Chugach State Park
This is one of the most accessible and unique natural areas in the U.S. It delivers full-bore Alaskan adventure minutes from Anchorage’s amenities. Here you’ll find a handful of recreational opportunities, often along the park with well-maintained trails and facilities.
Favorite Activities
This half-a-million-acre park is a day trekkers paradise, with over 280 miles of beautifully maintained trails for biking and hiking, embarking from more than ten trailheads spread from each side of the city. Another 110 miles of routes open in winter to fat tile biking, skiing, and snow machine when there’s sufficient snowfall. Besides this, add the 28 miles of paddling in Eagle River Valley, plus the boating opportunities of the eight-mile-long Eklutna Lake. You’ve got almost every kind of outdoor travel activity covered.
At Chugach State Park, you’ll find over a dozen 2-5 mile excursions available and suitable for families and visitors for a low-key encounter with wild Alaska. For those seeking a more complex challenge, Chugach features many well-known trails, some of them forming loops that take most of the day to complete. Several iconic multiday treks traverse mountain ridges and wilderness valleys and require expert backcountry skills.
Don’t feel like hiking? Chugach features several postcards, perfect overlooks, and beautiful natural features that can be accessed over flat and comfortable paved trails a few minutes from the parking lot.
Through August and September, Chugach explodes with pickers scrambling through the trails and swarming open baggies with blueberries. Anglers can find rainbow trout and Dolly Varden in Rabbit and Eklutna lakes up in the mountains or pursue migrating salmon in Bird, Penguin, and Indian creeks along Turnagain Arm close to Seward High.
Wildlife watching can be world-class and intimate – Dall sheep perched on cliffs beside Seward Highway at Windy Corner, bald eagles, freely soaring over Turnagain Arm during fish runs, moose roaming Powerline Pass during the fall rut.
Chugach is among America’s four biggest state parks, looming on a stunning mountain front above the Anchorage Bowl. It stretches from the urban area to remote glaciers still gouging fiords. This park ranges from the tidal Turnagain Arm with migrating salmon and beluga whales to craggy mountain valleys home to wolves, moose, and bears. Its natural diversity is unusual even for Alaska, with nine distinctive environments. They include the Pacific Northwest’s furthest north-reach temperate rain forest, a vast alpine realm of rock, tundra, and ice, and a boreal spruce-birch woodland covering river bottoms and foothills.
The park’s geography makes it a microcosm of what makes Alaska great. Between 31 different mile-high peaks and mud flats at sea level, you’ll find lakes, glaciers, rivers, waterfalls, boulder fields, and thousand-foot cliffs. Trek a couple of miles into the backcountry, and you’ll find pristine valleys where it’s as rugged and wild and where people rarely pass.
And yet, even with all that untracked area inside the Chugach, most trailheads are a short drive from Anchorage. This outstanding accessibility offers travelers an iconic opportunity. Visitors can spend hours on an Alaskan outdoor experience – and then quickly the rest of the day with wholesome dining and comfortable lodging in the city.