The best part of the Indian to Girdwood path is that it can be for everyone. There are long flat…read morestretches, hills, great views, wildlife. Frequent bear, moose, even spotted belugas from the path. I would take the dogs along for a walk that would even wear them out. Great for walking or biking. Path is wide and paved, ( but if walking, still be aware of bicycles and don't have dogs loose as there are a few Greg Lemond wanna be type that bicycle at 40 mph on the shared trail). That aside, you can start at Bird Creek, Beluga Point, Girdwood or any number of parking areas and make the walk/hike as long or short as you desire. I often park in Girdwood and hike to Beluga and back and then drive in to Jack Sprats or maybe Chair 5 in Girdwood for Lunch/Dinner. After some good reviews, sounds like Girdwood Brewing should be my next spot to try out after a nice walk with the dogs.

So, it's kind of hard to find information on this trail, so I'll help ya'll out…read more GETTING HERE: From the Seward Highway, go north (a right if you're heading towards Anchorage, a left if you're heading away from Anchorage) on Boretide Rd (right next to the new Turnagain Arm Pit BBQ location). Where the marker is for this Yelp listing, is where the paved road ends. Just keep going straight! The road can be a little bumpy but nothing that would require high-clearance or 4WD/AWD. Eventually, after what seems like a long time (but isn't), you'll end up at the trailhead. Officially, this trailhead is called "Indian Valley Trailhead". Chugach State Park's website is horrible (they have some great .pdf's for some of their trails, but good luck finding them anywhere on their website...), so I was only able to find most of this information from: googling, using summitpost (a climbing website), and browsing blogs. Hopefully, this consolidated source of information will be helpful to some! From this trailhead, you can access two trails: Powerline Pass: which has its other end at the Glen Alps area (Flattop) Indian Valley Trail: a trail of controversial quality (I have never done it) that goes NE from this trailhead and eventually meets the Ship Creek Trail. (About 1/4 of a mile up the trail you'll come to a junction: if you go straight you'll be on Indian Valley Trail, if you take a left, and go over a footbridge, you'll be on Powerline Pass trail) I'll be mainly speaking of Powerline Pass. Most folks start Powerline Pass up near Glen Alps. Most folks mountain bike* it, rather than hike it. Most folks would need a bike with a good suspension to do this. I do not have such a faithful, two-wheeled steed, so I hike. Why hike it from this side? A couple reasons: 1) This is the approach hike to climb Homicide Peak: this is how I originally found the trail. Homicide Peak is a fun scramble with awesome views of the Suicide Peaks. More info on climbing Homicide can be found here: http://www.summitpost.org/homicide-peak/815642 2) Crowds: there aren't many. This trail isn't as well-known or popular as many others in the area. 3) Feasting options: Froth and Forage (https://www.yelp.com/biz/froth-and-forage-coffeehouse-and-eatery-anchorage) is open till 10 pm, and located very close to this trailhead. Hiking early in the morning? Stop in for a coffee. Hiking late in the evening? Stop in for a burger! 4) Get out of your usual rut: expand your mind, hike some new stuff! Reasons you might want to be a bit leery of this trail: 1) I've heard the Indian Valley Trail can be miserable and overgrown in spots. I hope you like bushwhacking. Or 'schwacking, for short. 2) There can be lots of bear activity in this area. Carry your spray, take your dog, hike in a group. 3) If there's been recent rain, it can get pretty muddy. Definitely, give this trail a shot! *for info on mountain biking Powerline Pass, check out this slick website: https://www.mtbproject.com/trail/6452974/powerline-pass

