A Hike near Jackson Park

Dear Diary,

There are three city properties just south of Jackson Park, two of which are fairly substantial parks in their own rights.  I remember taking some photos before, but apparently never showed them to you.  I think this is because the parks are called "Natural Area"s, and since at that time I anticipated lots of publicity for you, I worried that I would lead mobs to those unprotected places.

Well, even aside from the grandiosity, I was also worrying too much.  It's freaking hard to get into most natural areas except along approved trails.  And nature itself is at least as destructive to those as they are to nature.  Further south, we'll see a "Natural Area" and a park that might as well be called that, blighted with litter; but these larger parks are too far out of the way for much of that.

A map:

Now here goes, the non-park first:

Jackson Park P-Patch

This is frequently referred to as part of Jackson Park, and its benches:

may have been mentioned in relation to the natural areas, but it's actually tracked by the city as a separate property from all three.  Here's another photo:

I'm coming to appreciate P-Patches that aren't built around stairs, and this is one, entirely on the flat.

Flicker Haven Natural Area

This park, somewhat bigger than eight acres, is poorly treated by mappers.  Open Street Map doesn't name it, though it shows most of its area as woods.  Google Maps allows it, under the name "Thornton Creek Park", to fade into Jackson Park.  The mappers of the Thornton Creek watershed (PDF) show most of its northern border as at the level of NE 133rd St, which ends at the northeast corner of the P-Patch, but Green Seattle Partnership shows that border as at the Jackson Park Perimeter Trail.

If the latter is right, then maybe the previous page showed you a photo of this park, and its northeastern part is relatively walkable.

But because all "Natural Area"s in North Seattle revolve around creeks, they all normally present the challenge of verticality to any would-be hiker or trail-builder.  Flicker Haven's people have mostly dealt with this by not building trails.  I looked pretty hard Monday, and everywhere I looked, had gone last year too.  First, though, the sign just south of the P-Patch on 10th Ave NE:

The way to tell whether one is on an official trail in Beaver Pond Natural Area further south is that the official trails have signs warning hikers not to leave their dogs' Number Twos lying around.  This is much nicer, and can also be seen along the main non-Jackson Park Perimeter Trail trail through Flicker Haven.

The best way to find access to Natural Areas is to go to the dead ends that end at them, or any streets that border them.  In this case, since I'd already walked 10th Ave NE, past the end there of NE 133rd St, I knew there wasn't a way in along that side.  So I went to the park's western side, where Google Maps shows short borders to what it calls "Thornton Creek Park" along NE 130th St (the instance of 130th that goes from Roosevelt Way NE past 8th Ave NE) and along 8th Ave NE just before it turns into 8th Court NE.

At 130th, there's worn grass suggesting a trail, but once one enters the woods, this turns out to have been a red herring.  There is, however, a creek close at hand, so I took a photo:

Where 8th Ave turns, a trail does appear, continuing along the line of 8th Ave into the woods.  Tall vegetation along most of this trail means it has very little view of the creek or its valley, except at the beginning, where there's a grassy patch near 8th Ave, allowing views like this:

This trail goes straight to the Jackson Park Perimeter Trail, so I figured maybe the perimeter trail was the northern border of the Natural Area.  Depends who you believe, whether these are photos of Jackson Park or of Flicker Haven, but anyway, one can't walk far south from the perimeter trail along either side of the creek.

Licorice Fern Natural Area

This not-quite eight-acre park seems to have been quite accessible once upon a time.  In "Top of the City", part II I identified Flicker Haven as formerly named Thornton Creek Park #1, but actually it's Licorice Fern, as witness the page in Year of Seattle Parks, which refers to seating.  The map produced by consultants (PDF), which is also available in the park itself:

shows easy trails and bridges across the creek.

Reality is somewhat different:

Those consultants described the bridges as "temporary", and this one, the western one, certainly was.  However, there are creekside trails (the one on the north side involves walking a fallen tree for quite a ways), so it's still possible, with the help of the surviving eastern bridge, to walk the entire loop.

Early along the trail to that bridge, one passes a whole lot of ferns:

To judge by pictures, these might be the titular ferns.  I didn't notice flickers in Flicker Haven, nor, to anticipate a bit, beavers in Beaver Pond.

