The Alaska Supreme Court sent a 14-year Willow property fight back to Palmer, with the trail's path still undecided

The Alaska Supreme Court on Friday wiped out the judgment that mapped the Jigliotti Family Trust's access route around a Willow home, sending a 14-year property fight back to Palmer. Neither side has a final description of where the trail runs, or of where years of blocked, unchallenged use extinguished the right to cross it.

The dispute traces to a 1966 agreement over land in the Matanuska-Susitna Borough. Donald and Deborah Bloom bought their parcel in 1994 and, starting in 1996, built a home directly on the access trail — adding a shop, cleared ground, and water and sewer lines beneath it. The trust's 2012 lawsuit to settle who held which rights ended with the superior court upholding the old access right but finding it partially extinguished where the trail met the Bloom house — meaning that by building on it and using it unchallenged for years, the Blooms had erased the easement at that spot. The Supreme Court affirmed that in 2021 and sent the case back for a final judgment.

That judgment, entered by Superior Court Judge John C. Cagle, adopted the trust's proposed route — but its map showed no such extinguished stretch at all. "We vacate the final judgment because it is inconsistent with the superior court's previous findings that the historical access easement was partially extinguished," Justice Aimee A. Oravec wrote for the court.

The trust argued the judgment was fine because the route stayed more than 25 feet from the Bloom house. The court disagreed: that 25-foot figure marks where the extinguished section ends, it said — not a rule for how close the trail may come to the Blooms' home and immediate yard. The trust does have another option it never pursued: a route along the section line, though it never sought permits to build a road there.

The Blooms, representing themselves, objected that the route was a "new un-litigated route not identified in trial," and noted the map labels their residence but draws no boundary around the house and yard. The trust was represented by Anchorage attorney Brian Duffy.

The court upheld the rest of the lower court's rulings: the 60-foot trail width, the refusal to reopen the 1966 agreement, and the denial of attorney's fees to the trust, which won some claims but not all. Both sides' positions come from the written opinion, the only record of them.

Back in Palmer, the court must now pin down the trail's location and just how much of the easement was extinguished — and whether the Blooms' home and yard sit squarely on the trail, erasing the crossing right there, or only narrow it.