All in the Dry Month of May

Dear Diary,

Hooray!  Just two pages left of today's hike.  This one covers Fremont, understood as the area between Stone Way N and 1st Ave NW, farther north than feels like Fremont to me, all the way from the Ship Canal to N 50th St.  This means five parks run by the Seattle Department of Parks and Recreation.  Same as last year, only one has a water fountain, and none has a restroom.

EDIT 5/11:  Map:

Troll's Knoll Park

My errand on N 36th St put me north of the waterfront, but close to Fremont's two stairway parks.  This one, however, isn't a stairway park like the Wallingford Steps, but a ramp park.  Look:

At the top of the ramp is a P-Patch, and I suppose I should've checked to make sure no water fountain had been installed there since I last visited in June ("At the Centre of the Universe, Does Gas Work?") and took no photos.  But the park's web page mentions no amenities, except the central one:  it can get anyone, feet, wheels or both, from N 36th to 38th Streets.  In a pleasant environment, too.

A. B. Ernst Park

I'd forgotten how helpful the park web pages can be.  It had dawned on me I should pay more attention to the people the parks are named for, and this one turns out to be an early park commissioner who, quoth the web page, helped implement the Olmsted plans that resulted in, for example, Ravenna Park and Boulevard.

Anyway, this has been a stairs park, climbing from N 34th to 35th Streets, parkier than the Wallingford Steps, but, in my opinion, cursed with concrete benches instead of a mosaic as its landing focus.  A construction project was to have started by now that would have gotten rid of those benches and the steps, in favour of a ramp all the way as at Troll's Knoll.  I've written about this park a bit more than most of those that lack plumbing, because of this:  June 9 in "At the Centre of the Universe" and June 21 in "Past Work and Gas Works", with photos.  So I was very surprised and mildly displeased that I could climb the stairs:

all the way to the top, where I could read the explanation:

We'll soon see a project that doesn't have this kind of sign.  Why do access projects like this and the work planned years ago to improve the entrances to Gas Works Park take a back seat in comparison?

The Burke-Gilman Trail

The parks of Wallingford and Fremont, as of various other neighbourhoods, include this trail, and in my general enthusiasm for taking photos today, I didn't forget this one.

I had to take stairs, again, to get to it from Troll Ave N.  At the bottom of those stairs I found a mini-park.  Since the street it's on is loudly proclaimed to be a private street, I'm guessing this is a private park; no doubt to discourage people, whether general public or employees, from lingering, the only furniture it has is, um, a picture frame:

Google Maps shows a conspicuously vast splotch of green just north of the trail, somewhat further west, and I was very curious what it could be.  It turned out not to be so vast after all, and it's just the fenced-in landscaping of Adobe's building there:

At least they spent a bit to make the fence abutting the trail a little prettier.

The reason I was taking the trail is that it goes right to and through the next park, and this brings me to a sort of apology I owe, dear Diary.  On January 19, in "Water and Water", about the Lake Washington Ship Canal, I wrote in part:

"Because essentially all the [Fremont] Cut's width is reserved for navigation, which bars piers, boaters don't show it much love, and its only North Seattle street end is the uninteresting one under the Fremont Bridge, with opportunities for more passed up at Phinney Ave N and 2nd Ave NW, at least."

This is preposterous.  The whole point of the street end program was to make private land public.  But by the time that program got going in the 1990s, the Burke-Gilman Trail and this next park occupied the entire north waterfront of the Fremont Cut.  So there wouldn't have been any point to street ends at those two spots.  Harrumph.

So here's that park, which has everything except plumbing:

Fremont Canal Park

The first time I visited this park last June, I was having trouble getting to the parks department web pages, which is what I blamed for the fact that I only looked at the eastern half of the park (the half with the topiary dinosaurs), and only described that half June 9 in "At the Centre of the Universe, Does Gas Work?"  The other half (the one with furniture hidden in small topiary bushes), I presented June 25 in "History and Parks" part I.  So this park has gotten a bit more photography from me than others, and I was lazy today, taking only a generic shot down the trail:

At least I singled it out for praise January 6 in "What's in a Name?", pairing it with a park so obviously meant as its opposite that I kind of have to wonder what chemicals were involved in planning Fremont's too-few, too-small, parks that punch so much above their weight.  That is, pairing it with

Fremont Peak Park

Today I learnt that while Palatine Ave N is a through street from 50th to 44th, which is enough to get to this park, it is not a through street from 44th to the canal.  Oops.

Anyway, this park also isn't exactly on a peak, the way Fremont Canal Park is exactly on a canal.  The peak is two blocks east, on Phinney Ave N.  Fremont Peak Park is well down the western slope.  But it's still plenty high up.

It's weird in a rather appealing way, and I took some photos of that for "At the Centre", so this time I decided instead to focus on dumb obvious stuff.  Here's the entrance:

And here's a view:

I did walk both Fremont Canal and Fremont Peak Parks end to end in case there were new water fountains, but neither saw any nor any signs of them.

B. F. Day Playground

B. F. Day was a realtor, says the parks department web page, who donated the land to build a school, land on which I suspect the park also sits.

This is the biggest park in Fremont, and the only one with plumbing, in the form of a water fountain.  Last October, that fountain ran, while none of those in the bigger parks of Wallingford did.  Anyway, its plumbing means I've visited it rather more often than most of these (the Trail and therefore Fremont Canal Park are different).  I introduced it June 9 in "At the Centre" and came back to it October 8 in "South of North Once More", part I, with photos and a story that I then had to retract March 21 in "Hike 8A" (more photos).  Here are yet more:

A landscape, of course.

No water, of course.

And whereas in January the "sanican" that had been here was gone, probably lent to Northgate Park, where there was a Curative COVID testing site, it's back now, and in a place obviously built for it, that I didn't notice in January and so offered a probably incorrect memory of where it had been:

This park has playground improvements planned.  Not, mind, the installation of a new playground, but improvements to an existing one.  I showed, either October or January, a photo of a revised schedule, a sign still there today.  That schedule claimed construction would happen in 2021, but it's now May and nothing's happening.  So I don't actually know that playgrounds are more important to the parks department than access, but the contrast between the signs suggests that that's the case.

What a dreary note to end on, dear Diary.  I have a better one.  A while back, I noted that I find that ducks improve almost any situation.  Geese not so much - it's hard to ignore their indiscriminately scattered Numbers Two, and they're more aggressive.  But still, two geese in Fremont Canal Park were remarkably indifferent to me today, so I took their picture:

Next page:  a start on Woodland Park.