NEW REFLECTIONS

PALMER — If you haven’t been out to Reflections Lake just off the Glenn Highway recently, you might not know how much the place has been gussied up.

There are new bathrooms there, a foot of new gravel. And if you go out there this weekend, it’ll be even better thanks to the efforts of a group of volunteers and 12 Alaska Job Corps students.

The area, accessed through a trailhead on the service road at the Knik River Access exit, has come a long way, said Joe Meehan with the state Department of Fish and Game.

“From a gravel pit to a garbage dump to a family recreation site” is how he put it.

The lake itself was actually the spot where the state took out gravel to build the highway. When the state was done with it the public took over.

“it just became a place for people to come and dump their refrigerators, stolen cars, goats,” Meehan said.

Wait, goats?

“We found dead goats in here,” Meehan confirmed.

Anyway, Meehan, like most everyone out there sprucing up the trails Thursday, recognized that transforming the area is a gradual process. The displays offering information about the area had taken at least one blast of buckshot, as had a sign out on the road.

People are obviously still shooting out there. Meehan said lead in the sand has reached dangerous levels at least twice. Six years ago, the sand was dug up and shipped to Portland — the nearest place to dispose of it — and a foot of new gravel was a lead-remediation effort conducted last summer.

Still, Meehan said he’s hopeful.

“The more people are aware, there’s hopefully down the road going to be a cultural shift,” he said.

Monica Gilpin, executive director of Alaskans for Palmer Hay Flats, joins him in that hope.

She said that the day’s work was to make the trail more accessible to handicapped users. It’s already pretty accessible.

“We’re filling in the low spots, compacting it, putting in more safety fencing,” she said. “We needed a lot of manpower and that’s why we brought in Job Corps.”

Roger Gossett, leadership coordinator with Job Corps in Palmer, said his 12 students came from different programs at the center.

“We’re working primarily on the importance of giving back to our community,” he said.

Which, to an observer on the trail Thursday, looked like a lot of manual labor with shovels and pickaxes.

“After we’re all done I take it back and debrief it,” Gossett said. The message? “Just hoping someone else will do it doesn’t get the job done.”

As for the future — Gilpin said there are big plans just on the horizon for the lake. A coalition of private-sector companies, labor unions and government agencies have come together to work with the state and put a raised viewing tower on the backside of the lake.

After that, Alaskans for Palmer Hay Flats plans to erect a pavilion on the trail overlooking the lake.

“Just a place to get out of the weather for educational groups and recreational groups,” Gilpin said.

Meehan said they’re also looking to boost fishing in the area; stocking the lake with fish maybe next year once a new hatchery in Anchorage comes online.

Meehan described two sets of users for the lake — consumptive users like bird hunters and fishermen and non-consumptive users like hikers and canoers. Sometimes those groups butt heads. Here and there one group will advocate barring the other from Reflections Lake. But neither has gotten serious about it. Both seem willing to co-exist.

“So far I would say it’s kind of a truce,” Meehan said.

Contact Andrew Wellner at andrew.wellner@frontiersman.com or 352-2270.