A Hike in Victory - and Defeat

Dear Diary,

I'm sorry, this isn't 8 A.M., is it?  That's kind of the point of one of the pages I now probably won't have time to write today.  So let me instead get on with the pages about the city properties of the third region I've hiked in May.  This page covers sites - actually, this time they're all Seattle Department of Parks and Recreation parks - between Roosevelt Way NE and Lake City Way NE from about NE Northgate Way to about NE 95th St.

A map:

Victory Creek Park

One of my goals for this set of hikes was to "do justice" to the Natural Areas, meaning explore them enough to a) take some good photos and b) explain them reasonably well to your readers, dear Diary.  This page is essentially about how I started to give that goal up, and the start of that start was in Victory Creek Park.

See, I'd forgotten something about that park, which is that every other square foot of it spawns trails.  Walking in that park is a weird combination of running into dead ends, and running into choices of something like a dozen ways to go.  I think Escher is the only person who could ever have mapped it.

Basically, this park is built around the titular creek.  It has trails on each side of the creek.  There are a number of entrances to the park, and when I said in introducing it in "South to and from Northgate" that I'd only found entrances from a QFC parking lot, I was really saying I'd been lazy.  One entrance is beside this bench on Northgate Way:

which is not the bench I photographed in the previously mentioned page as the (I claimed) only bench.  Argh.  Anyway, I took a couple of landscape shots and gave up this time too:

Victory Heights Playground

At least if I couldn't do justice to a small natural area, I could do justice to a small playground.  Its water fountains weren't running, again:

But even before that, I took pictures of this park's tourist attraction, which is playground equipment with translucent panes attached at the top, so that on sunny days there are coloured shadows all over the place.  There are actually two areas of playground with such equipment, but I only took pictures of one:

Finally, I took a couple of landscapes:

I should mention that those water fountains are attached to a school building, which is occupied by a non-public school, though not quite a business:  the Victory Heights Co-Op Preschool.  So if one goes as a tourist, one should be considerate of timing.  I also don't actually know that the parks department owns those water fountains (or the building they're attached to), although its web page for this park lists the water fountains as an amenity.

I then went to one part of 

Kingfisher Natural Area

I wouldn't know a kingfisher by sight, but there's at least one thing kingly about this park:  It's much the largest Natural Area in North Seattle, fifteen acres.  I had that information with me at the time, but didn't look it up; I just looked at the map on Open Street Map, looked at the time - almost 4:30 P.M. - and shook my head.  In "South to and from Northgate" I wrote that at the park's address as given (to this day) by Google, at 17th Ave NE and NE 104th St (these are actually the same street, which turns there), "there's a very obvious trail that runs quite straight down to the creek".  But I didn't go to that address this time, but to the place where NE 105th St dead ends despite having already crossed the creek (the upper dot on the map above).  There, the obvious trail only goes partway to the creek, is steeply downhill, and is not especially straight.  I explored quite a bit from there, led on by Open Street Map's appearing to claim that I could cross 15th Ave NE (present as a bridge overhead) on a trail.  I found a place where someone had abandoned a bunch of books, some of which I might have wanted to read but now sadly water-damaged, and one DVD, which I took.  I also took this photo along the way, I think:

I didn't, of course, find a way across 15th (and the South Fork of Thornton Creek), but did find a way to clamber up to 15th, which was good enough for my purposes, because I'd skipped several places along the way.  I didn't actually find any of those places, but took a photo where I thought one might be:

Victory Creek Confluence Natural Area

This is a quarter-acre park which is apparently, according to Thornton Creek watershed maps (such as the one online or the one in the park called Thornton Creek Water Quality Channel), south of the actual confluence, that is, where Victory Creek, the creek of Victory Creek Park, flows into the South Fork, the creek of the WQC and of Kingfisher Natural Area.  Somehow I got the idea that this confluence was directly north of the dead end of 10th Place NE.  So I went to that dead end and found this shrubbery blocking the way:

I figure it's pretty enough shrubbery to be worth showing you, dear Diary, the picture, but it isn't actually blocking the Natural Area, which is east of as well as north of this spot, and whose exact location remains a mystery to me.

Kingfisher Natural Area

So I went back to Kingfisher, specifically its actual official address, which is 1511 NE 105th St.  Which makes it unsurprising that, as I noted with surprise last year, the official park signage is here, such as it minimally is.  I was by this point tired, and very worried about reaching Maple Leaf Reservoir Park before its restrooms shut, both for reasons involving you, dear Diary, and reasons involving my own need to do Number One, which I no longer figure I'm entitled to do in daytime outside, now that I'm housed.  So at 5:30 P.M. I settled for taking two photos of the entrance, which makes everything a little clearer.  This is the lower of the two dots on the map.

And then went on to my next hike, much further south.  I hope I still have time to tell you both about that one and the last one for this region, dear Diary, tonight.

I also had to give up, here, my hope to explore the woods shown by Open Street Map that didn't have obvious explanations.  This hike included massive woods of this sort, along Victory Creek and the South Fork pretty much everywhere between the parks.  Obviously if I wasn't going to clamber around Kingfisher, which I know to be public property, I wasn't going to clamber around areas that might for all I know be private.

Sometime this year I also hope to get back to Kingfisher Natural Area, and for that matter to Victory Creek Confluence Natural Area and Victory Creek Park and Open Street Map's woods, but it won't be soon.