Oh my goodness…read more Unlike most people, when I'm super-excited, I don't cuss. I use granny phrases like "Heavens!". I'm so excited about this trail, I can't believe I'm just now hiking it. Bird Ridge starts at a big trailhead with blasted-out rockwalls from when the Seward Highway was widened. It has bathrooms at the parking lot and then another (emergency?) bathroom about 1,000 ft up the trail. After the second bathroom, you start going up! And up! And up! There's a lot of gain here in a short amount of time. If you do it in the winter, micro-spikes (choose your favorite brand) are pretty much mandatory (it gets mighty slippery). I'd also HIGHLY recommend a pole of some sort. An ice axe would even be handy for the upper reaches. I'd also recommend you STAY OFF THE CORNICES, people have DIED. But, if you stay off the corniced ridges, this trail is still decently safe to do in the winter. You're on a ridge which is, by definition, one of the safest places to be in avalanche terrain. You'll get amazing views of Penguin Peak (which I recommend NEVER doing in the winter, it is VERY avalanche-prone) to the east and of Indianhouse South Suicide North Suicide Homicide Avalanche Mountain to the West. To the north, you can keep taking this ridge for miles, although it looks like it gets increasingly gnarly. I can't comment on what it's like in the summer, but I've heard it's beautiful. This is a great place to get above the clouds in the winter. You'll have sun on your face while everyone at lower elevations ferments in the gloom! As a bonus, the trailhead is plowed.

Drive south on AK1. pass Indian Valley meats on your left, and you will see a sign for "Bird Ridge"…read moretrail parking lot. (Sign will be on your Right, but the parking lot is on your left when you head south on AK1.) $5 for parking or use your park pass. uphill work out with a fantastic view once you climb up over 3000 feet. If you are fit, you can ascend in less than 2 hours to the top. The trail continues behind along the ridge towards girdwood possibly. Also often times you can spot eagle soaring when you look back towards Turnigan Arm/Inlet. Everything becomes so small when you are up at the peak. It's challenge but you will be rewarded with the view.

Kudos to Joy G for snagging the FTR on this one! (and shame on my for missing it!)…read more This is one of two trails in Hope. Both are very well maintained. The other one, Gull Rock, is flat the entire time: https://www.yelp.com/biz/gull-rock-trail-hope This one, should you take it all the way to the top of Hope Point (3,708'), if you want to take it that far! Views from the top are incredible. You get views of the many peaks of the arm that you just can't get driving to Girdwood because, well, you're too close to the mountains to see their full profiles! This trail is also unique in that it melts out pretty early season (May) for how relatively high it is. More details on Joy G's review, check it out!

Hope Point trail has 2 access points. You can park at the free parking lot that shares the trail…read morehead will Gull Rock Trail for the first mile. Or, if you're lucky enough to be camping at Porcupine Campground, you can start your hike at the unmarked trailhead that starts at the entrance to the campground where the bridge crosses Porcupine Creek. It takes through a much prettier walk through the forest full if beautiful flora and the sounds if rushing water. We hiked both and agree this was much nicer. We didn't have time to hike the whole trail since we also did part of Gull Rock this day, but turned around due to overgrowth and a TON of bear scat on the trail. Hope Point is much rockier and steeper, and doesn't have the same pretty views as Gull, but I also don't want to be mauled by a brown bear. We'll definitely do this trail again.