A view from the bridge:

As for the seating?  The consultants suggested a park sign, a kiosk, a trash can and a tool box as improvements for the entrance.  They got two out of four.  The kiosk is where their map was installed.  Here's the tool box, the only thing resembling seating I found:

I set my satchels on it to eat supper.  Here are the entrances to the trail, along the eastern of which, a short way in, is the kiosk - barely visible in this photo:

I see now from the maps that I only explored a relatively small part of this Natural Area, and should really have gone to the dead ends around its northeastern part too, but considering how much I had on my plate, and how many photos are now crowding my phone, I'm kind of glad I left it for another time.

All for now, dear Diary, but there are still plenty more photos to show you tonight.  Until then.

Top of the City, Part II

Dear Diary,

Today's page is about four parks - or five if you count as the parks department does - that are all pretty close to each other, and that, taken together, project an image of an almost normal spring in the parks.  Two have no plumbing; in the other two, only one shut-off water fountain attests the current abnormal situation.

They're also all kind of hard to enter, so I'm giving more detailed directions.  They're all between 1st and 15th Avenues and 125th and 145th Streets.

Jackson Park

The parks department's website lists 413 parks.  It does not, however, list among those Jackson Park.  This is partly because it leases much of the park to a private company, Premier Golf.  (So this is the flip side of Nathan Hale Playfield and Cedar Park.)  Sad to say, this private company does a significantly better job of running things than I've found elsewhere in northeast Seattle.  Only two other parks there have all their plumbing working - Burke-Gilman Playground Park and Little Brook Park - and those two have only one or two restrooms and one water fountain each.

Visited May 14, 15, 26 and 27; over four restrooms, at least two pairs open, and at least two water fountains, both running

Jackson Park is, according to the parks department website and signage, two entirely separate not-quite-park entities:  Jackson Park Golf Course and Jackson Park Perimeter Trail.  Both are easiest to enter from 15th Ave, but the actual entrance to the golf course and the most informative entrance to the trail are further west, officially at 10th, actually best reached from 11th Ave and 130th St.  A sign for the trail near that intersection has a map of the trail on its trail-facing back.  As for the golf course, from 11th and 130th look around and identify the most active parking lot.  At that lot's head, you go up a steep incline to reach the main golf course buildings open to the public.

I don't buy the idea that these are two separate non-parks.  For one thing, both have the same official hours, "Dawn to Dusk", which is decidedly non-standard for Seattle parks.  However, all the plumbing is in the golf course.  I found much too little information online about the trail, so when I get the chance, I'll describe it in more detail.  Meanwhile, the golf course.

I didn't visit the course proper, only the cluster of buildings at the top of that hill.  There are essentially three - a cafe, which wasn't open anytime I was there; a shop staffed by professional golfers, so called the "pro shop", the course's nerve centre; and a building supporting a driving range, which is free and open to the public.  Each of these has restrooms.  One pro assured me that all these restrooms are open to the public; another, that no Premier Golf employee would block a well behaved member of the public from them.  I'm unsure anyway about the cafe - aren't restaurants in general still keeping their restrooms closed?  But the driving range has two single-user rooms; the shop's men's room features several toilets, with the usual privacy features so often lacking for park toilets.

I tried the driving range's men's room; it had hot water, believe it or not, but was out of soap that morning, May 27.  (So was BGPP's men's room, for days now.  I take this as a good thing, actually - it implies that parks employees are prioritising getting the rooms open, not getting them perfect - though of course in a better world I wouldn't need to carry hand soap.)

The water fountains I found are side by side between the restrooms at the driving range.  Of course there could be others.  Some talk about how Jackson Park adapted to the coronavirus mentions "restrooms" removed from the course itself, but I'm told these were only, as this implies, "sanican"s.

Licorice Fern Natural Area

Visited May 15; no plumbing

We've already seen with Mock Creek Ravine that individual parts of the Thornton Creek Natural Area can have their own names.  It now turns out you can have nested Natural Areas, as here.  Licorice Fern has, according to Google, not the parks department, an address, and if you go to that address, the dead end of 130th St west of 12th Ave, you find a greensward with two trails leading away.  I followed one, though not far, somewhat shocked by the idea of a trail anywhere near Thornton Creek.  (But wait until tomorrow...)  I found a map online (PDF) later according to which these two trails are the only ones, and excused myself on that basis from exploring further.

