Lake Louise Trail Issue

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Posted from an emailed letter

Snowmobile Trail Must Work Out Moose Concerns

By Mary Odden

Lake Louise—A snowmachine club that wants to improve a 65-mile trail from Lake Louise north to the Maclaren River and the Denali Highway is running into some opposition from the Alaska Department of Fish and Game and local Copper River hunting and wildlife groups, who strongly oppose the trail improvement project.

The trail goes through an area of the Alphabet Hills, south of the Denali Highway, which ADFG biologists say is prime wintering and calving habitat for Unit 13 Moose.

The Lake Louise Snowmachine Club, a.k.a. “The Wolf Pack,” actively promotes safe trails and riding practices in the Lake Louise area. Its president, Ron Jones of Anchorage, said his organization submitted a 49 page grant application last fall to the Alaska Trails Initiative grant program at DNR Division of Parks and Outdoor Recreation. They are unsure of the current status of that grant application, which asked for $91,250 to survey, permit, create maps for easement/right of way applications, clear, and improve the route to the width needed for the trail groomer, 16-20 feet.

The grant application also requests funds to build a small shelter cabin on skids, which Jones says would provide safe shelter at about the half-way point of the trail, but could be removed at the end of the late-winter recreation season.

The snowmachine club has a noteworthy list of accomplishments on behalf of winter recreationists. Since the formation of their group 15 years ago, the Wolf Pack has been surveying, building and grooming trails for winter recreationists and promoting safe riding practices for youth and adults. They have improved a system of trails between Eureka Summit and Lake Louise which benefits snowmachiners and local businesses, as well as trails to Mendeltna Creek, Tolsona Lake, and Crosswind Lake.

Corky Matthews of Lake Louise, an active member of the snowmachine club and a veteran of many of the club’s trail improvement projects, said the Wolf Pack is aware of potential abuses of an improved trail corridor, and the Maclaren River trail, like other trails built and improved by the club, will utilize the frozen lakes and rivers along its route—minimizing the potential for summer use.

The promotion of winter recreation and the protection of wildlife habitat are not completely mutually exclusive, says Ellen Simpson, a habitat biologist who works on access issues for the Alaska Department of Fish and Game. “We are not opposed to people recreating in the Alphabet Hills, as they already do,” says Simpson, “but a wide improved trail that makes the trip an easy one-day ride actually changes the nature of the access.

“More people will use the trail and the surrounding hills, and the widened and improved corridor does not go away when the snow does—so there is a definite factor of inviting year-round disturbance into an area selected by the state for its wildlife values,” said Simpson.

A December 13 memo from biologists at the Glennallen ADFG office to the Division of Parks trail grant program recommends that the Lake Louise-Maclaren Trail grant be denied, and expresses concern about improvement work that may have already taken place along the route.

In a three-page list of concerns with the project, wildlife biologists Bob Tobey and Becky Kelleyhouse caution that the “major impact of this trails project would be to open up one of the most remote and important habitats in GMU 13.” The memo especially cautions that disturbance to moose populations during winter and spring “could lower survival rates.”

A related concern is the continuing effort to burn or allow wildfire to consume woody fuels in the Alphabet Hills, a cooperative project between the federal Bureau of Land Management, the Alaska Department of Fish and Game, and the Alaska DNR Division of Forestry. “Active habitat management through the use of fire depends on a continued lack of development,” states the memo.

Citizen groups with wildlife habitat and hunting concerns have expressed opposition to the Lake Louise-Maclaren River trail improvement project. On January 24, the Copper Basin Fish and Game Advisory Committee voted unanimously to oppose the trail. The Copper Country Alliance, based in the Copper Valley, has asked its members to oppose the sanctioning and funding of the trail.

Biologist Kelleyhouse says it is always a difficult situation when a project that would clearly benefit one group of recreationists and businesses is in conflict with wildlife habitat and the subsistence and recreational users of wildlife. “But in this case,” says Kelleyhouse, “the area in question is the ‘crown jewel’ of moose habitat in GMU 13.”

Kelleyhouse said the best example of major winter trail improvement opening a habitat area to other kinds of development is the Eureka-John Lake system of trails, which have also provided unquestionable benefits to snowmachiners and businesses. She has been a recreational snowmachiner herself, she says, “so I can totally understand the benefits of the trail expansions.”

The unintended consequences of trail creation and improvement, however, says Kelleyhouse, is that new easements and right of ways, along with the now-connected rough trails and seismics, continue to be established and used year round by ATVs. That has made the moose habitat “in what was formerly the second most important habitat behind the Alphabets” measurably less viable, she said.

In the several communications between the Lake Louise Snowmachine Club, the Division of Parks, and the Alaska Department of Fish and Game, there has been talk of an alternate trail route, and Ron Jones says he would “really like to have another dialog with the biologists about that alternate route.”

“The preferred route to Maclaren River is already at the limit of a machine gas tank,” he says, “so if there’s an alternate route the Fish and Game people would like us to consider, then we need to know what it is and why it is preferable.”

“This is not an ‘us against them’ situation,” emphasized Jones. “We just want to look at the additional information they have for us so we can determine if we can go ahead with this trail project.”