Hydrology for land-use planning: The Hillside area, Anchorage, Alaska

Surficial geologic map of the Anchorage A-8 SE quadrangle, Alaska

“…Bedrock beneath the Anchorage lowland is concealed by a northwest-thickening wedge of glacial and glacioestuarine deposits (Dearborn and Barnwell, 1975;Schmoll and Barnwell, 1984;Schmoll and others, 1986). In the Hillside area where the coyer is thin, the underlying bedrock comprises Chugach terrane rocks probably similar to those that crop out in the mountains.…”

“…Although only a single line is shown on figure 1 separating the lowland and the mountains, they are separated in this map area by a transition zone about 4 km wide that straddles this line. This transition zone is known locally as the Hillside area (Dearborn and Barnwell, 1975), and in recent years it has developed rapidly into a major suburban residential area. Thick dashed lines indicate boundaries between major physiographic provinces of Wahrhaftig (1965): Kenai-Chugach Mountains, Talkeetna Mountains, and Cook Inlet-Susitna Lowlands; thin dashed lines and water bodies separate physiographic subprovinces of informal usage.…”

“…About 1 km to the southwest is Lake of the Hills, held in by a small dam constructed on what probably is a partial diversion of Little Campbell Creek. Because a previous dam failed in 1972 (Dearborn and Barnwell, 1975), only a relict pond is shown on the 1979 base map. Subsequently, the dam has been rebuilt and both the dam and the lake are shown on the geologic map.…”

“…The boundary between the Peninsular and Chugach rocks is marked by the Border Ranges fault (MacKevett and Plafker, 1974), originally named by Clark (1972) and known locally as the Knik fault (Dearborn and Barnwell, 1975;Magoon and others, 1976). The location of this fault is not known precisely; its inferred position is about 1 km northwest of and parallel to the physiographic boundary between the lowland and mountains shown on figure 1.…”

Summary appraisals of the Nation's ground-water resources; Alaska

“…Local pollution of ground water has been caused by septic tank effluent in unsewered areas of Anchorage (Dearborn and Barnwell, 1975) and at Fairbanks (G. L. Nelson, oral commun., 1976). The present problem area at Anchorage is the mountain slope environment east of the city where bedrock is mantled by only a thin, poorly permeable layer of unconsolidated glacial materials.…”