Flicker Haven Natural Area

Visited May 15 and 27; no plumbing

This is the current official name of an area south of Jackson Park, or sometimes considered itself the southwest of Jackson Park.  It has also been known as "Thornton Creek Park #1".  I haven't been able to reconcile descriptions of that with what I've found except by assuming the descriptions actually refer to the P-Patch which is in the northern end of what Google Maps thinks of as this park.  That P-Patch is on 10th Ave just north of a notional 130th St, on 10th represented by an overpass.  

The 8th Ave border isn't much more informative.  I couldn't tell whether the dead end of 130th St east of 8th included any public property.  Where 8th Ave turns and becomes 8th Ct, a trail appears, continuing north in the line of 8th Ave until it descends, probably to merge with the Jackson Park Perimeter Trail.

This page has a sort of map, but at least on my phone it doesn't render well.  Evidently people have worked within this area, but I don't know how they entered.

On this trip, I already knew I'd be covering Green Lake and other parks with strictly "N" addresses.  There are only two parks west of I-5 with "NE" addresses; since this next one has restrooms, I decided to cover them in this trip and set of pages.

Northacres Park and Playfield

Visited May 15 and 27; two pairs of restrooms (one all-gender single-user), for openness see below, and three water fountains, two running

This park is both terribly and excellently named.  It's entirely south of Jackson, Little Brook and Cedar Parks, and it's smaller not only than Jackson and Magnuson Parks but also than Ravenna Park and Matthews Beach.  But it still feels like acres, especially along its thickly forested north side, which stretches from I-5 to 1st Ave along 130th St, and it's still pretty far north for most of us.  As for its surname:  in Seattle's park nomenclature, "park" outranks "playfield"; Magnuson Park has a dozen ball fields, but nobody tacks an "and Playfields" onto its name.  This, too, however, makes sense, as I'll explain.

Northacres Park has the less common of the Seattle parks' two usual schedules.  It used to have the more common, and in this photo I can only hope you can see the different schedules on the two signs:

The two schedules are 4 A.M. to 11:30 P.M. (the default) and 6 A.M. to 10 P.M.  I suspect but do not know that the latter is usually thanks to neighbours.  Other parks I've covered that open at 6 are:

Laurelhurst Playfield

Ravenna Park

University Playground

Matthews Beach

Albert Davis Park

The park's official address is on 1st Ave, near a notional 127th St.  There one finds a seemingly ordinary park, with two age-specific playgrounds, a basketball hoop crowded by art, and weird plumbing:  two single-user all-gender restrooms, with two winter-hardened water fountains attached.  The weirdest thing about this not so ordinary park, however, is that in several directions it's surrounded by woods.

I don't remember any issues with the restrooms, which I used on May 15, except that I found them locked.  I'd had little luck calling the parks department weeks earlier, but decided to try again, and not only reached someone, but he got multiple parks employees to come unlock them.  On May 27 I filled two 20-ounce bottles from the water fountains and found it good water.

The guy who actually unlocked the rooms on May 15 represented himself as the boss of the person who'd forgotten to.  He's the one who told me Little Brook's restroom had reopened - he'd done that the same morning.  He wouldn't give me his name, but said he was close to retirement; I'll probably quote him enough to get him in trouble if any of his bosses ever read any of this, but doubt the trouble would be serious.

For now, however, I only need to thank him for pointing me to the playfield, which is in a different clearing in the woods, several blocks away.  This is why "and Playfield" makes sense to me here.  You reach Northacres Playfield by continuing south on 1st Ave, turning left onto 125th St, and turning left again on 3rd Ave.  This is a couple of baseball diamonds, a couple of picnic tables, restrooms and a water fountain; on May 27, without a game going, I found it kind of sad.

That day I used the men's room (which was open on both May 15 and May 27).  It was poor for privacy, but not as bad as Waldo Dahl Playfield or Little Brook Park.  Its sink, however, is of the same design as the one I remember from Cal Anderson Park:  spraying so much water horizontally that it's much better for soaking whatever's in your pockets than for washing your hands.

The water fountain, near but not visibly attached to the restrooms, is not running.  And that returns us to the real world of northeast Seattle's parks in May 2020, the last ten of which I'll discuss in less detail tomorrow.