A Hike in Maple Leaf

Dear Diary,

My next hike included three Seattle Department of Parks and Recreation parks, and three other sites which I hope you'll find interesting.  This hike was on various parts of Maple Leaf Hill, the biggest and tallest straightforward hill in North Seattle.  A map:

As you can see, dear Diary, Open Street Map shows plenty of woods in this area too that I wanted to explore that day, but I was running out of time, and it'll have to wait.

Sacajawea Playground

This is the only "Playground" in North Seattle that lacks actual playground equipment, which is at the school next door.  It's basically a lawn with one big tree in the low middle, with woods on the uplands to east and west.  I've shown you pictures before, dear Diary, and there were other people there, so I settled for a couple of transverse landscapes to demonstrate that no water fountain has arrived here:

Alley at 9012 12th Ave NE

This is an 896 square foot property that I couldn't quite identify, because there are two candidates.  See, there actually is an alley on the block in question, a neat and tidy place that I'm not good enough at estimating distances to assess against the stated size.  A photo:

However, there's also a weird little messy space between the hedges of two houses along 90th, and that space is more consistent with the address given, for whatever that's worth.  Just as I think the real alley might be too big, I think this space might be too small, but it also might not be.  A picture:

Anyway, at least one of these is city property, perhaps both.

Waldo Woods

I introduced this newer park to you relatively late, dear Diary, in "The Kingdom of the Winds" last November.  It's a conservation easement, in other words, a deal with a private land-owner to protect a large stand of Douglas firs.  The owner, Aegis Living, built a fence, but made a bay in it which allows public access to both one double-trunk fir (now busily spreading saplings) and an Aegis Living sign:

Maple Leaf Reservoir Park

This is the major park of Maple Leaf Hill, and so it has restrooms and a water fountain.  I had by that point needed restrooms, though only for Number One, for several hours, so it was deeply disappointing to arrive only to find this:

However, a woman approached me after I'd taken two shots of each door - the first without the newspaper - and mentioned that a parks employee had just locked them.  She and I talked for some time about you, dear Diary, about her complaints to the city that the restrooms closed too early, about the restrooms' history with fire, about my observations of this park's defenses against the homeless, and so forth.  After all that I really didn't have time to wander around the park, so I confined my attention to the water fountain, a double one that hasn't run since I first visited the park:

And then wandered around the park anyway, because it turned out my last two sites were in it:

Maple Leaf Reservoir

The park is the biggest of three parks in north Seattle built on reservoir land, the other two being Bitter Lake Reservoir Open Space, and Froula Playground, neither of which have plumbing of their own, so I haven't visited them as often.  But I knew from previous visits to Maple Leaf that most of the Seattle Public Utilities buildings that remain are dreary-looking and closed to the public:

However, this time I was specifically looking for the reservoir, and found this, which is actually in the background of a picture I've shown you before, dear Diary:

Northeast Radio Towers

I actually left the park looking for this, but it turned out to be adjacent to the water tower.  Duh.

Maple Leaf Reservoir Park Again

I went back yesterday, Saturday, morning, assuming I'd find the restrooms open and be able to ignore the photos from Wednesday of them shut.

It didn't quite work out that way.

A photo of the front page:

The restrooms:

These photos were taken at 10:16 A.M., and the park was crowded.

I'm used to the idea that during this epidemic, homeless people should just fast all Sunday because the already unreliable park restrooms become deeply unreliable, but now Saturdays too?  I'd visited three publicly managed and six privately managed park restrooms in this region.  The private ones, all at Jackson Park, had all been open; the public ones, at Little Brook and Maple Leaf Reservoir Parks, had all been closed, on two occasions each.  Is our city government really this incompetent after all?

That said, I didn't make any decisions on the spot, and one of my errands in this park was to photograph some of its neat stuff.  A garden there is named after a child who died, and he seems to have been a butterfly fan, so there are butterflies all around the playground.  Some examples:

I particularly like the use of butterflies to lighten up one of those dour SPU buildings:

Well, dear Diary, I may have time for one more page of park appreciation tonight, but although I have now made some decisions, I probably don't have time to tell you about the change of direction after that.