Feature Archives | Page 2 of 6 | Bainbridge Island Parks & Trails Foundation

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

Goats munch their way through the weeds at Blakely Harbor

Goats munch their way through the weeds at Blakely Harbor

What’s the cutest way to get rid of some really baaaaaaaaaad weeds? Goats!

Goats visited Blakely Harbor Park this past week, charming islanders while clearing invasive blackberry, ivy and more. Thanks to a grant from the Bainbridge Island Parks & Trails Foundation, Tammy Dunakin and her nearly 100 goats helped in the continued restoration of Blakely Harbor Park, once the site of the largest mill in the world.

Blakely Harbor Park is no stranger to goats. In 2018, a large herd visited to clear blackberry and other invasive weeds from areas of the park that are now replanted with thriving native vegetation. However, the work isn’t done yet. Thanks to Bainbridge Island Parks & Trails Foundation funding, the goats were able to return, working through a dense patch of over an acre of blackberry and ivy off Country Club Road.

Once above-ground vegetation is cleared, the Park District’s Student Conservation Corps, volunteers, and contractors, […]

Goats munch their way through the weeds at Blakely HarborDouglas2023-04-20T13:54:41-07:00

Moritani Preserve a model for conservation, restoration

Moritani Preserve a model for conservation, restoration

For a forester, a walk in the woods is never just that.

When she first stepped into Moritani Preserve, Malloree Weinheimer – atypical of her profession, perhaps, with a background in art history – could see the cascading layers of meaning that overlay the land: ancestral home to the island’s indigenous peoples; the vestiges of commercial berry production, when Japanese and Filipino farmers cleared the property and worked the soil; to over-dense stands of Douglas firs planted 50 or 60 years ago, presciently, to buffer against creeping suburbia.

And the poor health today of those same trees: hundreds of “lollipops” with skinny trunks, withered branches and mere tufts of green at the top. The trees may look pretty to the untrained eye, but the picture of forest vitality, Moritani Preserve is not. Yet.

“It’s overstocked and looks like a (tree) plantation on the north part,” […]

Moritani Preserve a model for conservation, restorationDouglas2023-03-08T18:10:44-08:00

Community Grant funds ‘pug mill’ for Eagledale Pottery Studio

Community Grant funds ‘pug mill’ for Eagledale Pottery Studio

Humans have been using clay for some time now – 16,000 years at last count, give or take an epoch – to craft everything from water jugs to funerary vessels, bricks to busts, tablets to trinkets.

Malleable when wet but reliably ridgid when fired or dried, it’s no stretch to think of clay as a wonder material upon which a good chunk of civilization itself has been built.

Turns out clay was way out in front of the recycling curve, too. Here, a dash of modernity helps.

“What’s neat about clay is that none of it has to be wasted, and you can keep using it over and over,” says Debbie Fecher-Gramstad, sculpture instructor at Eagledale Pottery Studio. “But the process of making used clay usable again, that has been hard and slow.”

Until now. “Peter Pugger,” the studio’s new pug mill – essentially […]

Community Grant funds ‘pug mill’ for Eagledale Pottery StudioDouglas2023-02-02T10:31:34-08:00

New Kubota will speed park trail building

New Kubota will speed park trail building

Here’s a gift with a bow for trail users – a new Kubota mini-excavator for trail building and maintenance.

The equipment purchase by Bainbridge Metro Parks was supported by a $25,000 grant from the Bainbridge Island Parks & Trails Foundation.

The mini-excavator is the second piece of trail-building machinery funded by the Parks & Trails Foundation for the Park District.

A 2018 grant supported purchase of a PierTech “anchor-auger” system, used to safely sink steel pilings for boardwalk construction in environmentally sensitive areas. The PierTech system has been used to build boardwalks at Sakai Park and Hawley Cove Park, and a small footbridge on the Old Mill Trail near IslandWood.

“Trail building can be pretty labor intensive, requiring whole crews of summer park staff and volunteers,” says Mary Meier, Parks & Trails Foundation executive director. “Supporting the Park District with new equipment like this […]

New Kubota will speed park trail buildingDouglas2022-12-15T14:50:15-08:00

Designing a bike park for every rider at Strawberry Hill

Designing a bike park for every rider at Strawberry Hill

Matt Blossom grew up on a simpler island, in a simpler time.

It was the 1980s, and on Bainbridge Island the people were fewer, the houses farther apart, the property lines less distinct. Blossom could ride his Yamaha dirt bike from his parents’ house in Eagledale to Walt’s Market in Lynwood Center, or wherever else, and nobody really seemed to mind.

“Bainbridge was a great place to grow up,” says Blossom, a fifth generation islander on both sides. “As a kid you feel isolated, but once you leave and come back, you realize what a special community it is.”

Knowing island back roads and byways as well as anyone and better than most, even Blossom was surprised when, last year, he first set foot on the former Hayashida property northwest of Strawberry Hill Park.

The historic strawberry farm was now a rolling hillside of […]

Designing a bike park for every rider at Strawberry HillDouglas2023-02-17T16:36:10-08:00

‘An emotional departure’ at the Exclusion Memorial

‘An emotional departure’ at the Exclusion Memorial

Where the Departure Deck ends, wartime exile began.

New interpretive artwork at the Bainbridge Island Japanese American Exclusion Memorial at Pritchard Park recalls the day in March 30, 1942, when 227 Bainbridge Islanders of Japanese descent, most American citizens, departed from this site for wartime exile. Their destination: concentration camps in Manzanar, Calif.

The works, by artists Anna Brones and Luc Revel, were inspired by photographic images taken on the exclusion day. An imposing mid-span gate is by Port Townsend craftsman John Buday of Port Townsend.

Oxidized steel figures depict the men, women and children carrying their scant belongings down the deck to a waiting ferry. Towering soldiers with bayonets in reverse-silhouette loom over the approach, while a pivoting steel plank underfoot evokes the clang of bars, of incarceration. Near the end of the deck, a lone “ghost figure” defined by negative space suggests absence […]

‘An emotional departure’ at the Exclusion MemorialDouglas2024-02-21T15:14:30-08:00