GULL ROCK: Regulations often stall Peninsula trail work and reclamation.
By CRAIG MEDRED
Anchorage Daily News
(Published: September 21, 2003)
NATIONAL FOREST DEVELOPMENT ROAD 34 -- Beneath a body-grabbing, mountain-bike-snagging tangle of devil's club and willow can still be found a remnant of the past nearly lost to the future.
Get down our your hands and knees out here past the end of the Gull Rock Trail, and you discover in places a rut that was a trail that was a road that is now on its way to becoming nothing.
All over the Kenai Peninsula, there are old forest roads and foot trails like this. Decades ago, this particular one was a road running from the mining community of Hope west to the tidal flats of the Chickaloon River. Part of the old road became what is today known and, more importantly, maintained as the Gull Rock Trail in the Chugach National Forest.
The rest of the road, which could have provided a connection with the Mystery Creek Access Road in the Kenai National Wildlife Refuge six miles farther west, was left to die a long, slow death in the engulfing forest.
The road's fate was most probably sealed in 1941 when the northwest end of the Kenai Peninsula became part of the Kenai National Moose Range, later to become the Kenai National Wildlife Refuge with the passage of the Alaska National Interest Lands and Conservation Act in 1980.
Moose range and refuge managers are not enthusiastic about recreation development. The Mystery Creek Access Road, for instance, remains closed to all uses, including mountain biking, for most of the year.
Only for a brief period during hunting season in fall is that restriction lifted. From Aug. 10 to Oct. 21 each year, the road is opened to four-wheel-drive vehicles and bikes but not other all-terrain vehicles. Allowing greater use of the road by bicyclists during summer was considered several years ago, but then refuge planning officer Emily Fiala said biologists were concerned that pedalers might disturb wildlife on the little-visited north end of the peninsula.
Trail advocates say such environmental concerns stall trail work and trail reclamation all across the Peninsula. Almost any proposal to open a closed trail or convert an old road bed into a trail is sure to run into a request for an environmental assessment study, at least, and possibly a demand for a full-blown, time-consuming and costly environmental impact study, said Sam Grimes, road program manager for the Chugach National Forest.
The Forest Service even had to do an environmental assessment before reopening the Kenai Peninsula segments of the historic Iditarod Trail. Environmental studies are part of the reason the agency expects to spend $15 million to rehabilitate, restore or reconstruct 120 miles of trail.
Trail planning costs now account for large parts of trail costs, according to Kevin Keeler of the National Park Service's Rivers, Trails and Conservation Assistance Program.
This is not like the 1940s and 1950s, Grimes said, when "you just went out and did it.''
Just go do it wasn't just the attitude in the '40s and '50s, though. It was the attitude for most of the last century on the Kenai. Grimes noted the north end of the Peninsula hummed with human activity early in the 1900s.
"From 1900 to 1907, Hope-Sunrise was the third-largest city in the state,'' he said. About 30,000 people lived there.
Where motorists today see only seemingly wild lands to the east of the highway as they drive up toward the pass, there stood the community of Wibel and several active placer mines. To the west of the highway, primitive roads ran off into Frenchy Creek, Fresno Creek, Colorado Creek, Summit Creek and Slate Creek.
Summit Creek eventually became an official Forest Service Trail. The others, like this old road, were largely abandoned, although they can still be found in places.
Keeler notes that if more of the old roads were resurrected as trails, the Kenai might well become a world-class hiking attraction.
The Kenai already has great hiking, of course. The tops of the ridges that cause motorists on the Sterling and Seward highways to gape are even more spectacular up top, but because of a lack of trails, getting onto the tundra atop these ridges is difficult.
And trail development on much of the Peninsula suffers for lack of advocates. Only in limited areas around the communities of Homer and Soldotna, and on long established trails, has much been done.
TRAILS COMMISSION CAME AND WENT
The Kenai Peninsula Borough did form a trails
commission in 1998. It came up with a lengthy list of trails that needed to be
maintained, created or re-established. But the commission is no longer active.
"We just kind of faded away,'' said former commissioner Mike Tetreau of
Seward. "I was the reigning chair at the end.''
He was never told what was going on. Fellow commissioner Charlie Crangle of
Seward said the borough basically just quit organizing commission meetings and
finally eliminated the $60,000 budget for the trail coordinator.
"We just kind of quit hearing from them,'' Tetreau said. "I'm not a
political-type person, and I didn't delve into the politics much.''
Crangle said he believes the commission fell victim to a combination of a
lack of staff, political pressure from people opposed to maintaining established
trails across private lands and Alaskans' general opposition to any sort of
regulation.
The latter two views, he added, are ironic, because the trail commission was
trying to resolve problems to the benefit of both private landowners and owners
of all-terrain vehicles. A lot of effort went into trying to coordinate
construction of a trail system for four-wheelers in the Caribou Hills near Homer
"before (Alaska) Fish and Game got in there and totally shut it down to
four wheelers,'' he said.
Keller of the Park Service's trails association was one of those most active
in trying to find ways to economically build four-wheeler trails that wouldn't
turn into messy, environmentally damaging mud holes.
Trail problems on the Kenai, as well as in other parts of Alaska, are
particularly interesting in that in forested areas a lack of trails largely
blocks the use of vast tracts of the wilderness while in accessible tundra and
mountain areas the landscape is being spider-webbed with the muddy tracks of a
growing fleet of all-terrain vehicles.
Crangle said it's pretty much the worst of both worlds.
"Most of the (Kenai trail commission) members were pretty discouraged,''
Tetreau said. "The trail commission really was trying to be more proactive
and more aggressive.''
Keeler said that turned out to be one of the things that "led to the
discovery they don't have trail powers down there,'' Keeler said. "They
don't have power to manage easements.''
