After two decades of dreaming about it, 122 hours of volunteer labor and thousands of shovels full of dirt, new mountain bike trails opened at Anchorage’s Russian Jack Springs Park on Tuesday.
The singletrack trails were dreamed up by two dads in the neighborhood who wanted a spot nearby to teach young kids to mountain bike.
“These are my favorite trails so far,” said 8-year-old Dominic Prossick-Brown as he sat on the ground eating a celebratory hot dog after checking out the trails during Tuesday’s opening celebration. “I love bike riding. It’s my favorite activity to do.”
He joined bikers of all ages to test out the three new miles of singletracks that snake through the woods. They zoomed around trees down the narrow dirt trails and tried out a variety of features including dirt jumps, berms, wooden skinnies and tabletops.
Luckily for Dominic, his family can bike to the Russian Jack trails if they’re coming from his grandmother’s house. Before these tracks opened, most of Anchorage’s singletracks were further south, meaning bikers on the east side likely had to drive to get to them.
“If you draw a radius around this park of about a mile or so, there’s more than a dozen schools right in the area,” said Steve Cleary, executive director of the nonprofit Alaska Trails. “So we really hope it’ll be someplace where young people can learn how to ride better and have fun right in their own neighborhood.”
Cleary lives in this neighborhood himself. He and neighbor Carl Battreall, who also works for Alaska Trails, are the two dads who dreamed up the project. They have sons who are about the same age, and they both wanted a place close by for them to learn to mountain bike. It ended up taking years to build the tracks, but it’s still so worth it, Battreall said.
“Steve and I have kids, we had hoped that maybe by the time they were 8 or 9 we would have had this done,” he said, laughing. “Our kids are old now, 17, but they’ll still be able to use it. The process is long. It takes a long time. So, you got to be real resilient.”
Cleary said the Russian Jack trails are great for all levels of mountain bikers, from those just learning to more advanced riders.
“You can use this park to build your skills so that you can safely progress,” Cleary said. “Now that my son is 16, he’s doing things that I will never do, and that kind of scare me, but I’m glad that he’s been doing it since he was 6 or 8 years old, so that he’s built up to be confident and safe.”
The trails are singletracks, which means they’re narrow and designed specifically for biking. The tracks at Russian Jack are one-way, with names like Do-Si-Do and Thin Mint — a nod that the location used to be a Girl Scout camp.
Along with Alaska Trails, the tracks came together with a challenge grant from The Anchorage Park Foundation, a grant from the state and funding from Mighty Bikes. Happy Trails, Inc. started building the trails in fall 2023. Kids in the Youth Employment in Parks program helped out and so did many volunteers who shoveled dirt and clipped back roots.
“The single track trails are a shining example of an idea starting at a neighborhood,” said Beth Nordlund, Anchorage Park Foundation’s executive director. “With challenge grants, often neighbors get an idea and it becomes something larger. It becomes something that the rest of the community wants to get behind and see happen.”
That same community came together for the opening ceremony on Tuesday. Children and adults alike came with their bikes, adorned with mohawk helmets, butterfly wings and light-up sneakers. The ceremony included cookies, hot dogs, a gnome hunt and, fittingly, a ribbon cutting where the ribbon was tied around trees.
Battreall’s teenage son, Walker, came to the opening event by bike with a big smile. He said he’s touched that his dad put so much effort into something inspired by the 8-year-old version of him.
“I’ve been mountain biking my whole life, and he’s really been the one who’s got me into it,” Walker said. “It does feel like a gift, it really does. So it’s super cool. It’s heart-touching.”
Anisa Vietze is Alaska Public Media's 2024 summer reporting fellow. Reach her at avietze@alaskapublic.org.
