Environment Archives | Bainbridge Island Parks & Trails Foundation

It’s Earth Month! Get involved with great activities

It’s Earth Month! Get involved with great activities

April is Earth Month on Bainbridge Island, and we’re proud to partner with Sustainable Bainbridge, Bainbridge Metro Parks and other great

See the full list of activities here, or find great ways to celebrate Earth Month below:

Earth care book displays, April 1-30, at the Bainbridge Public Library and Eagle Harbor Books – Learn more about individual and systemic actions that are restorative to a healthy planet by perusing and perhaps borrowing or buying books from the displays at the library and bookstore.

Prevent Food Waste display, April 1-15, Bainbridge Public Library – Food tossed in the trash is one of the biggest causes of methane emissions from landfills. Check out the lobby display case created by Kitsap Solid Waste for tips on making food last and using it up before it goes bad.

Attract Predatory Insects to Protect Your Garden, Tuesday, April 2, 6:30-8 pm on Zoom – Meet the many insects that protect […]

It’s Earth Month! Get involved with great activitiesDouglas2024-04-01T14:01:52-07:00

Join us for Superpowers of Our Parks & Trails

Join us for Superpowers of Our Parks & Trails

Dr. Howard Frumkin shares the “Superpowers of Our Parks and Trails” April 25, for youth, family health and wellness

Our parks and trails deliver an astonishing range of physical and mental health benefits – and the science behind this nature-health connection has blossomed in recent years.

Join us as Dr. Howard Frumkin presents “Superpowers of Our Parks and Trails,” a dynamic presentation for families and parents at 7 p.m. April 25 at the Bainbridge High School Theater. The event is co-sponsored by the Bainbridge Island Parks & Trails Foundation and Bainbridge Youth Services.

Learn about the link between parks and positive health outcomes for those who use and enjoy them regularly. Sample the latest research, consider what this means for family lifestyle choices and broader policies, and explore ideas to integrate parks and trails time into our busy lives.

The event is free, but […]

Join us for Superpowers of Our Parks & TrailsDouglas2024-04-01T16:47:32-07:00

Day of Remembrance was one to remember

Day of Remembrance was one to remember

The Day of Remembrance was one to remember.

The annual stewardship event brought more than 100 volunteers from the island, Seattle and beyond to tidy up the grounds of the Bainbridge Island Japanese American Exclusion Memorial at Pritchard Park. It marked the 82-year anniversary of federal Executive Order 9066, which on Feb. 19, 1942, authorized the wartime incarceration of citizens of Japanese ancestry.

The stewardship event – a prelude to the March 30 Exclusion Day observance – was hosted by the Bainbridge Island Japanese American Exclusion Memorial Association, and co-sponsored by the Bainbridge Island Parks & Trails Foundation and Bainbridge Island Metro Park & Recreation District.

Ellen Sato Faust, BIJAEMA executive director, thanked all for their participation.

“Young and old, rain or shine, volunteers play a crucial role in furthering our mission and ensuring that the stories and experience of those affected by the […]

Day of Remembrance was one to rememberDouglas2024-02-23T08:39:47-08:00

Rain can’t stop rowers in Waterfront Park stewardship

Rain can’t stop rowers in Waterfront Park stewardship

Rain means nothing to rowers. They are, they’re glad to remind you, out on the water five days a week, come what may from the skies above.

“The only time practice would be canceled is if there’s whitecaps or really extreme weather,” says Hayley Ransom, a junior in her third year with Bainbridge Island Rowing.

Adds junior Bennett Hay: “But then we’d just go inside (the boathouse) and work out. We’re out here no matter what.”

No surprise then that a contingent some 60 strong turned out for the club’s latest ParksCorps volunteer stewardship event at Waterfront Park – under soggy winter skies, and on Super Bowl Sunday at that. Not to row, but to steward the park.

Site of the new Stan Pocock Rowing Center, Waterfront Park is home ground for the rowers. The club has adopted the park environs in turn, and the […]

Rain can’t stop rowers in Waterfront Park stewardshipDouglas2024-02-23T09:49:59-08:00

Give to Moritani Preserve, in the heart of our community

Give to Moritani Preserve, in the heart of our community

To say it’s been an exciting 12 months at Moritani would be an understatement. Thanks to your help, the Preserve In the Heart of Winslow has received so much extraordinary care and – it’s Valentine’s Day, so yes, we’ll say it – love!

Your support through the Parks & Trails Foundation funded intensive, weeklong work sessions by EarthCorps and Student Conservation Corps, who concentrated on restoring the park’s east boundary. These teams worked with Bainbridge Metro Parks to revive an area that not long ago was overrun by vines and invasives, but this spring will be newly abloom. Visit the park and see!

Some 350 volunteers of all ages turned out through the year, offering 400-plus person-hours of spirited work at the Preserve. Volunteers planted 90 hardy native shrubs and trees (funded with your support), established new “habitat piles” of fallen sticks for the forest’s littlest critters, and spread many, many yards […]

Give to Moritani Preserve, in the heart of our communityDouglas2024-02-14T10:59:00-08:00

Forest thinning underway at Strawberry Hill

Forest thinning underway at Strawberry Hill

Even a skinny tree makes quite a WHUMP when it hits the ground.

