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Great food, great weather, a great evening at Picnic For Parks

Great food, great weather, a great evening at Picnic For Parks

Thanks to all who joined us at Picnic For Parks this past Saturday. What a wonderful summer evening for a picnic!

We packed the picnics, you picked the parks, and our special green baskets turned up in parks all across the island. We’re grateful for all of the compliments we’ve heard from our picnickers. It was a special evening for our parks, and a memorable one.

This great fundraiser helps the Bainbridge Island Parks Foundation accomplish all the great things we have going on in Bainbridge parks: Summer Trails Crew, the soon-to-open KidsUp! Playground, stewardship at Blakely Harbor, Moritani Preserve and so many others. Thank you again.

And the great reviews are rolling in:

“We had a great night and the food was amazing! Thanks so much! Enjoyed our meal down at Fort Ward! Perfect weather!”

“Great fun!! We played games too. No one had been to this […]

Great food, great weather, a great evening at Picnic For ParksDouglas2021-07-28T10:25:46-07:00

Summer Trails Crew blazing old trails, and a few new ones

Summer Trails Crew blazing old trails, and a few new ones

Such is the breadth of the Bainbridge park system that five young adults who mostly grew up on the island, and made full use of its abundant trails as kids, could still find themselves on unfamiliar ground.

Running, mountain biking, or just walking the family dog, all trails in their youth seemed to lead elsewhere. Then, Summer Trails Crew led them to Manzanita Park.

“I’ve never been to this park, but it’s nice,” Benjamin Logan mused, raking gravel across a dusty hollow deep within the 120-acre park off Day Road West. “Grand Forest is usually a lot more busy. If you need somewhere that’s not busy, come out here. You may see horse poo, but you can walk around that.”

Logan and colleagues Erin Thackray, Megan Boulware, Jack Harbour and Will Gleason – all, improbably, new to the park – spent much of the week […]

Summer Trails Crew blazing old trails, and a few new onesDouglas2021-07-16T14:37:23-07:00

KidsUp! Playground will be a bloomin’ wonder

KidsUp! Playground will be a bloomin’ wonder

Bright color is nice, and a sweet fragrance. Drought resistance, of course. Bonus points for edibility: What kid wouldn’t want to munch a tasty blueberry after a ride on a merry-go-round?

Flowers and shrubs at the new KidsUp! will have many qualities, but all should withstand the particular rigors of the playground environment.

“They have to be hardy,” Park District horticulturist Chris Andre says, “and they have to endure a lot of trampling by kids.”

Time and the treading of small feet should pose no challenge for the KidsUp! landscaping. Andre and island gardening maven Ann Lovejoy drew from a rich palette of shrubs and herbs, to create a space of sensory delights and add some welcome shade.

Nine new trees dot the playground, including Venus dogwoods, Sugar Tyme crab apples, and vine maples. Four varieties of oregano will provide ground cover, while waves […]

KidsUp! Playground will be a bloomin’ wonderDouglas2021-06-25T10:18:46-07:00

Clearing land by cloven hoof on the Sound To Olympics Trail

Clearing land by cloven hoof on the Sound To Olympics Trail

They came spilling out of the trailer in twos and threes, tentative at first, squinting into the sudden sunlight and a little unsure of the new terrain.

Then they saw green.

Then it was a pell-mell rush toward the sprawling buffet of a vacant lot at High School Road and SR305. The salad bar was open. The goats would be first in line.

“They’re happy. They’re doing what goats are designed to do,” said Tammy Dunakin of Vashon-based Rent-A-Ruminant, as her goats set about denuding the landscape. “They’re designed to eat ‘browse’ – not feed or hay, that’s not their main thing. They love to climb, and they love new things because they’re very smart and very inquisitive.

“This kind of meets all those things that they love.”

The menu on the one-acre lot next to the Chevron station featured nuisance plants like ivy and blackberry, along with various scrub […]

Clearing land by cloven hoof on the Sound To Olympics TrailDouglas2021-05-25T19:04:02-07:00

Stewarding the sublime at Halls Hill Lookout

Stewarding the sublime at Halls Hill Lookout

The labyrinth symbol crosses cultures, time and meaning: maze, prison or trap, path of pilgrimage or spiraling journey to inner peace.

Steve Grumm hews to the latter meanings in his spiritual practice, and calls the Halls Hill Labyrinth one of the most interesting and “organic” he has ever experienced.

“It’s a place for stopping, not working, and just ‘being,’” Grumm said. “Every time I walk the labyrinth, I leave in a different place than when I came. Where does this happen? You usually have to go to sacred space like a cathedral to get this experience.”

At least for a day, the Halls Hill Lookout & Labyrinth experience was less about “being” and more about doing. Grumm was among two dozen volunteers who turned out to tend the Lookout grounds, the first-ever stewardship event since the property was donated to the Bainbridge Island Parks Foundation earlier this year.

Working […]

Stewarding the sublime at Halls Hill LookoutDouglas2021-05-21T13:12:53-07:00

Watch the wildflowers grow at Moritani Preserve

Watch the wildflowers grow at Moritani Preserve

Where the wildflowers grow, the butterflies go.

