Homer, Alaska, is surrounded by a stunning landscape of emerald forests and snow-capped peaks. This small but bustling fishing town is located on Alaska’s Kenai Peninsula at the entrance of Kachemak Bay.
Even though many would consider Homer an ideal place for mountain bike trails, the area has been a dead zone for those on two wheels. Sanctioned trails are limited to a handful of miles just northwest of town. Compared to Alaskan mountain biking destinations such as Anchorage and Fairbanks, Homer’s handful of trails simply wasn’t enough for their growing mountain bike community.
Thankfully, 11 miles of new singletrack will soon be under construction.
Mountain biking in Homer, AK
Most people think of rugged landscapes, mountains, and endless forests when they think of Alaska. While Homer has that, there isn’t much in the way of easy access to singletrack.
But the Homer Cycling Club plans to change that.
The Homer Cycling Club promotes cycling as environmentally friendly, healthy, and enjoyable recreation for Homer residents. The club built and maintains the Diamond Creek Recreation Area, with about four miles of singletrack across four separate trails. They also put on the Homer Epic — a 100km fundraiser race through Homer’s Caribou Hills. Participants choose between cross-country skiing, running, or fat biking. Along with fat biking along miles of beaches, that’s about all Homer currently offers for mountain biking.
Fortunately, the Homer Cycling Club has taken on a new adventure that will bring significantly more trail access to Homer residents. Along with the Friends of Kachemak Bay State Park, they have taken on oversight and will eventually help maintain Homer’s newest trail system — the Cottonwood Eastland Trails.
Planning for trails
Directly across the bay from Homer, mountains climb straight out of the ocean at Kachemak Bay State Park.
“It’s absolutely spectacular. It’s Alaska’s oldest state park,” Cooper Freeman told us. “It’s really one of the crown jewels of the state park system.” Freeman is a member of the Cottonwood Eastland subcommittee, an arm of the Homer Cycling Club.
However, there are two issues with most of Kachemak Bay State Park. First, mountain biking isn’t allowed on any of the trails in the park. Secondly, even if mountain biking was allowed, getting there would cost an arm and a leg.
There is no road access to Kachemak Bay State Park. Visitors to that side of the bay can only get there by float plane, private boat, or ferry. While ferries run regularly to different parts of the park, fees run $100 per person, making regular trips to the park out of reach for many.
“But there’s a parcel of state park land that’s been in the state park for a few decades now that is on [Homer’s] side of the bay,” Freeman said. “It’s called the Cottonwood Eastland unit of Kachamak Bay State Park, and it has long been considered the priority parcel for recreational development in the park because of its road access.”
Recreational development ideas in this park area have been bouncing around for years but were always met with one roadblock or another. Last winter, Freeman and folks from the Homer Cycling Club began putting together a plan to hurdle those roadblocks and move forward with trails in the Cottonwood Eastland area.
If this group from the Homer Cycling Club was going to push for trails in Cottonwood Eastland again, they wanted to do their homework. The first step was to bring it back to Homer and see what the community wanted.
“There’s a monthly meeting about the state park, including a trails committee,” Freeman explained. “So we worked with the community and the folks really interested in these trails, [asking] what people want. What do we want for these trails? What’s the community vision?”
Trail access for mountain biking and hiking rose to the top of the community’s priority list. Many Homer residents wanted hiking trails closer to home that didn’t cost $100 to reach.
Secondly, funding was one of the significant hurdles. So, the group drafted an application for a Recreational Trails Program (RTP) grant, a federal grant that will match up to $200,000. To be fully prepared, the club hired Eddie Kessler of Ptarmigan Trails to design a trail plan for the Cottonwood Eastland area.
Homer Cycling Club’s planning paid off, and they were awarded the full $200,000 RTP grant.
New trails at Cottonwood Eastland
The Homer Cycling Club is currently taking bids for the new trails at Cottonwood Eastland, which will be completed in phases. With wet, snowy Alaskan winters, the building window is relatively short, and the club anticipates the project spanning several build seasons.
While the trails will be multi-use, Kessler and the Homer Cycling Club designed the trail system with hiking and biking options. Mountain bike-optimized sections of the Cottonwood Eastland trail system will branch off from the multi-use trail, especially where the descending is good.
“The bikers would use the hiking loops to get uphill, and then there would be mountain bike-optimized downhills,” Freeman explained.
The land and soil surrounding Homer lends itself to flowy, less technical trails. Freeman expects the proposed mountain bike-optimized singletrack at Cottonwood Eastland to reflect this. However, the club will have more elevation to work with than the current Diamond Creek Recreation Area — Cottonwood Eastland climbs more than 1,000 feet above sea level.
The Homer Cycling Club will better understand the trails’ design and flavor once they start working with their hired trail crew. For now, they’re waiting for bids to come in and snow to melt before shovels can hit the dirt. Phase one of this multiphase project will begin by constructing a trailhead and over three of the planned eleven miles of trails.
Freeman hopes to wrap phase one up this year and move on to phase two. This, of course, will take more money, but he’s optimistic.
“We think it’ll be about a million-dollar project in total,” Freeman said. “We’re about a third of the way there thanks to the RTP and some really generous individual donors. We have some really good prospects that we’re working on for funding phase two so that we can get ahead of that and keep that rolling.”
1 Comments
3 weeks ago
When I visited a few years back, we didn't get as far as Homer because there weren't any MTB trails yet, but next time I'm there, I'll have to fix that...