Winner Creek: Boardwalks, brush, and a couple of beautiful creeks

Winner Creek is the quintessential Alaska rainforest hike: Two trailheads, a series of well-placed boardwalks, and beautifully maintained trail take you on a reasonably easy ramble through temperate rainforest to a pair of rushing creeks and a steep-walled gorge.

A hand tram across that gorge used to be one of the biggest attractions on this hike, but due to a series of tragic accidents it has been closed indefinitely. That means you can only do the hike as an out-and-back from either of the two trailheads. Without the Winner Creek hand tram, you can’t connect the two ends of the trail.

This is hike 59 in my guidebook Day Hiking Southcentral Alaska and hike 3 in 50 Hikes Around Anchorage.

Hiking Winner Creek

As you just read, there are two trailheads for this hike — but with the Winner Creek hand tram out of commission, they no longer connect directly. Under those circumstances, I find this to still be a very worthy hike from the Alyeska Resort end of the trail — but less-interesting from the Crow Creek Road side of things. Your mileage may vary, and I’m curious to hear what you think!

From Alyeska Resort

This trail begins behind the Alyeska Resort’s tram building, very close to the start of the North Face trail. Just walk around the tram building and look to your left for a gray-and-blue national forest sign marked for Winner Creek.

About 1.6 miles in, the trail hits a T intersection. The right fork leads you onto the rough, often wet Upper Winner Creek trail; take the left fork instead. Continue past an enormous, broken-down Sno-Cat bridge across Winner Creek, and at about 2.5 miles from the trailhead you’ll reach another bridge over Winner Creek — this one you do cross — and then the hand tram that has, historically, been one of the greatest attractions on this hike.

That hand tram is commonly referred to as the Winner Creek hand tram, but it actually crosses a different creek — Glacier Creek — and, unfortunately, it was the site of two tragic accidents in recent years. Because of that, it’s closed for the foreseeable future. You can check the US Forest Service’s official open/closed status for the Winner Creek hand tram here.

That closure means this is now an out-and-back hike to the tram instead of a thru hike to the other trailhead. But the gorge the tram spans is still impressive, both Winner and Glacier creeks are beautiful, and the rainforest trail is so pleasant that this hike remains well worth doing.

From Crow Creek Road

I highly recommend doing this hike from Alyeska Resort; I find the terrain there to be much prettier and more interesting, and the trail is a bit longer. However, if you find yourself at the Crow Creek Road trailhead instead, it’s still a lovely forest walk that takes you to the other side of the Glacier Creek Gorge.

The total round-trip distance from the Crow Creek Road trailhead to the gorge, then back again, is about 2 miles. Watch for a right turn that’ll take you from the trailhead down to the gorge; if you continue straight ahead instead, you may end up at Crow Creek Mine instead.

A Note About Avalanche Hazard

This trail gets used plenty during the winter, but it also crosses known avalanche slopes, and the Alyeska Resort sometimes conducts avalanche mitigation on those slopes: i.e., deliberately causing avalanches to keep skiers from getting caught up in unexpected ones. Because of that, I’ve marked the trail as having a typical summer season: July to September, or later depending on snow conditions.

If you’re thinking of hitting this trail in the winter, why not contact the Alyeska Resort to see if they’re recommending hikers use it under current conditions — and whether they have any avalanche mitigation efforts planned during the time you expect to hike?

Bottom line: Knowledge is power, and even a basic understanding of avalanche risk factors can help you make well-informed decisions on your winter hikes.