The Ballard Seacoast: Parks Not Parks', part I

Dear Diary,

Yesterday morning I woke up with a bunch of dishes to wash, so it was clearly time to go back to Laurelhurst Community Center's hot water taps.  Since the Playfield's water fountains still aren't on, I then had to hike to Burke-Gilman Playground Park for drinking water.  Now, I've made this trip before, but I'm not actually all that observant, so this was the first time I noticed a park on 47th Ave NE.  It's called SUN Park, and it may be owned by Forterra, which was Cascade Land Conservancy before discovering the joys of hiring consultants.  A couple of photos:

There are actually lots of parks and park-like places around town that have nothing to do with the City of Seattle's Department of Parks and Recreation.  Just for starters, many of the public elementary schools open their playgrounds' doors to the public on a schedule.

My choice to focus on Seattle's official parks has been justified by one thing I've yet to see any other kind of park do:  offer running water in toilet, sink, or water fountain.  That is, of course, why I started writing you in the first place, dear Diary.  But that doesn't mean I have to ignore all the other things parks do.  One of which is, offer beaches.

I came to Seattle the day I turned 39, and even before then wasn't much of a beachgoer.  So although I knew of, and had even been to, Magnuson, Gas Works and Green Lake Parks before moving north in 2014, I hadn't much clue about Golden Gardens or Carkeek Parks before this spring.

But these are two of only four Seattle Parks' parks on the Ballard seacoast.  There are eight other places that offer public access to the coast, for some value of "offer", as far as I know.  One of them even offers restrooms and water fountains, just not in its park-like areas.  It would be asinine to leave them all out.

So the page's title isn't really a paradox.  Many of the parks here aren't Parks'.  That's all.

When I left Sunset Hill Park, around 4 P.M. on June 23, my next destination was Eddie Vine Boat Ramp.  The map quickly showed that the only sane way to get there was to go all the way back south to the Ballard Locks, whose east gate I'd taken in the day before:

and choose the road not taken, which has dozens of names, but which for simplicity I'll here call Seaview.

So to start with,

The Ballard Locks

er, that is, I mean,

(United States Army Corps of Engineers) The Hiram M. Chittenden Locks and Carl S. English Botanical Gardens

Google Maps says the gardens actually pretty much dwarf the locks for sheer area, but there's at least a sense in which the locks represent the end of the canal and the beginning of the sea.  However, as is the case for Woodland Park's Zoo and Rose Garden, both are coronavirally closed.  Speaking of dwarfing, what I could see of the gardens from the outside consisted largely of extremely tall, straight conifers with reddish bark:

Anyway, from the west gate begins a gravel track that I explored on the 23rd.  All the parks I found can easily be reached from the adjacent Burke-Gilman Trail, but are more easily found from the gravel track that actually links them.  The first actually precedes the gravel.

(Seattle Public Utilities) Salmon Bay Natural Area

This presents itself as pretty much a viewing area with some benches.  The first time I went, I met a homeless couple, the man white, the woman looking Native American.  He told me it was tribal territory, a former burial ground.  I couldn't find it in the city's real estate report, so I suspect he was right, but anyway the signage is Seattle Public Utilities'.  There's a Native-looking statue, sculptor Marvin Oliver:

I think this photo of a view that I shot yesterday must be from this spot:

At the next interruption in the fence south of the Burke-Gilman Trail, if you look back east you'll glimpse

(?) Seaview Picnic Park

This is a very poorly documented place which would've been called "NW Market Street End" if it had been named consistently with its northern neighbours.  It's got a "Public Shore" sign, but whichever agency owns it doesn't seem eager for credit.  To fit its name, yesterday I photographed its view and its picnic tables:

(Dear Diary, we've been seeing things lost from the delay in writing in you about this trip - if nothing else, I've forgotten most of the excruciating hills - but this page and its sequel are solid gains, incorporating photos and explorations on the 22nd, the 23rd, the 24th, the 26th, and the 29th.)

The next interruption in the southern fence has something of interest besides a park; it has another disabled Burke-Gilman Trail street water fountain:

but of course it does also have a park:

(?Seattle Public Utilities) NW 57th Street End

This is the first of these actually providing access to the water, so it's less about the views.

I vaguely remember people fishing there on the 23rd.  Notice that gritty black and white sand; there's more of that ahead.

NW 60th St Viewpoint

I hadn't been quite sure the wonderful viewpoint at the end of 60th St was really the park so named because I hadn't found its sign.  So you can imagine how I felt when I rounded a corner and saw this:

right where it was supposed to be on Seaview Ave.  It has benches, unlike the viewpoint above it; that late afternoon, those were occupied.  Here's a view of Magnolia, not from a bench:

(Private) Point Shilshole Beach

Google Maps was my guide in this middle part of the trip, and it said there was a beach and put-in roughly level with 64th St above the bluff.  You reach it either by walking a narrow public access path or by cutting through the parking lot of a long-suffering neighbour.  Rules are posted:

but I still don't have a clue how it makes its owners any money.  I didn't explore much (and so can't assess Google Maps's curious claim that part of this beach is public), because it was crowded and because I was totally unprepared for this:

I'd seen no sand at NE 130th Street End and only a silly fringe of it at Matthews Beach, and had started to think Seattleites objected to sand.  Guess not.  Marvelling, I continued north to

(Port of Seattle) Shilshole Bay Marina

and marvelled again when on the place's front door I saw a sign:

There are probably more "No Public Restrooms" signs in the U-District than hours signs; it was a shock to see the opposite.  The building's hours make the advertised restrooms uncompetitive except for people who get caught short on the long hike up Seaview.

Much of the length of that hike consists of the marina itself, which runs from about the equivalent of 68th St right up to the next park at not-80th.  As seen from Seaview, most of that space is parking for cars, but I expect the surface lots are so big largely to match the water room needed.

Anyhow, the park-like elements are in a much smaller area around not-74th.  They include, besides the welcoming building (the main office), an area with benches behind the building, a garden south of them, and furthest south, a statue of Leif Erikson:

However, a sign at the garden says it's temporary, just until a new restaurant occupies the spot, at which point the benches will presumably become its outdoor seating.

Continuing north we finally reach

Eddie Vine Boat Ramp

The parks department may choose to treat this as a separate park from its much larger northern neighbour, but it sure doesn't post anything on the ground to warn when going from the 24-hour ramp to the currently much shorter hours next door.  Now, even if I hadn't heard about it, I figure Golden Gardens Park is one of the famous parks I won't photograph - at least, it currently closes at 8 P.M. - so it's a good thing the rom-com-ready pier from which I photographed these views is next to, and I claim part of, the boat ramp.

The first is of the beach, and I suppose it's my first in you, dear Diary, to include people by intent, but I don't think anyone's identifiable.  In the second, I figured I'd shot the Olympic Mountains enough times, so I tried to get the Olympic Peninsula north of the mountains.

Let me leave you there for a time, dear Diary, with me looking at Golden Gardens Park but refusing to admit I'd already entered it.  Both my visits to that park, the night of the 23rd and, um, various daylit times on the 24th, I made sober and sensible decisions that should be recorded for the instruction of younger generations, and I need to think about the most serious way to do so.  I hope to write not only that page, but the following one that belongs to today, before night, but we'll just have to see.