Visitors to Moritani Preserve should see plenty of both this summer, as the preserve’s first-ever pollinator garden sprouts up in the north meadow.

Volunteers from Friends of Moritani Preserve have seeded the new garden with a colorful mix of wildflowers, mostly perennials with a few annuals tossed in, from Pro Time Lawn Seed Co. of Portland, Ore. A few Black-eyed Susan (Rudbeckia fulgida) starts were added to jump-start the garden.

As the garden flowers, butterflies, bees and other pollinators are attracted to the nectar the flowers provide. In the process of feeding, they transfer pollen from flower to flower.

“Pollinators are extremely important, and one of the hidden things most people probably don’t notice is, every plant and tree and shrub has its specific pollinators to help with seed production,” Friends of Moritani Preserve chair Maryann Kirkby says. “The more diversity we can put into the preserve to […]

Watch the wildflowers grow at Moritani PreserveDouglas2021-05-11T09:34:19-07:00

Boarding soon at Battle Point: KidsUp! Ferry readies for launch

Boarding soon at Battle Point: KidsUp! Ferry readies for launch

It’s forty-seven feet long, wide enough to race a fleet of tricycles through the middle, two stories high at the funnel, with the familiar forest-green-and white livery of the real thing: a Washington State Ferry.

Scaled down perhaps, but through a child’s eyes, not by much.

“To a little kid,” Doug Slingerland says, “it’s going to feel life size.”

To the fascination of passerby – many of them, wide-eyed future “riders” – the KidsUp! Ferry Boat is almost ready for launch at Battle Point Park.

Working from a handful of schematics and drawings (and sometimes their own intuition), the Park District construction team puzzled the ferry into existence – all steel panels, railings, hatchways, ladders and decking, and the thousands of nuts and bolts and clamps that hold it all together. What in shipbuilding parlance would be the “keel” is a forest of more than three dozen steel stanchions, now cemented into place, around […]

Boarding soon at Battle Point: KidsUp! Ferry readies for launchDouglas2021-05-10T10:57:47-07:00

Earth Corps working wonders at Blakely Harbor

Earth Corps working wonders at Blakely Harbor

It’s been more than a year since the last volunteer work day in a Bainbridge Island park. The pandemic frustrated stewardship efforts, with two Earth Days, an MLK Day of Service and a dozen trail work parties lost.

One thing COVID didn’t slow: noxious weeds. Ivy, holly, blackberry and other nuisance plants kept right on crawling across the landscape.

Fortunately, we still had Earth Corps. Work crews from the Seattle-based nonprofit will soon complete their fourth full week in Bainbridge parks since November, keeping invasive plants in check even as the island’s volunteer stewards have been sidelined.

An Earth Corps team led by Ethan East has been grubbing out vines and Scotch broom along the loop trail at Blakely Harbor Park, picking up where he and another team left off last fall.

“It’s especially good coming back and seeing, ‘Wow, the work we did stuck,’” East says. “The first chunk of the sweep where we […]

Earth Corps working wonders at Blakely HarborDouglas2021-04-16T07:46:03-07:00

Building a game, and building community

Building a game, and building community

Now that would be quite a yarn for a Women’s History Month feature: the untold story of how the game of pickleball was actually invented by the ladies of Pleasant Beach.

Alas, history is quite settled on the point, and credit will forever go to three men. So it goes.

But lo these many decades later, as the game devised on Bainbridge Island in the 1960s lays claim as the world’s fastest growing sport, you’d be hard pressed to find a more welcoming, gender-inclusive space than pickleball.

Men may have invented the game, but women are building it up, and building something more besides: community.

“Because so many of us are older, we’re not about competition,” says Mary Utley, part of a regular foursome at the Founders Courts at Battle Point Park. “We’re about having fun, collaboration and being kind to each other. It’s just part of who […]

Building a game, and building communityDouglas2021-04-22T09:25:54-07:00

Kathleen Wolf and the ‘soft fascination’ of forests

Kathleen Wolf and the ‘soft fascination’ of forests

Years before strolling among beautiful trees yet staring fixedly, blankly, into a tiny electronic device wouldn’t seem all that weird – which is to say, long before the world would dearly need it – researchers at the University of Michigan coined the term “soft fascination.”

It describes nature’s subtle power to draw our attention to the delight of birdsong, the caress of wind in treetops, the idle drift of clouds overhead. Calming sounds and sensations, so quietly inviting, so different from the hypnotic screen or insistent digital chirp.

“We don’t have to intentionally focus in nature,” Kathleen Wolf says, but simply open ourselves to the wonders of the natural world and their gentle tug. “Nature brings us to it.”

Spreading the gospel of forests’ restorative properties has become the focus of Wolf’s work as a research social scientist in the University of Washington’s College of the Environment. The Rolling […]

Kathleen Wolf and the ‘soft fascination’ of forestsDouglas2021-04-16T07:29:18-07:00