Ride the Campbell Creek Trail west from Taku Lake Park on any weekday evening and you'll hit the same wall everyone in this neighborhood already knows about. The paved trail simply stops at Campbell Park, dumps you onto Lake Otis Parkway, and expects you to find your own way across four lanes of arterial traffic before picking the trail back up on the other side. There's a crosswalk. There's a tunnel a few blocks off. Neither one feels like it was built with a bike or a jogging stroller in mind.
For years, the story around this gap has been simple: a fix is coming. An elevated crossing, a real bridge, has been the plan discussed in public meetings, engineering studies, and city trail documents going back well before this year. As recently as February 2026, that was still the story Anchorage residents were being told. It isn't the story anymore, and the reason why says something worth knowing if you live on either side of that intersection.
What everyone was told versus what's actually being built
In February, the Anchorage Daily News covered the city's draft 2026 recreational trails plan, which laid out where the Parks and Recreation Department hopes to close gaps like this one over the next two decades. The ADN piece quoted Alexa Dobson, executive director of Bike Anchorage, describing the current at-grade crossing as a "pain." Her point was straightforward: when the trail ends abruptly at Campbell Creek Park, cyclists have to work through a busy intersection and loop back through a residential street before they can catch the trail again on the far side. The plan being discussed that month was an elevated crossing over Lake Otis Parkway, connecting the two halves of the trail without forcing anyone into traffic.
That's the version most residents heard. It isn't what's currently funded and moving through design.
The Anchorage Metropolitan Area Transportation Solutions program tracks every trail and road project with federal or municipal money attached, and its most recent quarterly project update, covering the period through March 31, 2026, lists the Campbell Creek Trail crossing at Lake Otis Parkway under a different status than the one described a month earlier in the press. The update states plainly that the project "has been rescoped away from a grade separated crossing to an at-grade crossing due to significant ROW complications." Environmental document work is underway on that revised scope now.
Translated out of planning language, ROW means right-of-way, the strip of land a bridge would need on both sides of Lake Otis Parkway to land its ramps and approaches. An elevated crossing wide enough for bikes, pedestrians, and winter grooming equipment needs real acreage on either bank, and getting that acreage from adjacent property owners turned out to be harder than the design team could work around. So the state's Department of Transportation and Public Facilities, which is funding the project with the Municipality of Anchorage covering a share of the match, pivoted to a street-level solution instead.
None of this means the crossing is getting worse. An at-grade crossing built with proper signals and sightlines is still a real improvement over the current setup, which relies on drivers noticing a crosswalk on a road built for speed. It does mean the bridge residents were picturing isn't the project that's actually in the pipeline, and it means the timeline resets to whatever an at-grade design and environmental review takes rather than whatever a bridge would have taken. If you've been waiting to see construction fencing go up at Campbell Park, the honest answer is not yet, and not in the form you were expecting.
The trail works fine everywhere else
The crossing gap is a real annoyance, but it's a small stretch of a system that otherwise holds together well. Campbell Creek Trail runs 7.5 miles with a gentle 469 feet of elevation gain across its whole length, which is why it shows up on so many casual family rides and why cross-country skiers use the northern half between University Lake Park and Campbell Park in winter without much trouble. It's also one quarter of Anchorage's Moose Loop, the 32-mile connected system that links Campbell Creek Trail with the Lanie Fleischer Chester Creek Trail, the Tony Knowles Coastal Trail, and the Ship Creek Trail into a single route shaped, if you squint at a map, like a moose.
If you're riding it for more than exercise, Taku Lake Park itself is worth the stop. The 53-acre park anchors the Taku/Campbell neighborhood and holds more than just trail access: tennis courts, a picnic shelter, adult fitness equipment installed with an AARP donation in 2020, and the skatepark that reopened here in 2024 as the largest in Anchorage. That $2.1 million rebuild, built by the concrete-park specialists at Grindline, came together through two municipal bonds worth $1.6 million combined, contributions from the Anchorage Park Foundation and the Rasmuson Foundation, and a $10,000 grant from the Tony Hawk Foundation, with local shop Blue and Gold Boardshop kicking off a community fundraiser that hit its $40,000 match. The park's signature features, an inlaid Big Dipper cast into the concrete and a whale-tail-shaped bowl, made it into the ADN's coverage at the time as a genuine point of neighborhood pride, and it still draws roller derby skaters, BMX riders, and scooter kids alongside traditional skateboarders.
Hungry after a ride, you don't have far to go. Peanut Farm and Arctic Roadrunner both sit right off the Old Seward Highway near the park, close enough to the trail that they've become the default stop for anyone who started their ride at Taku Lake and needs a reason to turn around.
A reason to use all of it before winter
If you've been meaning to ride the whole Moose Loop instead of just your usual stretch of Campbell Creek Trail, the Anchorage Park Foundation's annual challenge gives you a structured reason to do it. The 2026 Moose Loop Trail Challenge runs September 12 through 19, an untimed, self-paced event where you pick your distance and complete it on your own schedule, on the actual trail system or anywhere else that works for you:
- 5K
- 10K
- Mini Moose (25.75K)
- Mighty Moose (51.5K, the full loop)
There's a small adult registration fee, kids under 18 participate free, and proceeds go directly back into the Park Foundation's work on trails like this one. It won't fund a bridge over Lake Otis Parkway. That project has its own funding stream through DOT&PF. But it's a fair reminder that the trail system running past your front door didn't build itself, and the same community process that got a skatepark rebuilt and a Big Dipper cast into concrete is still working on the parts that aren't finished yet.
Living with the gap for now
None of this changes what you'll do on your next ride. You'll still hit Campbell Park, still cross at the light or duck through the tunnel, still pick the trail back up a block later. What's changed is what you know while you're doing it. The bridge that was supposed to fix this is not the project currently funded, and the actual fix, whenever it lands, will be a street-level crossing built out of an environmental review that's only just getting underway. That's not a complaint. It's just the kind of detail that separates people who've lived on this trail for years from people who read one article about it in February and assumed the story was over.
If you're weighing whether Taku/Campbell fits how you actually want to live, not just what a listing photo can show you, that's the conversation Sam Lightle is glad to have. Schedule a consultation and talk through what a neighborhood like this one actually offers day to day, gaps and all.
