Day 7 of 2020 Alaska Trip, Lazy Mountain

Seventh and last day of our Alaska trip. I would be hiking Lazy Mountain Trail near Palmer, Alaska before hopping onto a 7pm flight to Seattle.

Matanuska Mountain

It’s our last day in Alaska, I figured it would be nice to conclude this Alaska trip with my favorite activity of hiking. There were quite some hiking trails at the mouth of Knik River, near the town of Palmer. With a flight to catch in the evening, I picked Lazy Mountain Trail for the day, a short 9km trip with 900m elevation gain but nonetheless stunning views at the summit.

I left Airbnb in Palmer at 10am, and started my hike at 10:25. By the time I got to trailhead, the parking lot was about half-full (and it pretty much stayed that way for the reminder of day). There’s 5 dollar parking charge, and since this was a popular trail, I had some struggle pushing the fee envelope into an overflowing box.
Here’s GPS tracking:

Height Limiter
Does anyone have ideas what this structure was for? Setting up a height limiter at trailhead didn’t make sense to me.

Fork of Trail

To prevent people from accidentally heading onto the “most difficult” Lazy Mountain Trail, such a huge sign was erected with directions of the easier Lazy Moose Trail clearly marked.

The entire trail could be broken up into three parts, from trailhead it’s either the 3.6km Lazy Moose Trail on a gentle incline to an intersection, which could also be reached via the steep 1.8km Lazy Mountain Trail. After the intersection where the previous two trails met, it’s another 1.8km to the summit of Lazy Mountain.
I took the Lazy Moose Trail uphill, and Lazy Mountain Trail down.

 
 
 
Trail

Immediately after start, the trail felt different than what I normally ran into in the States. The soil was soft (but thankfully not muddy), plants along were tall, it felt more like hiking among paddy fields in South Asia than rugged mountains in Alaska.

 
Plants

Bench

Adding to the trail’s unique characters, I have done quite a lot of hiking in United States, but I seldomly saw benches like this made along the trail for people to rest. Along the entire Lazy Mountain Trail, there were quite a lot of these benches and picnic tables for people to rest.

In addition, both trails before the junction had frequent distance marks, which wasn’t a usual sight along hiking trails in US. Though I had been used to checking distances from cell phone GPS.

Mushroom
Pretty sizable ones.

Berries

 
 
Trail

As the trail made its way up the mountain, trees began to dominate the landscape, which was becoming familiar to me.

One aspect of Lazy Moose Trail that I didn’t quite appreciate was its numerous (and I believed, unnecessary) switchbacks with an incline that’s too smooth. It’s so tempting to cut around them making a more direct ascent that’s not difficult at all.

In addition to that, the forest was doing a good job at keeping out the wind, which meant it’s a pretty hot ascent with lots of sweats. A huge contrast to later in the day when I experienced furious winds up top.

 
Trail

And as one made his way up the hill, various mountains to the South emerged above the tree line.

Twin Peaks

Pioneer Peak

Soaring across Knik River. This shot was taken against sunlight and the best of my post-processing could only reveal so much of the mountain’s detail.

 
 
Trees
Approaching the junction, trees got sparser so one could enjoy more sunshine.

 
 
Trail

90 minutes after I started, I reached the intersection of trails. Soon after that there was a picnic table, where I took some rest while enjoying the view below.

Matanuska River

Palmer Municipal Airport before Downtown Palmer

Distant Hunter Creek Glacier

Distant Tordrillo Mountains
More than 100 miles of visibility.

Road

East Huntley Road in the foreground and East Bogard Road in the background, cut off by river in the middle. It felt to me that they were supposed to be a straight and continuous road, until the engineers decided a bridge across Matanuska River should be built elsewhere.

Soon after leaving picnic table, there was some steep ascent in the bushes, after which rocks began to dominate the landscape.

That’s when I started to notice the rocky ground was decorated with patches of grass, the most alluring and mesmerizing being these wearing crimson red. It’s end of August it’s sensational watching cycle of their life ended in such dramatic colors.

 

 
Grass

 
Cairn

Picnic Table

Where I had my lunch with nice views around. There were a handful of tables like this for people to rest after the two trails merged. A couple of dogs seemed interested in my sandwich too.

 
Trail

Summit of Lazy Mountain

Finally, 2.5 hours after I started, I reached the summit of Lazy Mountain at 1pm.

Final Stretch

Flag at Lazy Mountain Summit

It was a windy day and the US flag was flying graciously at the summit. However, the obvious summit was a few steps ahead, I wonder why the summit box wasn’t placed there.

Overlooking Lazy Mountain

The summit was more appropriately described as a high point along an east-west ridge.

And in line with my tradition, I commemorated the moment with a video shot from my drone.

1.04x playback speed, 17 seconds, 2160p25fps, 14Mbps/29MB for H265, 17Mbps/35MB for H264.

Mountains surrounding Lazy Mountain

Lazy Mountain Summit
Taken from my drone.

The views were spectacular from the summit of Lazy Mountain, with Matanuska Mountain among others in Chugach Range to the South and East, Talkeetna Range to the North, and the plains along Knik Arm to the West.

Matanuska Mountain

Chugach Mountains from Lazy Mountain

Eska Mountain
The magnificent Talkeetna Ranges to the North.

 
Distant Mountains
At the heart (left) and perimeter (right) of Talkeetna Ranges.

 
 
Mountains

Wolverine Lake
Even a lake in this region was elongated like carved from the mountains.

Matanuska River
The river widened up as it made its way pass Palmer, and finally joined Knik River.

 
Field

View around Lazy Mountain

Trail to Matanuska Peak
Matanuska Peak was another trail that I considered hiking. It’s higher and longer, and with limited time today I opted for the shorter and easier Lazy Mountain.

Grass at Lazy Mountain Summit
They seemingly sprouted out of nowhere from these rocks at the summit.

After spending about 30 minutes at the summit, I made my way back.
The final stretch to summit was steep and on loose rocks, so it’s a test to one’s patience, balance and knees walking downhill.

 
 

Trail

Cloud had been gathering, wind had been picking up since I started. While the wind was strong at the summit, it wasn’t that bad as Matanuska Mountain to the south stood in its way (my drone still flew). Now that I was making my way down, it turned into a gale. And there’s no plants nearby where I could seek shelter from.

 
Matanuska River
It was a windy day, the mists over Matanuska River could attest to that.

 
Trail

Matanuska Mountain

Finally, at 2:40pm I got past the trail intersection, taking the shorter Lazy Mountain Trail back to parking lot while back to the embrace of trees shielding out wind.

Unfortunately, the remaining trail presented another challenge, its steepness. Its initial part averaged 40% gradient, that must be trod with extreme caution as the trail’s mostly uniform dirt without stairs. I wisely stowed my camera, despite that, I still slipped once.

 
 
Trail

Such steep incline was hard to tackle and stairs (top left) were rare along the way. Most of the time, it’s the exposed roots (bottom) that were providing traction.

 
 
Trail

 
 
Trail in Field

Towards the end where the gradient smoothed out, the trail cut its way through some fields where plants were taller than me.

I encountered lots of bugs on my way down, presumably because they found the woods a perfect harbor against hauling winds above. Luckily, they didn’t turn out to bother me too much.

 
Trail

Finally, 4 hours and 40 minutes since I left, I was back at the parking lot. After that, I drove to Anchorage, returned the rental car and caught up with my friend. We made our way to the airport, and readied ourselves for the flight to Seattle.

END

Day 7 of 2020 Alaska Trip, Lazy Mountain by Huang's Site is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.