This peak is accessed from the penguin creek trail:…read morehttps://www.yelp.com/biz/penguin-creek-trail-anchorage Depending on who you ask, it may be considered the most difficult hike in Chugach State Park. It definitely requires lots of off-trail travel and navigation, that's for sure! Here's my trip report from when I summitted it: We left the penguin creek trail shortly after and began our traverse into the hanging valley. We ended up maintaining an elevation of roughly 1400 ft before steadily ascending to 2600 ft to drop down into the hanging valley. This decision was...OK. It wasn't a sufferfest, but it wasn't exactly great. There was definitely some bad snow and some alder-wrangling. The lake of any chlorophyll in any of the foilage made route-finding through it much easier...but there was still ample grunting and rubber-banding-gunning of branches. Rather than take the full ridge up Bird, we decided to go up-valley and then gain the ridge near "Point 4800"/"Point 4840" (I've heard it called both things, and on my map it isn't either of these elevations, anyone know where this name is documented?) Anyway, we started ascending form the valley floor at roughly 60.9989, -149.3137. It was mostly snow climbing on snow of marginal quality. Lower down it was very bad wallowing, so we climbed the rock bands. Eventually the rock bands ended and we were climbing a spine of snow (reminded my of the "hogsback" from my Mt Hood climbing days!). It was straightforward ascending, but extremely bad visibility was a little anxiety-inducing. We were in and out of rolling whiteouts and there was so little contrast my camera couldn't auto-focus, ha! We kept taking the obvious gully up, and eventually were dumped out onto a flattish rock band. From there steep, firm snow climbing to gained the ridge proper. (we didn't put our crampons on for this, but we probably should have) We aggressively side-hilled to avoid going up and over Point 48XX, a decision that didn't end up saving any time. Knife-hard Icy snow slopes peppered sloppy scree fields making travel annoying, unless you're really good at crampon-changing! Eventually we were at a low-point in the ridge, where I found a sneaky route down. I was a line I had heard described in some trip reports at the end of the valley that could take you directly to the summit ridge and probably save a lot of time, if it had snow on it. There was a ton of good-looking snow on it, so I noted it in caltopo (60.9981, -149.2958) for a possible, hot-pizza-at-Moose's Tooth-preserving descent short-cut. What we did next is hard to describe, but sticking to the ridge became difficult so we started side-willing east towards the true summit. Eventually we were on and off of really bad choss that was either dusted with half-melted powder or hardened by rime ice (similar to what Kevin Downie experienced last fall: https://www.peakbagger.com/climber/ascent.aspx?aid=1524570) . I can see how this would be a fun scramble in the summer, but dodging icy gullies and scraping choss with crampons was not! Abbey found an "easy" icy ramp to the summit area (I thought it was kinda scary), and after front-pointing on some rime, we reached the snow-and-rime dome that is the Bird Peak summit...to absolutely zero views. Vis was probably at 20-30 ft? There was enough visibility for us to scout an easy snow ramp that would take us down from the summit. (Anything to avoid down-climbing the Abbey M0 variation!) Long story short, the snow ramp was also extremely hard snow. It would've protected beautifully with even vertical pickets. We just kept our heads down and slowly front-pointed down it for what seemed like forever. Eventually we got back down to the scree slopes, took the crampons off, and started side-hilling back to the ridge (west). We went right to the descent line I had marked and...it still looked pretty good. I got out and tested it a little and it was just too hard to tell what the quality of the snow would be once we got out on it. I still had some mild anxiety from the summit downclimb and wasn't interested it going down a long slope with that level of firmness (especially with my crappy ultra light crampons, but that's for another time) We talked about it and, with some hesitancy, decided to go down the way we came up. We didn't side-hill Peak 48XX this time, we stayed pretty high, and travel was much faster! We found where we were topped out on the ridge, put our crampons on, and started down-climbing. The first small section was really steep, but eventually we were quickly plunge stepping down the slopes. I decided to go left (south) down a different way than what we came up to make it a pure snow down-climb. Heavy, wet snow in this area made for perfect wet-cement, slow-and-steady glissade conditions. We then trudged through chunky-water-style snow back to our tent, and we quickly saturated our gaitered mountaineering boots. Good day in the hills? Um, kinda?

Man, how am I just now getting around to hiking this?!…read more Falls Creek is located at ~Mile Post 105.6 on the Seward Highway. In relation to other trails: To the West: Rainbow Trailhead (https://www.yelp.com/biz/rainbow-trailhead-anchorage) To the East: Indian Valley Trailhead (https://www.yelp.com/biz/indian-valley-trail-anchorage) Stats: Mileage: 2.7 (one-way) Gain: 2,900 ft About a 1,000 ft/mile, steep but not *too* steep. The trail starts out...next to a falls! It closely follows Falls Creek for the first half of its length. As the water is loud and the brush is thick, I'd highly recommend doing some trail karaoke with your friends to make sure you alert any bears in the area that you're coming. Eventually, you get out of the brush and the valley expands. It's gorgeous. It's wide and it's bright-freakin'-green (my favorite shade of that color), or at least it was in mid-June. This is going to sound odd but, it actually reminded me of some of the valleys I hiked in Hawaii! It made me a little butthurt that I am only just-now getting around to hiking the trail. The trail ends at a lake. I'm not sure what the name of it is, so I'll just call it "Falls Lake". The lake frequently has snow on/in/around it, up until July. But, there is an ample amount of vegetated, snow-free flat area around the lake, this would be a perfect "Baby's First Backpacking" trip. (no permits required, just load yourself down and hike up) You can continue up past the lake, onto the ridge between South Suicide Peak and Indianhouse Mountain. The path will quickly change from "hiking" to "scrambling" though. I'd only recommend going up South Suicide if you are confident on your feet, and I'd only recommend going up Indianhouse if you have a rope and a partner! If you're quick enough, this can be done as an after-work hike. If you're slow or looking for a casual stroll, you can easily make a day of this hike.

