There’s a straightaway section of the Glenn Highway between Sutton and Chickaloon at Milepost 70. The old Pinnacle Restaurant was here. For the last several years it has been the home of Alaska Woodyard, owned by Jeff and Jill Thornton.
The properties across the Glenn Highway from Alaska Woodyard are backed by the Matanuska River. The river has been eating away at them for years. It took the septic tank of a resident and closed in on his house. He had to re-locate. That property was bought by the Thorntons last summer. They removed the remaining structures.
This year heavy equipment has been clearing and filling at the site. So people have been asking “What’s going on at Mile 70?”
We need to go east to Long Lake to answer this. The Alaska Department of Transportation began a “Shave and Pave” maintenance operation on the Glenn Highway at Long Lake this summer. It goes from Milepost 83 to Milepost 92. Granite Construction is performing the work. It was supposed to be a simple operation: just pull up the old asphalt and lay down new.
The crews shaved the old asphalt and milled it into material to pave the pullouts. Flaggers flagged. Traffic crawled. Crews paved.
Then it rained. And it rained. And it rained. And the new pavement started slipping off the side of the mountain.
Turns out, that section of the highway does not have a solid base. It was built on dirt according to one crew member. They needed to dig deep and make that base. Crews are now digging three-feet, four-feet, even five-feet down to pull out the dirt and rock and replace it with gravel. The question became – where to put all that material?
That’s where Milepost 70 comes in. It was the perfect place to put the old dirt and rock. Trucks make a nice efficient loop. They haul old material away from Long Lake, unload it at Mile 70 on the vacant property beside the river then continue to a gravel pit at Mile 66. The trucks load up on gravel and loop back up to Long Lake.
But why re-pave by Long Lake at all? That section of highway has been slated to be moved to the south side of Long Lake since 1993 to “enhance safety, provide climbing lanes and mitigate rock fall”.
Rockfall is a big deal. In 2018, a Federal Highway Administration (FHA) document described rocks as “fist to basketball sized, but often three-foot to ten-foot blocks of rock that impact the travel way”.
Residents can attest to that. One Glacier View resident recalls an incident when a boulder “as big as a refrigerator” barreled in front of him and continued on, clearing a path of trees before sinking into the lake.
The Glacier View Community Council has a Resolution in support of moving the highway to the other side of Long Lake. The construction crew reports daily rockfall at the construction site. They are digging a deep trench along the mountain side of the highway to catch the rocks.
So is the project to move the Glenn Highway to the other side of Long Lake dead? Not according to state and federal highway documents.
The FHA list of projects for 2025-2029 includes nearly a quarter million dollars for survey and design work. According to Steve Morrow of the FHA, the state has taken over the planning and design phase. The state budget for Fiscal Year 2026 included over three million dollars in funding for studies.
The re-pavement is expected to be complete by September 1. For now, residents and travelers can expect delays of up to 45 minutes on their trips to and from Glacier View. For the foreseeable future, travelers have to deal with rockfall. And as for the land at Milepost 70 – there are no plans to develop that property.
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Kendra Zamzow reported this Page Two article and yours truly, Lee Henrikson produced it. If you have an idea for a Page 2 topic, please email us at page2@radiofreepalmer.org.
That’s it for today and the news on Page Two on Tuesday July 21, 2026.
Image: Fill on the property at Milepost 70. Image credit: Kendra Zamzow.