One of the “Worst Crags in the U.S.” Faces Destruction. Here’s Why That Matters.
Every trip south out of Anchorage, Alaska relies on a single road, and that road has a body count.
To cross the Kenai Peninsula, you take the Seward Highway: a narrow, winding stretch of asphalt straddling mountains and tidewater. Rockfall is common. Collisions are routine. Moose jams bring traffic to a stop and tourists treat the corridor like a wildlife documentary. On average, it sees about 70 crashes per year.
Still, just off the shoulder, climbers pull over. There isn’t a sign or a formal trailhead, just a widening in the gravel where people have been parking for decades. A social trail climbs uphill toward the Weeping Wall, a band of dark, water-streaked rock rising straight from the road. In winter, it freezes into one of the highways’ most accessible ice climbs.
The highway isn’t background noise here; it’s the access, and the reason these walls were ever climbed at all. And now, after years of development, it’s at risk of being leveled.
In late December, the Alaska Department of Transportation shared draft plans for its Safer Seward Highway project: a proposal to realign and widen road sections beneath roadside crags including Resolution Bluff, Goats Head Soup, Bermuda Triangle, Twinkle Toes and the Weeping Wall. According to the Climbers Alliance of Southcentral Alaska (CASA), this project will permanently eliminate roughly 52 percent of established climbing routes along the Seward Highway and limit access to the rest of them.
For Anchorage climbers, the roughly 350 routes along Seward Highway function as an afternoon crag, an easy place to climb after work, after school, between storms, and when there isn’t time for anything bigger. The routes are short and bolted, the grades at cruising altitude, the approaches measured in steps rather than miles.
“The removal of over half the established climbs and the loss of safe parking and trail access will dramatically reduce opportunities for climbing in the corridor,” said Chad Jensen, Vice President of CASA. “This will not only affect current users but also limit the potential for future stewardship, community engagement, and the preservation of local climbing culture.”
The Safer Seward Highway project is still in its planning phase and is outlined in a draft Environmental Assessment (EA), which evaluates how and whether or not the highway should be changed. It also invites public comment before any final design decisions are made. Both Access Fund and CASA are urging climbers to submit a comment to protect the routes before the February 27 deadline.
The Safer Seward Highway Project
The Seward Highway wasn’t supposed to be rebuilt all at once. For years, the state tried to tame it in pieces through targeted safety upgrades, stepped-up enforcement, and public education, until it became clear that the road wasn’t going to yield to small solutions.
Over the past two decades, the Alaska Department of Transportation and Public Facilities (DOT&PF) has invested roughly $100 million in small improvements like additional signage and rumble strips to the highway. While the measures have reduced some crash types, DOT officials say serious and fatal crashes along the corridor have continued at alarming rates.
In 2023, DOT and its consultants began evaluating the full 20-mile stretch of highway through Turnagain Arm under a single project title, arguing that safety issues, environmental constraints, and access conflicts could no longer be addressed in pieces.
In practice, this means walking a tightrope of competing interests: sensitive marine habitat, like areas used by the endangered Cook Inlet beluga whale, wildlife preservation areas, hiking and biking trails, as well as climbing areas. In some locations, shifting the highway toward the water would trigger federal permitting challenges; in others, cutting farther into the mountainside would affect climbing routes, wildlife habitat, or both.
“This is an extremely challenging corridor,” said Katherine Wood, communications lead for the Safer Seward Highway Environmental Assessment. “There are so many overlapping and conflicting uses and important environmental resources along the entire corridor on both sides. There isn’t any solution that has no cost. We have really tried to thread the needle between a rock and an ocean.”
Early on in the project planning, DOT and its consultants put together a “stakeholder working group,” made up of state agencies and nonprofits who had interests along the highway. They also met individually with others, including CASA. Chris Hughes, the engineer lead with HDR who consulted on the project said those meetings lead to some design changes that saved climbing areas, most notably Sunshine Ridge.
Jensen, however, was surprised by the new draft released on Dec. 29. “We felt like our concerns were acknowledged early on,” he said. “But when the latest draft came out, many of the things we had talked through weren’t reflected, and we weren’t notified about those changes.”
As currently proposed, Jensen said, pedestrian and climber safety, particularly movement between parking areas and climbing areas, has not been adequately addressed. Without designated parking, constructed access trails, or safe crossing points, climbers could be forced to walk along the highway shoulder or attempt unsafe approaches above steep road cuts.
DOT officials counter that the project remains in a planning phase and that access solutions. including trail connections, crossings, and parking, are exactly the kinds of issues the public comment period is intended to find.
“If there are win-win solutions that we’ve missed, now is the time to hear about them,” Wood said.
The debate on the ground
The Seward Highway has never been confused with a world-class climbing destination. The rock is splintering, roadside, and unforgiving, so much so that in 2003 this publication named it one of the “worst crags in the U.S.”
Today, that label’s a bit of an inside joke amongst Anchorage climbers. But they can agree on one thing: the value of the highway’s climbing has never been its rock quality, but its reliability for Alaska’s vertically inclined.
“I didn’t realize how many nights I went out there last summer until I looked through my photos,” said Anchorage climber Marcy Laufer. “We were out there at least once a week.”
That rhythm—after work, after class, between storms—is what’s made the Seward Highway a starter gym for Alaska climbers, including up-and-coming alpinists like the late Balin Miller, who passed away in 2025. His brother Dylan remembers those early years easily.