Or obtain trail-construction grants, Crangle added, or police trail heads, or
do many of the other things to help maintain a trail system.
"The borough tried to get trails power a few years ago,'' he said,
"(and) it's on the ballot again ... but nobody's out there trumpeting its
virtues.''
About all the commission ever accomplished was noting the existence of the
route in its 1998 report. That report called for an extension of the Gull Rock
Trail to be maintained and "continue to Chickaloon Winter Trail and Mystery
Creek Road.''
Now there is barely a trace of a trail. An attempt to trace it west earlier
this month turned into a brush-battling nightmare. The cursing just got worse
and worse as Jim Jager and I repeatedly wrestled bikes over big piles of blown
down spruce trees only to slip and land in spiny, moose-head-high thickets of
devil's club.
In three hours, we managed to go a mile. We had yet to reach Taylor Creek
when I turned on a GPS receiver to discover how far we had come. The answer was
demoralizing. Afterward, our progress seemed to slow even more.
"My attitude is bad,'' Jager confessed. "I'm sorry.''
The former winner of the Alaska Mountain and Wilderness Classic on the Hope
to Homer course had expected tough going, but nothing quite like this. Just the
challenge of trying to find the old trail was enough to test one's attitude.
Hopeful prospects soon gave way to grim realities. It was almost easy to
forget the vision in which the idea for the adventure formed. We had dream of a
great mountain bike ride:
Pedal to Gull Rock. Push a few miles to Mystery Creek. Ride to the Sterling
Highway. Then swing north for a short ways along the highway to the Resurrection
Pass Trail and follow that route back to the start of the adventure in Hope.
Friends and acquaintances balked at that great circle trip around the
northwestern Kenai Mountains as too much, and Jager and I finally abandoned the
idea as too burdensome for a first try. The reasoning was simple:
To make the loop, we would have to spend a night out. That would require us
to carry at least minimal equipment for a bivouac. Carrying anything would make
the bushwhacking expected between Gull Rock and Mystery Creek more difficult.
The worst-case scenario had us doing a long ride by headlamp in the dark
along that road, but that was nothing worth fretting over. We had done it
before.
That parts of the trail between the end of the Gull Rock Trail and the road
might be difficult to follow, we knew. That there would be a fair amount of
bushwhacking, we expected. That this bushwhacking with bikes would come to
resemble pushing a football blocking sled with a fat man sitting on it, we never
guessed.
Five hours after starting out, four hours into the bike pushing, we were
forced to engage in a serious discussion. The trail was becoming more and more
difficult to find. There was still the occasional trace of the rut here or
there, some old flagging in places, and a slope that appeared to be an old road
cut in another.
But these traces were few and far between. We were wandering all over trying
to connect them. Because of that, it had taken us far, far longer than expected
to make it about a third of the way to the Mystery Creek Road.
The math was simple. If it took us four hours to go a third of the way, we
could expect to spend at least eight hours to go the rest of the way, but it
would be dark in about four. Once it got dark, we would have to stop. There was
no way anyone was going to bushwhack this route in the dark.
Given that we had no shelter or sleeping bags, a bivouac would mean a less
than comfortable night under a blow-down somewhere tending a fire. That was
doable, but we would have worried mates at home and on the morning after the
bivouac would still be looking at hours of bike pushing followed by a 25- to
30-mile pedal back along the road.
The only logical decision was to turn back.
Somewhere high above, I swore I could hear Bonnie Bernholz laughing.
It was Bernholz and I who first discovered the remnant of the old road to the
Chickaloon Flats branching off the Gull Rock Trail more than a decade ago. At
that time, there was at least some bandit maintenance going on. Someone armed
with a chain saw had cut away the blown-down spruce trees along the first mile
or so of trail and then marked the route with flagging for another couple of
miles beyond.
From the way it was done, with minimal work adjacent to the Gull Rock Trail
but more clearing as the trail side-hilled around the north end of the Kenai
Peninsula, we figured the trail work was most likely the efforts of moose
hunters looking to make the old route passable to horse but as invisible as
possible to other moose hunters or hikers.
Bernholz and I that year followed the trail flagging for several hours to
where it ran out. We figured we were then close, very close, to the Mystery
Creek Road, but time and family commitments prompted us to turn back. We arrived
back at the trail head in Hope just before dark to be met by less than happy
mates.
For years afterward, as we continued to occasionally wonder about exploring
the route all the way to the Mystery Creek Road, we were reminded of how that
earlier excursion had ended. Still, we kept talking about going back. We just
never made it.
Bonnie died of breast cancer in October 2000.
Connecting the Gull Rock Trail to the Mystery Creek Access Road has become a
challenge now. I'm thinking about a plan to go over the top:
Up the Hope Point Trail, across the tundra on what appears to be a decent
traverse at about 3,000 feet, followed by a bushwhack down along Little Indian
Creek to the road.
The way things look on the Kenai now, I figure we'll probably make that trip
long before this old road gets renovated into a real trail.
Trail commission or no trail commission, there doesn't seem much hope of that
happening.
It is enough to make one yearn for the old days of Alaska when public service
was a way of life -- whether Alaskans wanted it that way or not. On April 27,
1904, Public Law 188-33 Stat. 391 ordered able-bodied Alaskans to work on roads
and trails.
"Specifically,'' noted John F. Bennett of the Alaska Department of
Transportation and Public Facilities, "it required that 'all male persons
between 18 and 50 years of age who have resided 30 days in the district of
Alaska, who are capable of performing labor on roads or trails ... to perform
two days' work of eight hours each in locating, constructing or repairing public
roads or trails ... or furnish a substitute ... or pay the sum of four dollars
per day for two days' labor.' ''
After beating the brush on the Kenai for half a day to go but a few miles,
it's easy to wonder if maybe it isn't time to bring this law back.