As we are there to hear it, an age-old philosophical question remains unsettled. In any case there are the echoes, reverberating through the misty morning and across the island to herald that forest thinning at Strawberry Hill Park has, in fact, begun.

WHUMP.

“It’s a shocking sound for such a small tree, isn’t it?,” reflects Lydia Roush, Parks Superintendent for Bainbridge Metro Parks. “But they’re so dense, and Douglas fir is heavy.”

It’s a first-of-its-kind project on the island: restoring an overdense, profoundly unhealthy forest through aggressive thinning and strategic replanting, while at the same time carving out chute-like paths for the new bike trails that soon will criss-cross down the hillside.

About 40 percent of the trees are coming out. In the shadow of those […]

Forest thinning underway at Strawberry HillDouglas2024-03-05T07:51:43-08:00

Thanks for an inspiring MLK event Blakely Harbor

Thanks for an inspiring MLK event Blakely Harbor

Tremendous thanks to all who made MLK Day of Service at Blakely Harbor Park a grand success!

Much mulch was spread, many nasty weeds tugged out of the frozen ground as together we made it a wholesome and spirited Day On, not a Day Off for volunteer service and park stewardship.

Who turned out? Tim Burke and son Beckham:

“We live up the street and use this park all the time, so we wanted to give a little bit of our time to help out the park that we frequent,” Tim Burke said. “Our family runs here, we play on the beach, we swim in the water. It’s a special place.”

And Liz Springer:

“It’s one of my New Year’s resolutions, to volunteer in parks more, because I use the trails,” she said. “And I really hate invasives. I have them in my […]

Thanks for an inspiring MLK event Blakely HarborDouglas2024-01-25T16:59:58-08:00

Sign up for Winter Work Parties

Sign up for Winter Work Parties

There’s a full slate of winter work parties in Bainbridge Island parks and trails ahead. Sign up today!

Conservation Work Party

Where: Blakley Harbor Park, NE Country Club Road

When: Saturday, Feb. 10 and March 9 (2nd Saturdays), 10:00a-12:00p

What: Join the Park District, IslandWood, and the Bainbridge Island Parks & Trails Foundation every second Saturday this winter in the ongoing restoration of Blakley Harbor Park! Thousands of volunteer hours have already been logged, helping transform the site of the former largest mill in the world. Volunteers will help remove invasive species, spread mulch to discourage regrowth, and plant native species where invasives have been controlled.

Well suited for children ages six and up who are comfortable using small hand tools and walking off trail on uneven surfaces.

REGISTER HERE

Trails Work Party

Where: Fort Ward Park (Upper Parking Lot), Fort Ward Hill Road

When: Saturday, Jan. 20, Feb. 17, March 16 (3rd Saturdays), 10:00a-12:00p

What: Join the […]

Sign up for Winter Work PartiesDouglas2024-02-07T10:57:50-08:00

Hyla, Madrona students do great work for parks

Hyla, Madrona students do great work for parks

Here’s a great note to close out the year: great kids doing great work in great parks.

Students from Hyla School turned out in numbers in November and December, for stewardship projects at Moritani Preserve and Halls Hill Lookout & Labyrinth.

At Moritani, kids from both Hyla School and Winslow’s Madrona School – together about 70 strong, counting teachers and a few helpful neighbors – stepped in to round up storm debris and install more than 100 new plants, after high winds scrubbed a community work party the weekend prior.

Yarrow, ocean spray, spirea, tall Oregon grape, red elderberry, vine maple and Pacific wax myrtle and other Northwest natives went in along the preserve’s east boundary, the focus of intense restoration work for the past year or more.

The work identifying and installing native plants aligned with the Hyla life science curriculum and the students’ recent studies, teacher Shelby Mann said.

Madrona School too, while […]

Hyla, Madrona students do great work for parksDouglas2024-02-07T10:55:42-08:00

Ferry walkways to be reused on Puget Sound to Pacific

Ferry walkways to be reused on Puget Sound to Pacific

An elevated walkway being removed from the Colman Dock ferry terminal starting this weekend is bound for re-use on the Puget Sound to Pacific trail corridor – a combination of the Olympic Discovery Trail and Sound to Olympics Trail in Kitsap, Jefferson and Clallam counties.

The temporary walkway comes down as a new, permanent pedestrian bridge has opened from the Washington State Ferries terminal to First Avenue at Marion Street.

Five of the eight segments from the old span, totaling over 350 feet, are being donated to Clallam County and facilitated by the Puget Sound to Pacific Collaborative. The bridge segments will be trucked away early Saturday morning and stored near Port Angeles.

The walkway segments will eventually be re-used as multi-use bridges along the Puget Sound to Pacific corridor, a planned 200-mile multi-use trail system from the ferry terminals on Puget Sound to the Pacific Ocean at LaPush.

The donation was initiated by […]

Ferry walkways to be reused on Puget Sound to PacificDouglas2023-11-06T09:51:57-08:00