October 1, 2026
Introduction
Beneath the Anchorage Hillside, water moves in ways we’re only beginning to understand. Everyone living in the band of land between the Chugach Mountains and Cook Inlet shares the same underground water system — the aquifers our wells draw from, and the near-surface flows that show up as wet basements, failing septic fields, and shifting ground. This site is where Hillside residents can join in an effort lead by the HALO Hillside and Land Owners organization to learn about that water system, share what we’re each seeing on our own properties, and help build the kind of shared, ground-truthed picture needed to guide smarter development and water policy in the years ahead.
NEW – DRAFT Survey Contents – Please open and add comments or send feedback to Ky.
To Be Added – HALO Working Group Contact names and how to join the group or attend a future meeting.
If you’d like to be contacted about a future meeting or share information, please contact Rep. Ky Holland at 907 727 2735 or rep.ky.holland@akleg.gov
Background
Much of what’s known about our water resources traces back to a 1975 U.S. Geological Survey study, done in cooperation with the Alaska Division of Geological & Geophysical Surveys, that mapped the geology and hydrology of this same stretch of hillside (full report).
That study found an area built from the debris of the last ice age: thick layers of glacial till, sand, and gravel left behind roughly 20,000 years ago, when an ice sheet flowing south through the Cook Inlet basin met a second lobe flowing west through Turnagain Arm near what’s now Huffman Road. Even then, researchers warned that the Hillside’s low-permeability soils, shallow groundwater, and steep slopes could make water supply, drainage, and septic systems hard to manage as the area filled in — and that was when the Hillside held a small fraction of today’s homes. Fifty years and thousands of new wells, driveways, and buried utility lines later, many of us are seeing firsthand what that early study anticipated: seasonal flooding, hillside movement, and well or septic problems that don’t map neatly onto the streams and drainages we can see on the surface. This fall and winter, the Hillside task force is launching a community effort to build on that original work — gathering our own observations and data, learning together about how water moves through the moraines, buried drainage channels, and outwash deposits beneath our homes, and using what we find to move toward a better-informed municipal strategy for understanding our aquifers, near-surface flows, and the hillside’s future development.