Anchorage trails plan adds inland fallback route for stalled Kincaid-to-Potter Marsh trail

For nearly three decades, Anchorage has wanted to run its Tony Knowles Coastal Trail all the way south — a continuous ribbon from Kincaid Park to Potter Marsh, threading the whole west edge of the city. The route has never happened, tangled up in private bluff-top property and an unresolved path through the Anchorage Coastal Wildlife Refuge. Now planners have added a new option: an inland concept that would sidestep the coastline entirely.

The South Coastal Trail extension appears in the 2026 Recreational Trails Plan, which goes before an Anchorage transportation committee Thursday afternoon for a recommendation. Staff recommends approval. The goal, the plan says, hasn't changed since 1997 — a coastal trail with minimal traffic crossings that finally folds South Anchorage into the city's greenbelt system.

The plan floats two possible routes. The inland concept, listed as a medium-priority, long-term project, openly acknowledges the "environmental and political barriers" that have blocked a shoreline path. The other would convert a wide strip of Alaska Railroad right-of-way along the coast, with a possible underpass near where the railroad, the Seward Highway and Rabbit Creek Road come together by the rifle range.

Getting even this far took compromise. After public comment, planners pulled the line outside a conservation easement on the Campbell Creek Estuary and rewrote the route description to steer toward park land, greenbelts and low-traffic corridors — keeping it off private property and out of the refuge as much as possible.

The obstacles are old and stubborn. A 1980 coastal management study found roughly seven miles of the corridor in private hands. State wildlife planners have never endorsed a route through the refuge: in a 2003 report, they wrote that they "did not find consensus on whether the trail should travel through the Refuge," where a trail might harm habitat and stir up wildlife-human conflicts. And residents have fought over this before — an earlier 13-to-16-mile extension split the city, and in November 2005 the Assembly told staff to stop studying it altogether. A 2006 environmental impact statement examined route alternatives; the plan says it now needs to be redone.

Even with a route on paper, the trail has no money behind it — and no easy way to force it through. Municipal code bars the use of eminent domain for trails, so any path across private land would have to come by purchase, trade or a negotiated easement.