Eklutna Lakeside Trail: A beautiful Southcentral Alaska gem

Few places are as fantastically suited for so many activities as Eklutna Lake. This post focuses on the Eklutna Lakeside trail, which is for the most part an easy-to-moderate romp along an old roadbed.

There are a few other hikes in the area including the Twin Peaks trail to (with an optional continuation to Pepper Peak), Bold Ridge, and the relatively short Eydlu Bena Loop. Black bear encounters are pretty common in all of these places.

This is hike 24 in my guidebook Day Hiking Southcentral Alaska, and hike 46 in 50 Hikes Around Anchorage.

Hiking the Eklutna Lakeside Trail

The Eklutna Lakeside trail is an old roadbed, and it shows — but the rolling terrain still makes for pleasant walking and biking. The trail starts just out of the day-use parking area and follows the western shore of the lake, but you’ll see a few periodic divides: The main Eklutna Lakeside trail goes left, while a narrower, non-motorized trail swoops down toward the water before rejoining the main trail.

Aside from giving you nice views over the water, those short, non-motorized detours come in particularly handy from Sunday through Wednesday, when the main Eklutna Lakeside trail is open to ATV traffic.

During summer there’s a Lifetime Adventures kiosk near the trailhead that rents bikes. They also rent kayaks; the lake is fantastic for paddling too, although it’s also very big, very cold and prone to stiff afternoon winds that can make it hard to get back to your starting point, so it’s not always suited to novices.

Anyway, back to hiking! During summer, the trail itself is more than 12 miles one-way to the end, but only the first 8.5 miles or so are along the lake, and the trail narrows and gets brushier toward the end. So, use your own judgment about how far it’s worth going.

And during the winter? As long as the lake remains frozen over, you have ridiculous amounts of space for social distancing, although you may need snowshoes or skis to make use of it. The Eklutna Lakeside trail itself is usually pretty well-trampled.

Speaking of Eklutna Lake, it’s huge and deep, so use caution in deciding when it’s safe to go out on the ice. Watch out for occasional separation and collapsing of ice near the banks, and keep in mind that ice can be thinner — or even entirely absent — anywhere there’s moving water.