The Trailhead Parking Lot That Shrinks Every Time the Hillside Funds It

Drive up Toilsome Road on a clear Saturday in September and you will understand the problem before anyone explains it to you. Cars line both shoulders past the switchback, tires half in the ditch, doors swung open into traffic. By the time you reach Glen Alps, the $5 pay lot has been full since nine. This is not a new complaint on the Hillside. What is new is the fight over what to do about it, and the surprising direction that fight has taken.

For three years running, Anchorage voters have said yes to spending more money on Chugach State Park access. And for three years running, the amount of actual pavement and parking that money buys has gotten smaller, not bigger. That gap between what was promised and what gets built is the real story on the Hillside this month, and it explains a lot about why your weekend hike keeps getting harder even as the city keeps telling you help is on the way.

A math problem with three answers

Start with Basher Drive, a quieter cousin to Glen Alps tucked into the Stuckagain Heights area, where hikers head out to Wolverine Peak and Long Lake. The existing lot there is a patch of dirt that holds about 16 vehicles. On busy weekends, cars spill onto the shoulders of Campbell Airstrip Road and Basher Drive itself, which sits at the crest of a hill with limited sight lines, tight enough that emergency vehicles have trouble getting through.

When the project team scoped out how big the replacement lot should be, they used 2020 census data and comparisons to similar trailheads and landed on a need for 80 to 100 spaces. That number never got built. Planners settled on a compromise of 60, citing site constraints and neighborhood feedback that a full-sized lot would be out of scale. By this spring, even that compromise was in doubt. Reporting on the project this year put the realistic construction number at closer to 45 spaces, roughly half of what the original study said was needed and a quarter of the way to what some neighbors had asked for.

Here is that math laid out plainly:

Three ballot measures got this project to where it is. Voters created the Chugach State Park Access Service Area, known as CASA, in 2023, agreeing to tax themselves for road and trailhead upgrades across the Anchorage Bowl, a boundary that loops around the city and includes the Hillside but excludes Eagle River and Girdwood, which fund their own park access separately. The next year, voters approved a $4 million bond to rebuild the rough, boulder-strewn section of Canyon Road that leads to the Flattop Sunnyside trail. The year after that, they approved money to design a new trailhead at Basher. This spring, they approved another $1.5 million to actually build it, in a vote that passed by less than two percentage points.

Every one of those votes was a yes for more capacity. The lot at the end of that chain keeps getting smaller.

Why the shrinkage keeps happening

Anchorage Assembly Chair Christopher Constant put the underlying pressure into a single sentence earlier this year:

"Every single access point to the Chugach State Park is drowning in cars. That's why the neighbors are upset."

That statement captures the paradox at the center of CASA. The same crowding that justifies building a bigger lot is what makes the neighbors living along the access road nervous about building one. A 60-space lot at Basher does not just serve the hikers already showing up in overflow along the shoulder. It advertises to everyone else that Basher now has parking, which tends to pull in more cars than it holds. Residents who watched the Basher process this spring pushed for a smaller footprint. Assembly members who wanted to honor what voters actually approved pushed back, arguing that a lot built too small just relocates the same overflow problem a hundred yards down the road instead of solving it.

That tension came to a head in April, when Assembly member Daniel Volland and then-Chair Constant introduced a resolution demanding the Basher design return to the full 60 spaces or risk losing Assembly funding entirely. It failed narrowly, 6 to 5. The design has kept shrinking anyway.

The bigger fight underneath the parking count

If the parking number is the visible argument, the quieter one happening at Anchorage's Assembly chambers is about who gets to make that call at all.

On August 4, the Assembly took up an ordinance, co-sponsored by Volland and current Chair Anna Brawley, that would create a formal seven-member CASA advisory board to guide future trailhead projects and budget recommendations. Buried in that ordinance is a change that matters more to Hillside residents than the board seats themselves. City code currently requires the municipality to reach a cooperative agreement with the adjacent road service area before building any CASA project. The new ordinance would remove that requirement.

Volland has described the change as necessary to prevent what he calls a de facto veto by the neighbors closest to the park, worried that requiring sign-off from small road service areas lets a handful of property owners slow down or shrink projects the wider service area voted to fund. Residents from Glen Alps and Stuckagain Heights, who showed up to the August 4 meeting, said they generally support having a formal advisory board but object to losing their seat at the table on individual projects. Roger Marks, who serves on the Glen Alps Road Service Area board, represents the group responsible for the roads leading to the two busiest trailheads in the entire park system, Glen Alps and the Flattop Sunnyside and Rabbit Lake access. David Pease, from the Upper O'Malley Limited Road Service Area, raised similar concerns. Basher Community Council member Barbara Hood put the disagreement this way:

"It seems to me, to have CASA succeed, it has to be balanced between the needs of the neighborhood who are facing the impacts and the users who need to get onto the trails."

Hood also pointed out that the existing ad hoc CASA working group skews toward trails and parks advocacy, which she called a biased starting point for a board meant to referee disputes between park users and the neighborhoods that live along the access roads. That disagreement has not been resolved. The Assembly has continued the hearing three times since January.

What this means before the snow flies

None of this is settled, and it will not be settled before fall. If you live on the Hillside, that has a practical consequence worth knowing about now. Every September and October, Chugach State Park hosts one of the more remarkable wildlife displays in the state, when 20 to 30 bull and cow moose converge on the open brush of the South Fork Campbell Creek valley for the annual rut, visible right from the Powerline Pass Trail a half mile past the Glen Alps trailhead. That draw, layered on top of the ordinary weekend hiking crowd, is exactly the kind of traffic the Basher and Canyon Road projects were supposed to absorb. Instead, the parking count keeps shrinking while the governance question of who decides how much gets built stays open at the Assembly level.

If you are planning a weekend at Glen Alps this fall, arrive early. The lot fills before nine most Saturdays, and the fight over whether that changes anytime soon is still being argued a few miles away in Assembly chambers, not on the mountain.

Living on the Hillside means paying close attention to decisions like this one, since they shape everything from your Saturday morning plans to your road service assessment. If you are curious about what else is shifting in this part of Anchorage, from trailhead access to the broader Hillside housing market, Anchorage Home Group keeps a close eye on both. Reach out anytime to schedule a personal market consultation with Michelle Nelson.