Feature Archives | Bainbridge Island Parks & Trails Foundation

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

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

Find winter peace in parks and trails

Find winter peace in parks and trails

We are in the approach of the shortest day of the year, Dec. 20. The winter months can feel like a long dark tunnel through which we must pass endless hours in low light and shortened days. The moistness of the air is heavy, and the mists cling and linger in the fir and cedar branches shooting skyward.

The cloud layer is soddened and gray, and the distant memory of summer flowers feel at their very farthest. It is time to harvest the gifts hidden among the shadows in the woods and within our beautiful parks and beaches.

Drip-drip-drip go the rain droplets falling from wet branches as the breeze loosens them and they fall to the ground. The thirsty soil drinks them up and laughs a cheerful splash back to the ear. Mushrooms, rotted wood dissolving in the rains, laden covered branches with gray furry lichen, fallen leaves, evergreen huckleberry, salal, […]

Find winter peace in parks and trailsDouglas2024-01-25T16:17:10-08:00

Amanda Nathan: Remembering parks in your will

Amanda Nathan: Remembering parks in your will

Amanda Nathan

Learn more about remembering the Bainbridge Island Parks & Trails Foundation in your will: LEARN MORE

Conversation with Amanda Nathan, Estate Planning Attorney

Amanda Nathan is a Bainbridge Island parent and a partner at the law firm Gordon Thomas Honeywell LLP, where her practice focuses on estate planning, probate, and trust administration. Born and raised in Tacoma, she moved to a home near Moritani Preserve in 2020 after living abroad in Belfast, Northern Ireland.

Since then, Amanda has leaned into her volunteer work with local parks and trails, recently as the chair of our Friends of Moritani Preserve Committee, as well as a co-founder of the Saturday morning Fort Ward parkrun.

Amanda sat down to talk with Bainbridge Island Parks & Trails Foundation staff about her perspective on charitable gifting as a component of estate planning, as well as her passion for parks, […]

Amanda Nathan: Remembering parks in your willDouglas2023-10-26T14:41:22-07:00

A new shelter from a classic age at Pritchard Park

A new shelter from a classic age at Pritchard Park

The golden age of design in American parks was, ironically, the Depression.

The Civilian Conservation Corps, a new federal relief program meant to put America back to work, sent 3 million displaced laborers out across the continent to restore and enhance the nation’s public lands. Some were craftsmen, recent immigrants who brought Old World skills and perspectives to the task.

Among the greatest beneficiaries: national parks, where the CCC built countless lodges, cabins, shelters, bridges, stone gateways and walls, dams, sheds, trailhead markers – proud, iconic structures, still admired and enjoyed by visitors today.

Bainbridge Island has a new park feature inspired and informed by the CCC era: a rock-and-timber bench shelter at Pritchard Park. Nestled into the bluff overlooking the mouth of Eagle Harbor and west toward the Seattle skyline – its view, eagle-eye straight to the Space Needle – the rustic shelter is crafted from local materials and wholly at one […]

A new shelter from a classic age at Pritchard ParkDouglas2023-12-14T08:40:31-08:00

Stop weeds – brush those boots before you hike

Stop weeds – brush those boots before you hike

Brush your boots before you hike? It’s good policy, and good trail hygiene, catching the spread of invasive weeds and seeds before they’re tromped all over trails and parks.

To that end, you’ll find new boot-brush stations at two island trailheads: Gazzam Lake Preserve (Deerpath Lane) and Blakely Harbor Park (3-T Road). Two more are on the way, at Grand Forest West (Miller Road) and another at Gazzam Lake (Marshall Road trailhead, this one an Eagle Scout project and also funded by a Parks & Trails Foundation grant).

“They’re exactly like what people might on their front porch to scrape mud off their boots before they head inside,” says Morgan Houk, volunteer program manager for Bainbridge Metro Parks. “They can be used coming in and out of trail systems to catch invasive weeds – especially in the wintertime, when we tend to […]

Stop weeds – brush those boots before you hikeDouglas2023-08-25T09:19:44-07:00

Charles Schmid was at home on the Waterfront Trail

Charles Schmid was at home on the Waterfront Trail

He was a product of suburban Long Island, N.Y., who found deep connection with the environment as a Northwest rower and mountaineer. An engineer for a defense contractor, who organized anti-nuke meetings during his lunch hour. A patient, owlish presence at public meetings for decades, who was never shy about keeping the City’s feet to the fire on environmental regulation.

When the Charles Schmid Waterfront Trail is formally dedicated on July 7, you could make a good case that it’s as much for Schmid’s years as the avatar of environmentalism islandwide as for his work on the trail itself.

“I think just seeing the natural beauty, the spectacular mountains around here, was a big philosophical influence on his caring for the planet,” says his daughter, Jenny Schmid. “He was so passionate about mountain climbing, and he approached that the same way he approached the Waterfront Trail – slow and steady wins the […]

Charles Schmid was at home on the Waterfront TrailDouglas2023-08-30T16:06:44-07:00

Lost Valley Trail takes a long stride forward

Lost Valley Trail takes a long stride forward

Twenty-plus years in the planning, the Lost Valley Trail is going to be on the map.

The Bainbridge Island City Council has unanimously OK’d the Lost Valley Trail project, a partnership between the City, the Bainbridge Island Parks & Trails Foundation and Bainbridge Metro Parks.

When completed, the mile-long trail will connect the Head of the Bay area with Fletcher Bay Road, through the Cooper Creek Watershed and woodland. It’s the approximate midpoint of the long-planned Cross-Island Trail route from Winslow to Gazzam Lake and Crystal Springs.

“There’s two decades of stories behind this, and we should celebrate as a community and as the City of Bainbridge Island,” said Andy Maron, Parks & Trails Foundation board member, who has worked on the project since inception. “Things get done – they take a while – but things get done when lots of organizations and people and governments work together.”

The project dates to the 1990s, […]

Lost Valley Trail takes a long stride forwardDouglas2023-06-23T11:38:07-07:00

The heart and soul of Bainbridge Island parks

The heart and soul of Bainbridge Island parks

Perry Barrett and Bainbridge Island found each other at just the right moment.

It was 1994, and islanders were not too long removed from saving the first 240 acres of the Grand Forest from development, and were turning their eyes toward Gazzam Lake. Preservation was in the air. Barrett, meanwhile, joined the Bainbridge Island Park and Recreation District (the “Metro” would come later) as a planner with a background in open space and trails.

It was a timely match.

“The community had this shared vision that ‘if you don’t buy it now, it’ll go away as an opportunity,’” Barrett recalls. “That was very much true, and even more true today than even the most far-sighted people could see.”

Over the next 29 years, Barrett would play a quiet but essential role in expanding a modest park system into the treasure that islanders know and enjoy today.

Working from a hopelessly cluttered nook in the Park […]

The heart and soul of Bainbridge Island parksDouglas2023-04-20T13:35:56-07:00