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

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

Restoring a forest at Strawberry Hill

Restoring a forest at Strawberry Hill

Trees this tall shouldn’t be this thin.

Bundled like pencils they stand, ring upon ring of bare, withered branches scaling their skinny trunks toward tiny puffs of green canopy aloft. In a Pacific Northwest defined by majestic forests of Douglas fir, the trees on the new Strawberry Hill Park addition have never quite made the grade. Now the challenge is helping the best ones move forward.

“It should not be this heavily stocked for this size of tree,” says Lydia Roush, natural resources manager for Bainbridge Metro Parks, scanning the rolling stands of troubled firs along park’s west edge. “It’s kind of a miracle more trees haven’t come down, or they’re not in even worse shape.”

The 10-acre parcel reflects the shifting uses of the island landscape, its natural and cultural history. Ancient forests were cleared for timber and, here, agriculture. Several generations of berry […]

Restoring a forest at Strawberry HillDouglas2022-11-23T11:57:39-08:00

Community Grants fund community chess board at Battle Point

Community Grants fund community chess board at Battle Point

For the record, Ben Watson doesn’t actually play chess.

But you may – or checkers, for that matter – and Watson’s Eagle Scout project sets you up for a pleasant match at Battle Point Park.

The Bainbridge High School junior installed an outdoor chess board and benches at the park this summer to complete his Scout requirements for Bainbridge Island Troop 1564. The project was supported by a $2,700 Community Grant from the Bainbridge Island Parks & Trails Foundation.

“I was thinking I really wanted something that would last,” Watson said. “I wanted something really permanent that I could come back to, way down the line.”

“Permanent” pointed to concrete, in both senses of the word, and Watson wanted something more interactive than a typical park bench. While not a chess player himself, he landed on an outdoor chess table typical of many urban […]

Community Grants fund community chess board at Battle PointDouglas2022-08-20T10:11:47-07:00

Park Stewards program looks for next-level volunteers

Park Stewards program looks for next-level volunteers

Everybody has a favorite park – that one with great features, a special memory attached, or just the one down the street.

For Pete Jones, it’s the park right next door.

A resident of the historic Victorian Lane condominiums – built around 1910, as officers quarters for a then-remote Coast Artillery Corps post at “Bean Point” – Jones has only to step outside, cross a green threshold and lose himself in the 137 acres of Fort Ward Park.

“One of the reasons we moved in was because of the park,” says Jones, who relocated to the island from California’s Carmel Valley three years ago. “I’ve been hiking in this park since day one, almost every single day.”

No surprise that Fort Ward Park is Jones’ “absolute” pick as a founding volunteer with Park Stewards, a new program of the Bainbridge Island Metro Park & […]

Park Stewards program looks for next-level volunteersDouglas2022-06-21T16:05:47-07:00

A ‘trifecta of awesomeness’ on the STO Trail

A ‘trifecta of awesomeness’ on the STO Trail

In the fullness of a 3,700-mile route, a seven-mile ribbon across a little island in Puget Sound may not seem so grand.

Then again, it’s our seven miles. So the fact that Bainbridge Island’s bit of the Sound to Olympics Trail also falls along the path of the Great American Rail-Trail – a contiguous path that will stretch from the other Washington to this one, crossing a dozen states and entirely walkable and bikeable – that’s turning into kind of a big deal.

That’s what Kevin Belanger, project manager for Washington D.C.-based Rails To Trails Conservancy found during an April visit to Bainbridge Island. Belanger came to spend an hour walking the STO’s Winslow segment with local trails fans, and was greeted by City Hall.

“I really […]

A ‘trifecta of awesomeness’ on the STO TrailDouglas2022-09-23T11:08:42-07:00