Trailing an icon: Outdoor enthusiasts plot 80-mile route from Yakima to Mt. Rainier

YAKIMA, Wash. –  On a blustery afternoon two weeks ago, Yakima County Parks and Recreation manager Ken Wilkinson eyed the narrow gully below the weedy slope paralleling Powerhouse Road a quarter-mile west of 40th Avenue and imagined its best possible future.

From left, Alan Adolf, Betsy Bloomfield, Ted Gamlem, Al Brown, Faye Bradford and Ken Wilkinson talk about the intersection at 40th Avenue and Powerhouse Road on May 13. The group, which includes individuals from a wide range of local organizations, met to talk about how to link several pieces of an existing trail system to complete the William O. Douglas Trail. (SARA GETTYS/Yakima Herald-Republic)

For now, though, it is just a logistical hurdle.

“This is the biggest challenge right here,” Wilkinson said, considering the logistical aspects of fitting a 10-foot-wide trail between the winding road and the hillside.

“But, hey, all these projects have challenges. And you can’t blame the people who put the road here. This kind of thing wasn’t thought of when they put this road in. This is all new stuff.”

So new, in fact, that even the would-be National Recreation Trail’s most optimistic proponents don’t believe its 80-mile length will be free of physical or emotional obstacles by the goal date of June 2, 2012: National Trails Day.

“There are so many jurisdictions from one end to the other, lots of impediments and mixed feelings at various places along the route,” said Ted Gamlem, who heads up the William O. Douglas Trail Task spearheaded by the Cowiche Canyon Conservancy. “We have to sort out the things that are absolutely essential by the June 2012 deadline, and separate those from all the other things that we can polish up sometime in the future.

“If we’ve got a section that is utterly not possible to have open by that time, we’ll move around it.”

• • • •

As far as its proponents are concerned, the recreational opportunity isn’t the primary reason behind the push for a William O Douglas National Recreation Trail.

From left, Ted Gamlem, Betsy Bloomfield, Faye Bradford, Alan Adolf and Ken Wilkinson stop where the sidewalk ends on Powerhouse Road on May 13. (SARA GETTYS/Yakima Herald-Republic)

The trail’s route was selected specifically to highlight the area’s natural and cultural wonders that so captivated Douglas and led him to become one of the country’s most influential and environmentally-focused jurists.

Numerous spots along the route will feature signs or kiosks explaining their significance in Douglas’ life, from his old high school to the bridge where he talked philosophy with train-hopping hobos and the basalt structure as which he faced his own mortality. Portions of the trail follow the old Cowlitz Pass Trail route used by Native Americans to cross the Cascade Crest.

“The natural and cultural history of this whole project,” Gamlem said, “is probably even more important than the recreational part. We’re trying to educate everybody, especially kids, that this is not just a place to go walk, but that the reason for this exists because of the history of this area.”

The potential tourist draw, though, certainly figures into the equation.

“Look at things like the Pacific Crest Trail and the Appalachian Trail. That’s the kind of company this trail will be in,” Gamlem said. Noting that those trails were officially “national scenic trails,” while the Douglas trail would be a “national recreational trail” like the John Wayne Trail and the Tahoe Rim Trail, Gamlem said those trails have a certain panache simply because of that national designation.

“This trail has the potential for really bringing tourists to the area,” Gamlem said, “because people will want to hike a piece of this.”

• • • •

The most problematic piece of the entire proposed route isn’t along some far-flung, hard-to-access mountain ridge; it is, rather, the slightly less than three miles of relatively flat urban landscape between the Yakima Greenway’s terminus at 40th Avenue and the lower end of Cowiche Canyon Road.

The planners won’t route the trail along 40th Avenue to Powerhouse Road for the obvious reason.

“We really want to keep the trail away from this traffic,” Yakima County senior transportation planner Alan Adolf said, gesturing to the early-afternoon throngs of cars and trucks moving along 40th. “This just is not a good place for that. Too many safety issues.”

Continuing the trail along the south side of State Highway 12 past the Fred Meyer shopping complex and then routing the trail south to Powerhouse Road is a very real possibility. But a $400,000 grant the task force had sought to pay for that very thing didn’t come through.

Most of the strip of land between Highway 12 and Powerhouse Road on the way west to Cowiche Canyon Road is covered by orchards and by the Riverview Manor trailer park; trail engineers must figure out a way to circumvent both of those while snaking the trail from the end of the Greenway to Cowiche Canyon.

But even upon solving that riddle, those engineers will still have to find a way to route the trail from the sidewalk’s end at the trailer park’s entrance the rest of the way west to Cowiche Canyon Road. There may not be sufficient property development funds available to pay for it.

And even if those funds become available, there remains the “biggest challenge” referenced by Ken Wilkinson: how and where to run the trail west along Powerhouse Road.

• • • •

Even if the task force can solve those problems and find a way to run the trail to the county’s new parking area near the northern end of Cowiche Canyon Road, trail planners will still face the issues surrounding the two miles of old Burlington Northern Santa Fe railroad bed paralleling Cowiche Canyon Road.

The county’s recent project improving the intersection of Powerhouse and Cowiche Canyon roads incorporates about 1/3 mile of William O. Douglas Trail. And Yakima officials have assured the task force that the city owns the rights to the railroad bed.

But the berm passes across or near the property of numerous landowners along its path. Some of those owners have expressed concerns about having trail users cutting through or across their private property and question the city’s right to allow it.

Then there’s the issue of the areas where the creek has a tendency to overflow its channel, necessitating bridges to keep people from leaving the city’s right-of-way along the railroad bed and crossing people’s yards. Those bridges, said Betsy Bloomfield, executive director of the Cowiche Canyon Conservancy, must both complement the area’s natural appeal and be functionally resilient enough to be put back into place quickly after flood events.

“We really want to wire this so that it’s consistent with homeowner values,” Bloomfield said, “and at the same time be consistent with nature values and recreational values.

“There’s no silver bullet for any of this, no instant fix.”

Fortunately for supporters of the trail’s candidacy as a National Recreation Trail, there doesn’t need to be.

“In order to receive National Recreation Trail status, you don’t have to have a continuous trail in place from one end to the other,” Gamlem said. “Basically, there are going to be sections — not many of them, and certainly not much of the overall distance — that won’t be part of the trail by 2012, but they will be part of the planned trail.

“So when we apply to the Department of the Interior (for national-trail status), there will be gaps we will fill in later.”

Once those problem spots are filled in, the trail will be easily navigable — one segment at a time or all at once — by hikers and horseback riders, cyclists and sightseers, naturalists and history buffs.

The only ones who won’t be able to travel its entire route will be the cyclists, because federal guidelines regarding Designated Wilderness areas forbids the use wheeled vehicles, even human-powered ones. And the trail goes through roughly 10 miles of Wilderness — and a very fitting one at that.

The William O. Douglas Wilderness.