I'm still sore. Dragged my spouse and our neurodivergent son with me to do this hike on a sunny…read moreSeptember Saturday. We parked at 1pm (parking lot was packed). Got back to the parking lot after 5pm. You'll need most of your day to do this hike if you're not a professional. This hike is beautiful but it is challenging for sure. You are going uphill the entire time. On the way down it's so steep you're jamming your toes trying not to fall. We did the bulk of this hike with nothing but backpacks full of snacks hahaha. Everyone that passed us up or down had poles, guns, bear spray, bells, dogs, the whole enchilada. I don't recommend hiking this area the way we did, we just got lucky :) It was a beautiful day and we were never alone for longer than 15-20min at a time. Weather was perfect, it was sunny and warm but the breeze was breezin'. The falls are a sight to see and made this strenuous hike completely worth it for my water-loving son. I can't wait to return soon and make it further.

One of the best trails I did in Alaska!!!! it's not that long and on relatively flat ground…read more Changing scenery along the way and you are rewarded with an absolutely gorgeous Alpine Lake at the end.

Beautiful trail any time of year. The parking area and street can packed, so be prepared to hike to…read morethe start of the trailhead depending on the time of day and day of the week. In the past I've only hit this trail to go to peak two for skiing, but recently went to Rabbit Lake on the most perfect day possible. Got great photos of the Suicides, waded in the lake, and wallowed on the grass. One regret is that I didn't get a pano shot. I'm like queen of the panos, what the heck? There were a few people tenting it, making it a perfect amateur backpacking adventure. Will come again and may pack a picnic.

You may not know the name of this mountain but, she knows you…read more.. if you've driven through the Arm more than a couple times, you've definitely seen it. If you're driving back into Anchorage, it's visible as you're approaching the small village of "Indian" (home to one of the best restaurants in the state: Froth & Forage, https://www.yelp.com/biz/froth-and-forage-coffeehouse-and-eatery-anchorage) It's flanked by two official trails: Falls Creek Trail: on the "Anchorage side" (west) https://www.yelp.com/biz/falls-creek-trail-anchorage Indian Valley Trail: on the "Indian, AK side" (east) https://www.yelp.com/biz/indian-valley-trail-anchorage The trail that goes up to Indianhouse is not an "official trail". Because of this, I was always leery about climbing Indianhouse Mountain. I'm not super-thrilled about bushwhacking, and I thought getting to the mountain proper would require a ton of it. Oh, how wrong I was! The trail that goes up here is actually shockingly well maintained. No 'schwacking at all! It is, however, incredibly steep. Probably steepest trail I've been on in the Chugach State Park area (maybe that's why it's not "official"). Anyway, for the first (steep) mile, it's a very steep hike. You'll eventually top out on nice, wide prairie-like area. From here, casual hikers should probably turn around. You'll know you're at the turnaround point because the trail will start to become faint and eventually disappear into a ridge that leads to the much larger ridge of Indianhouse Mountain. To summit Indianhouse, DO NOT ride this ridge up to ridge of Indianhouse and then try to take that to the summit! This is a tempting move to make but the rock that lies ahead for you is of very poor quality and the moves are very much 5th-class! (e.g. you'll need a rope) Go partially up the ridge, but, before you connect with the summit ridge traverse right. And keep traversing right. This...can be kinda bushwhacky, but you're largely on tundra (and/or garbage snow). I'd say this is probably the crux of the hike/climb. You're looking for a large couloir (narrow gully) that leads up to the summit. It usually has snow in it until later in the summer. You might want to bring an ice axe and crampons or, at the very least, a trekking pole and some microspikes. The summit is exposed and complex, with incredible views in all directions. Views of the nearby Suicide Peaks are one-of-a-kind!