Safer Seward Highway Project would severely harm the Turnagain Arm Trail

The state’s proposal for a highway safety project southeast of Anchorage threatens one of the region’s premier and irreplaceable trails.

For those unfamiliar with the project, the Alaska Department of Transportation and Public Facilities wants to build a 20-mile-long, four-lane highway from Rabbit Creek to Bird Flats, to purportedly make the highway safer.

What especially concerns me is that this controversial project would do great damage to a highly valued part of Chugach State Park, the half-million-acre wildland gem that is Anchorage’s backyard wilderness.

Some of the most severe impacts would likely occur along the Turnagain Arm Trail, one of the park’s most popular—and, I would argue, beloved—trails.

A rolling, 9½-mile-long pathway, the trail cuts across steep mountainsides from the Potter area to Windy Corner, all of it within DOT’s proposed construction corridor. I would say it is also a destruction zone.

It’s here that I want to focus my attention.

There are numerous reasons the TAT is popular to so many residents and cherished by some. First and perhaps foremost, it’s among the few Chugach pathways that is truly a “trail for all seasons,” one that is both easily accessible and reasonable to negotiate in all but the most extreme weather conditions. For much of the year, it is traveled by hikers, dog walkers and trail runners of varying skills.

In its passage along largely forested hillsides, some sections of the trail cross steep rocky terrain that is challenging, even potentially dangerous. But there are also stretches suitable for casual woodland strolling. Many times I have encountered families with young children adventuring along the trail. And because it can be accessed from four different trailheads — at Potter, McHugh Creek, Rainbow and Windy Corner — it’s possible to sample different aspects of the trail on short excursions, a great benefit to those getting to know its character.

For all its easy access and relative ease of travel, the Turnagain Arm Trail retains a sense of wildness, and along some sections, remoteness, that can’t be experienced in nearby Anchorage’s city parks. One of the things I value most about the trail is the abundant, soul-nourishing solitude I can find there, by choosing to visit when few other people are present, such as mid-week mornings.

Though this woodland trail roughly parallels the Seward Highway from start to finish, for much of its length the surrounding forest buffers visitors from the highway traffic below, and the noise associated with it. This too is among the trail’s great appeals: the quiet and serenity that can be found in both the forest and its rocky, meadowed bluffs that offer expansive views of mountain peaks and coastal waters.

The chance of encountering wildlife is another attraction. In my many years of venturing here, I have seen—and at times shared the trail with—a wide variety of critters, from moose and bears (both black and brown) to Dall sheep, lynx, coyotes, porcupines and smaller sorts (including weasels).

I can’t think of another local trail that offers a greater variety of mammals.

Birds, too, are abundant, especially in spring and early summer. This trail is usually the place where I first hear and see the earliest migratory songbirds to arrive in the Anchorage area each spring. The first blooming wildflowers can be found here, too, a seasonal delight.

There’s more, but that will have to do for now, as I wish to address the dangers that the SSHP would pose to this, my favorite woodland trail.

The greatest threat is the proposed blasting and excavation of cliffs below the trail.

A draft of the environmental assessment of the project notes that road cuts between 200 and 400 feet high will be blasted out of the steep, natural terrain across a substantial portion of the 20-mile-long construction zone. In places, those rock quarry-like cuts would rise nearly to the existing trail and in some places require that the trail be re-routed or replaced.

One entire section of the trail is marked for reconstruction. Notably, this is near the Windy Corner area, of great importance to Dall sheep. One of the environmental assessment draft’s great shortcomings is its brief and dismissive discussion of impacts to those sheep, which are an essential element of the TAT experience. It seems probable that other mammals, particularly bears, will also be affected by the highway’s encroachment, and might even be driven from the area.

The close proximity of the road cuts to the trail would also diminish the forest’s buffering effect on highway noise and the route’s scenic beauty.

Though the DOT’s draft EA downplays all of these impacts, it seems clear to me and other park advocates that the TAT’s wild nature—and the experiences of those who recreate here—will be significantly diminished.

As Anchorage land-use planner, trail runner and member of the highway project’s Stakeholder Working Group Nancy Pease has noted, it appears that the proposed road cuts will compromise, if not ruin, some of the trail’s “treasured viewpoints . . . At these locations, the proposed road cut will touch the trail and the (proposed) elevated northbound lanes will be in full view and earshot.”

Beyond all that, the 15 to 20-year construction timeline means that much of the trail will be closed for substantial periods of time and there is no timeframe for replacement of the trail.

Pease and I agree that, as she puts it: “The character and attributes of the Turnagain Arm Trail are irreplaceable.”

The proposed action being pushed by DOT will inevitably and irreparably harm that character and greatly diminish the experiences of those recreating along this exceptional and treasured pathway — one important reason among many for DOT to rethink and reconfigure its vision for a stretch of highway that’s intimately tied to the landscape through which it passes.

Anchorage nature writer and wildlife/wildlands advocate Bill Sherwonit is a widely published essayist and the author of more than a dozen books, including “Chugach State Park: Alaska’s Backyard Wilderness” and “Animal Stories: Encounters with Alaska’s Wildlife.”