The images by now are familiar: A cloudless summer day. Above, sunny skies; below, cars overflowing parking lots and lining streets near the Anchorage Bowl's most popular trail heads.
More than half of Alaska's residents live within 30 miles of Chugach State Park, and the population has grown rapidly since the 1980s. That unabated growth, state officials say, has placed increasing stress on unevenly distributed trail heads along the park's 259-mile boundary. At the same time, the pace of private development at the borders of the park has prompted concerns about access in the future.
On Tuesday, the Anchorage Assembly will consider adopting the first comprehensive document addressing state park access and private development along the park's edges.
The Chugach Access Plan lays out all the places where visitors enter the park now, legal or not, and identifies spots that could become legal access points in the future.
The complex document is the product of a vast scoping effort by the Municipality of Anchorage and the state Department of Natural Resources. Since 2008, that effort has canvassed two public hearings, four open houses, dozens of meetings and hundreds of public comments from individuals, community councils, homeowners associations, government agencies and nonprofit organizations.
Marked by dueling issues of property rights and public access, the plan has sparked a wide range of diverging viewpoints in the community. At its heart are fundamental questions about who can have access and who will ultimately pay.
What the plan does
In 2002, the state mapped out all the areas traditionally used to access the park. The municipality unofficially used the document to make platting and zoning decisions. But it wasn't an officially adopted municipal plan, said Monica Alvarez, project manager with the state's planning section for Chugach State Park.
Starting in 2008, the state and the city launched the first comprehensive joint effort to inventory access points, identify possible future additions and figure out how to establish legal access points alongside private development. Now, 32 trail heads are spaced across 259 miles of park boundary, but together they have only 1,706 parking spaces, according to Anchorage senior planner Thede Tobish.
Two hundred of those spaces are at the Glen Alps trail head, where a push to relieve congestion led to the construction of an expanded parking area two years ago.
One group, the Chugach Park Access Coalition, is among those that has advocated for multiple smaller access points to the park. The coalition's president, Cory Hinds, is a hiker and climber who enjoys venturing into the mountains.
Hinds said he started the coalition because of issues with legal access to Ram Valley in Eagle River. Due to private development, public access to the scenic glacial valley does not officially exist, though some landowners have made agreements allowing park visitors to cross their property.
"I couldn't believe there was no legal access," Hinds said.
Phil Shephard, the executive director of the Great Land Trust, linked issues of access to quality of life.
"(The reason) why people come here, and why they stay, is the access," Shephard said. "That's what this plan helps. It's the vision for the next 20 years."
Private property worries
The plan has drawn a crush of opposition from neighbors who live near places identified as possible access points. Commonly voiced worries include increased traffic on rural roads, more visitors but not more facilities, a spike in maintenance costs, trash, trespassing and interference with private property.
Anchorage Assembly member Amy Demboski, who represents Chugiak-Eagle River, said the Chugiak Community Council, voted unanimously at its Thursday night meeting to oppose the plan. On Saturday, she called it "woefully inadequate."
"I think it's complete government overreach," Demboski said. "It's a complete assault on private property rights."
One Eagle River landowner, Richard Peters, told the Anchorage Assembly at its Sept. 9 meeting that three of the 30 new trails proposed for Eagle River would begin on his rural road, and two pass through more than 500 yards of his property. He called the plan a "juggernaut" among his neighbors, who feel their concerns have been largely ignored.
Peters presented the Assembly with a suggested list of requirements to be put in place before a trail can open to public use. He said the people who have submitted public comments are not necessarily opposed to all access points.
"They're opposed to trails in neighborhoods without mitigation," Peters said.
Homeowners voice concerns
Alaska Dispatch News contacted several homeowners who submitted public comments more than a year ago opposing specific access points. All who responded said their positions were unchanged.
Stacee Kleinsmith, who lives in Chugiak but runs an elderly home care business in Anchorage, said past trouble with trespassers was at the root of her worries about an access point identified just east of her home. The access point would lead to a lake, which has been a favored spot for teenage partiers and unsafe cliff jumping, Kleinsmith said.
She pointed out that the Ptarmigan Valley Trailhead is less than a quarter mile from the proposed access point and doesn't require visitors to negotiate a winding, residential road.
"In our case, it's the, 'Wait a second, there's access right here already,' " she said. "We don't have to have an access spot every 500 meters."
She said she knows the plan doesn't mean bulldozers will be showing up anytime soon -- and may never show up. But while she and her husband generally support park access, she said she wanted to voice her specific concerns sooner rather than later.
Sharolyn Lange described her neighborhood, Eagle River's Brandywine subdivision, as "very tight," with zero-lot-line homes and kids playing constantly in the streets. An intensive care nurse, she said she's worked personally to clean trash from the trails and worries about safety if a new trailhead is built in the neighborhood.
Lange pointed to the close proximity of the MacDonald Recreation Center, which has parking and bathrooms, as a better place to put a trail head.
"I'm not anti-people," she said. "I'm anti where they want to put the trail head. The logical alternative is not a mile away."
A homeowner who lives off Steeple Drive in Eagle River, Roy LeBlanc, said in an email that if the city ever decided to build an access point identified near his home, he'd move. He said he and his wife built their home from the ground up and enjoy the rural feel of the area.
"I know if there was park access here, we would not have purchased our lot and built our home," LeBlanc wrote in the email.
On Anchorage's Hillside, meanwhile, debate has surrounded an access point in the Near Point area of the Stuckagain Heights neighborhood. While the area is on park land, homeowners associations in the area have lobbied to remove the access point from the plan entirely, fearing the development of a Glen Alps-style parking lot down the line.
Soothing concerns
State and local officials have sought to temper community concerns by stressing that the access plan is exactly what the name implies -- a plan. None of the possible access points listed in the plan are required to come to fruition, Alvarez said.
"It's not a project list," Alvarez said. One main goal, she said, was to anticipate where development could happen in the future and create a guide for preserving park access in those places, avoiding what happened in Ram Valley.
Under state law, private property cannot be seized for recreational purposes. Implementation of the plan will happen "opportunistically," Alvarez said, through the platting process and then negotiations with landowners.
"What usually happens is people approach us," Alvarez said. She noted that the department rarely goes out on its own to seek property for acquisition, leaving that task to nonprofit groups like Great Land Trust or the Conservation Fund.
For the municipality, the plan offers a legal framework for dedicating public access, Tobish said.
An amended version sponsored by Assembly members Jennifer Johnston and Bill Evans, who represent South Anchorage, requires the plan to be reviewed every five years and requires the city platting board to work with the Department of Natural Resources when making decisions on access points. The language of the plan also offers flexibility when it comes to adding or deleting access points, Johnston said.
If approved, the access plan will be adopted as part of Anchorage's comprehensive plan and the new land use code, Title 21.
A public hearing on the issue will be at 6 p.m. Tuesday at the Assembly chambers at Anchorage's Z.J. Loussac Public Library.