I recently told my neighbor I wanted a gravel bike. Everybody’s riding gravel bikes these days. He looked at the Schwinn sitting in my garage and politely laughed, you already have one, he said. Just one from the ’80s. As he walked me through his bikes, the gap between them grew clear. Components chosen for a specific feel, disc brakes, handlebars that change the whole nature of a ride, interchangeable tubeless tire widths, replacement parts that haven’t been discontinued. My Schwinn did its best to disappear, awkward and self-aware, hoping no one would notice the spokes aplenty, rigid head tube, stem shifters that required a devoted movement, worn brakes that belonged to a different era. The line between transportation and curation, blurring.
Between our two garages sat forty years of cycling history, told in steel and aluminum. Our own little driveway museum, showing off how much the sport has evolved. Off-road cycling in the Mat-Su sits somewhere in that same timeline. Past its infancy, but still figuring out what it wants to be.
I asked a friend to describe mountain biking once. She talked about how empowering it feels, especially as a woman. Technical stuff with rocks and logs, zippy downhills, uphill suffer-fests, no matter the mood or day there’s a ride you can enjoy. Will Taygen put it in another way: the trail itself is part of the experience. From what I can tell there’s a kind of awareness mountain biking asks of you that’s different from other sports, this undulation between narrowed focus and just coasting, flowing with the land instead of plowing through it. It’s a sport that has its identity rooted in its landscapes, and the Mat-Su has plenty of those.
Mountain biking has been booming across the country over the past decade, and that boom comes with pressure on trails and the landscapes around them, the same pressure showing up in recreation everywhere.
I chatted with Will Taygen, Executive Director of Chugach Mountain Bikers and founder of the Off-Road Cycling Alliance (ORCA), an educational and advocacy organization. His reasoning for doing all this work is pretty simple. “I want to make my community awesome, live in an awesome place, and be able to do these things myself,” he says. It’s a pretty straightforward way to explain what motivates someone through years of grant applications, volunteer coordination, and bureaucratic patience, but it also gets at what can be true of how trail systems get built anywhere, by people who actually want to use them and want to make their communities awesome.
What’s Here and What’s Not
Mountain biking is younger than people assume, only about 40 years old as a sport, and Alaska didn’t get its first purpose-built trails until 2005. Will mentioned it wasn’t until 2022 that mountain bikes got their own regulatory category, separate from motorized users and horseback riders. Before that, figuring out where bikes even fit was complicated.
What’s grown in the Mat-Su since then is more than people may realize. There’s almost 100 miles of bike-accessible trail, ranging from the Matanuska Greenbelt’s kettle ponds and rolling moraine hills, to Government Peak’s flowy single-tracks, to the rawer backcountry and mining roads around Hatcher Pass, to the seasonal riverside trails along the Knik. Winter doesn’t really shut things down either, a lot of these trails stay open, and more, like the Moose Range, open up for fat tire biking. “There’s a different flavor during different times of the year,” Will says. It’s a four season sport here, not just a summer one.
That number doesn’t tell the whole story, though. Only around 17% of the Mat-Su’s off-road cycling trail miles are actually bike-optimized, built with the flow, drainage, and features modern riding calls for. The rest are multi-use trails, hiking routes, old mining roads. Rideable, and enjoyable, but not purpose built for bikes.
There’s also a less obvious argument Will makes about what mountain biking and solid trails actually do to a place. A hardened trail lets someone get into the backcountry and back out in hours, spending minutes in a valley rather than days. So good trail infrastructure can reduce impact instead of adding to it. It also spreads use out across more of the network, which matters in a location where popular trailheads take a lot of pressure. More access points, more options, less congestion at the places people already love.
The biggest gap is connectivity. Government Peak Recreation Area is the Mat-Su Valley’s go-to riding destination, a mix of cross country and enduro trails with real character. Hatcher Pass has some of the most scenic riding in Southcentral Alaska. But the two aren’t connected to each other, and neither connects well to where most people actually live. The Matanuska Greenbelt, sitting between Palmer and Wasilla, is often where people get on a bike for the first time, but it doesn’t really have the beginner skill-building infrastructure and sustainable design to serve that gateway role well. It’s also one of the more mature systems in the region, and Will points out that as trails mature, communities start figuring out more specifically what they need from them.
Access for kids and beginners is the clearest gap here. Palmer Bike Park is showing its age. The pump tracks and progressive skills areas that help new riders actually stick around are few and far between, especially if you live a fair distance out from any of it.
The Regional Trails Plan
This is the landscape ORCA set out to map and address. ORCA formed after a statewide mountain bike summit, when people realized groups across the region were all doing good work largely in isolation, and that there was real value in building something more connected. ORCA became an umbrella and was organized as a way to give those groups a way to pool resources, share advocacy, and present a unified voice to land managers and funders.
One of ORCA’s first major efforts was a Regional Trails Plan. Mat-Su Trails and Parks Foundation helped fund the Mat-Su portion with a $20,000 grant to Valley Mountain Bikers and Hikers. IMBA Trail Solutions were brought in to lead the process in collaboration with other partners and local land managers.
The result is a detailed inventory of more than 750 trails and 21,000 data points across Anchorage and the Mat-Su, mapped through purpose-built trail attribute and analysis tools. It’s not just a list of where trails are. It captures difficulty, design intent, who’s using which trails, how bike optimized they are, and where the geographic gaps sit, giving planners actual data instead of guesses and supporting informed decision making. Where are beginner trails missing? Where are the connectivity gaps? Where would money have the most impact? Now there’s something to refer to.
The plan also looked at what other communities have done well, and asked, in Will’s words, how does the Mat-Su leverage that? It’s meant to support thoughtful decisions, build on what’s already happening, and let the region market itself as a whole rather than a collection of individual spots.