“The first places that we’d ever climbed were on the Seward Highway,” Dylan Miller said. “That’s where our dad took us, and that’s where he learned how to climb, too. We didn’t really go to the climbing gym when we were kids. The highway was just where climbing happened. It was close, it was easy to get to, and it was a really important part of growing up climbing in Anchorage.”
Balin would later establish two ice routes on the Weeping Wall: Prince of the Highway (T WI6- M7+) and Super Fly (T WI6- R). The wall’s proximity to Anchorage has made it one of the few realistic ice venues for climbers who don’t have time to drive several hours north or east. For many, including Balin, it was where technical ice climbing began.
For Balin and Dylan’s mother, Jeanine Moorman, the highway represented something even more basic for her boys: a chance to grow up outside.
“They could go to school and go climbing in one day,” Moorman said. “It was realistic for them. It was close, it was accessible, and it gave them a place to put their energy into something healthy and demanding.” She was disheartened by the news that the Weeping Wall, where two of her son’s first ascents stand, was on the list of crags to be eliminated.
“Peak Alaska climbing, in my opinion, is being able to look over one shoulder and see goats, then belugas over the other,” said Emma Powley, who frequently climbs along the Seward Highway and at Hatcher’s Pass. “It’d be sad if 2026 is the last summer of ascents with these views.”
Others describe the corridor as a social anchor. “I feel like it’s my home crag,” said Christopher Williams. “It’s been a backyard playground for me for the last 18 years.”
Williams is one of the more prolific developers in Anchorage, having dedicated countless hours to rebolting efforts along the Turnagain Arm. By his count, the project will either destroy or render inaccessible approximately 105 routes he’s developed or replaced hardware on, often at his own expense, to the tune of $15,000.
“At some level I have at a minimum an emotional investment in nearly every route along the highway,” Williams said. “It’s devastating to think that all of that work could get blown up. If the project moves forward, climbers stand to lose a unique resource. The Seward Highway crags offer the opportunity to climb moderate grades close to town with amazing views of mountains and belugas. A four-lane freeway would undoubtedly detract from that.”
Even climbers who don’t romanticize the rock quality recognize what the area provides. Newer climbers, in particular, see the highway as an entry point. “I’ve only climbed in the gym,” said James West, a local anchorage climber, “but I’m looking forward to this summer getting out on Sunshine Ridge and Tree Fort. Those areas, I’ve heard, are some of the best to start out on in Alaska.”
Still, not everyone agrees the climbing should be preserved at all costs. One local climber summed it up with a familiar, long-running joke: “Worst crag in America,” said Brady Deal. “Climbing is better at ARG (Alaska Rock Gym). Blast it.”
But that tension between affection and a very harsh reality has always been part of the Seward Highway’s identity. It’s quintessentially Alaskan actually, to expect imperfect conditions, build skill on whatever’s near, and to care deeply about places not because they’re ideal, but because they’re how life works.
For a city with limited access and long winters, the highway functions as more than a roadside attraction. It carries everything: commuters and tour buses, fuel trucks and freezer meat, lumber for the outhouse, oxygen tanks and dialysis machines, people trying to get where they need to go. There is no practical alternative. No re-route on Google Maps. This isn’t a one-stoplight town; it’s a one-road state. When the Seward Highway closes, so does the south.
For climbers, it’s been a backyard, a training ground, and, despite its flaws, a beginning. The debate now isn’t whether the rock is good. It’s whether Anchorage can afford to lose one of the few places where climbing fits into everyday life.
“What’s going to happen five years from now,” asked William Diebold, an Anchorage-based climber, “when half our climbing is blasted and then funding dries up? What are we going to do when we realize people just drive faster on a wider, straighter highway and it actually didn’t improve safety?”
What happens next
As the Safer Seward Highway proposal enters its public comment phase, national and local climbing advocacy groups aren’t opposing the project outright, but pushing for specific changes that could preserve access where possible.
“This isn’t about trying to stop the highway project,” said Jensen. “It’s about making sure climbing access is actually addressed in the design, not treated as an afterthought.”
Even in areas where climbing routes may remain physically intact, access could be lost if pullouts are removed or approach trails are cut off by road realignments.
Access Fund policy analyst and regional director Katie Goodwin, who previously worked in Alaska as an environmental scientist and NEPA planner, confirms that the strategy is not to try to stop the highway project, but to engage deeply with the planning documents and recommend specific, actionable changes.
“This is a large transportation project with real safety goals,” Goodwin explained. “The question is how climbing fits into that, and how impacts can be reduced where possible, whether that’s avoiding blasting in certain areas or addressing secondary impacts like parking and trail access.”
The Access Fund writes, “Many climbing areas are accessed directly from the highway as it stands, and without thoughtful planning, up to 75% of the existing climbing routes could be impacted, and nearly all remaining routes may see reduced safety and quality of experience.”
Goodwin said the gap between earlier conversations and what appears in the draft is one of the reasons detailed public comments matter. Under NEPA, only issues raised during the draft comment period can be addressed later through appeals or protests.
“That’s why this stage is critical,” she said. “If concerns about access, parking, or safety aren’t documented now, it becomes much harder to address them later.”
For both groups, the goal is pragmatic rather than symbolic.
“This isn’t about saving everything,” Jensen said. “It’s about preserving what we can and making sure that access to what remains is actually safe and usable.”
Public comments on the Draft Environmental Assessment are open through February 27th.
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