For the Mat-Su, the plan confirmed what we may have already sensed. Good stuff in specific areas, real gaps in between, and not enough bike specific infrastructure near where people actually live. It also placed the region in a broader picture. The Southcentral Alaska trail network as a whole, according to the plan, is on par with established destinations like Bellingham, Washington, and Pisgah, North Carolina, in terms of trail density and terrain diversity. Not something most folks would guess, but it helps make the case that this place is worth investing in.
That concept got some outside validation recently. Anchorage was named an IMBA Trail Town, a national designation based on trail mileage, quality, diversity, and community involvement (volunteer hours, land manager partnerships, that kind of thing). What’s interesting is the designation is meant for developing communities, not places already well known as mountain biking destinations. It’s a recognition of what has already been accomplished in the region, and ties to a real economic incentive, getting visitors to stick around one more day, spend one more dollar, instead of just passing through. The Mat-Su isn’t there yet, but the regional trails plan is a step toward it.
On the ground
Anchorage’s designation is one kind of recognition. The more everyday kind happens at the trail level, in the people who keep showing up.
At Meadow Lakes Community Park, showing up has meant building something new. In 2025, MSTPF funded a $25,000 grant to Meadow Lakes Community Development for a pump track at the 70-acre park, which already draws an estimated 8,000 users a year but never had a dedicated spot for kids to ride and build skills, leaving them to ride parking lots instead. The track, built for different skill levels and connected into more than 40 acres of multi-use trail, took some trial and error: the build team worked through different mixes of sand, clay, and topsoil before landing on something that would hold up. Local businesses loaned trucks, neighbors showed up to move dirt, and the project leaned on the same community it was built for. As Patti Fisher, treasurer of Meadow Lakes Community Development, puts it, the park is meant to be a place where mothers and fathers and kids can come and play in a safe, clean environment. At an April 2025 Bike Rodeo meant to get the neighborhood excited about the project, Patti ran into a young girl who said she wanted to come but didn’t have a bike. “If you come, I’ll make sure you have one,” Patti told her. The girl showed up, got her bike, and rode off grinning, the kind of small solution that access usually comes down to.
The same thing is happening an hour away at Matanuska River Park, where an old pump track and flow trails have fallen neglect, wearing down but still well loved by the community. Valley Mountain Bikers and Hikers (VMBaH) is the small but mighty volunteer organization behind mountain biking in the valley, going back to Alaska’s first purpose-built trails in 2005. Their trail work focuses largely on Government Peak Recreation Area, along with fat tire grooming at trails like the Moose Range through the winter. At Matanuska River Park, they’re partnering on a local Eagle Scouts project to rebuild the pump track, repurposing most of the existing dirt and replacing the wooden features that haven’t held up. They’ve taken on smaller requests the same way, when someone asked for a section of the Monkshood trail to be made accessible to adaptive riders, VMBaH got it done, and now the whole trail is accessible. They work at a bigger scale too, partnering with the Mat-Su Borough and the Mat-Su Ski Club on a long-term master trails plan for GPRA.
That long-term thinking extends to who’s riding these trails in the first place. VMBaH runs SprocKidz, a youth mountain bike program for ages 8 to 18 that’s grown from 35 kids to150 over the years it’s run, taught entirely by volunteer coaches. VMBaH’s Administrative Director and SprocKidz Head Coach Grace Bruno says it’s intoxicating to be a part of, these stoked kids riding around, having fun with their friends, and the energy runs both directions. “Every time I teach a skill, I learn something new. It expands my own knowledge and theirs at the same time.” She says she can’t imagine life without it. Ask her what she envisions ten years from now and she comes back to beginner access, not just for youth but for anyone new to the sport. More easy trails, so people can spend time conditioning instead of getting thrown in before they’re ready. Get more people on bikes now, and maybe you get more people who care enough to take care of them later. Maybe that’s the girl from the Meadow Lakes Bike Rodeo, the one who showed up without a bike and rode off grinning. Maybe it’s one of this year’s SprocKidz, out there learning they can do more than they think, cheered on by coaches who learned the same thing once.
Where things are Headed
All of that, the pump tracks, the trail work, the kids learning to ride, adds up to something bigger than any one project. Compared to somewhere like Bend, Oregon, the Mat-Su is still pretty early in its off-road cycling development. Will is honest about that. But being early also means there’s still room to make good decisions, to build a trail network that is connected and sustainable instead of trying to retrofit one later.
The Regional Trails Plan is the foundation for that. It’s meant to be a living resource, the data tools behind it are built to be updated over time, used by land managers and advocates for ongoing planning and grant work. The plan identified specific priorities: a Hatcher Pass to GPRA connection, beginner infrastructure near populated areas, tread improvements in the Greenbelt, formalized routes in Knik River and Moose Range. These aren’t just wish list items, they’re the actual roadmap for off-road cycling in the Mat-Su Borough going forward.
At the core of it, Will just wants more people outside, on a bike, in the wilderness, finding what he found in it. That’s the future he’s working toward, more trails connecting the places people actually live, more kids riding before they’re driving, more of the region made reachable without wearing it down in the process.
None of that happens on its own. Every mile of it exists because someone decided it mattered enough to build. The regional plan, the pump track, the trail work, none of it is really about mountain biking on its own. It’s about building access that holds up, in a place that’s still mostly held together by people who, like Will said at the start, just want to make their community an awesome place to live.
Stay tuned on Valley Mountain Hikers and Bikers through their Facebook and Instagram. And, Meadow Lakes Community Park through their website. Additionally, don’t forget to check out the ORCA Bike Calendar!
Curious about the sport? Backcountry Bike and Ski and Talkeetna Gear Shop offer Bike Rentals.
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