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Snohomish County recreation
County's newest trail: If you build it, they will hike

By Diane Brooks
Times Snohomish County bureau

A mossy hemlock forest along the Stillaguamish River seems an odd spot to ruminate about baseball and Iowa cornfields. But during her seven years of loving labor on Snohomish County's newest trail -- carving routes into hillsides, rolling rocks into place, hewing brush, moving gravel -- M.J. Donovan-Creamer often mused about the film "Field of Dreams." Just as long-departed baseball stars wandered out of the past in that 1989 movie, the Everett woman half- expected to see railroad workers, mill hands and kiln operators from a century ago come ambling out of the woods.

Bob Creamer of Everett steadies a cedar post while his wife, M.J. Donovan-Creamer, uses a chisel to make an information sign they installed along the new Lime Kiln Trail near Granite Falls.

"We even found their shoes," said Donovan-Creamer, 59, who helped celebrate the 3.4-mile Lime Kiln Trail's completion Sunday with a final work party.

Volunteers who built the trail stumbled across many artifacts from the late 1800s and early 1900s, when the Everett & Monte Cristo Railway served a small cluster of riverside enterprises on its way to mines near Barlow Pass and the Big Four resort.

Among their finds: gilt-edged china from passing dining cars, huge saw blades from long-gone lumber mills and several leather shoes in remarkably good condition.

The first 1.4 miles are open to horses and bicycles. Local resident Max Forsgren rides his quarter horse, Joe, on the trail two or three times a week.

"This trail is a nice surprise," Forsgren said. "They just did a phenomenal job."

Volunteer project leader Steve Dean launched the trail construction in 1998. His original concept was a 2.6-mile trail to an abandoned lime kiln; he expected it would take about three years to complete.

It turned out to be a seven-summer undertaking, stretching beyond the old kiln. The county built two bridges and the parking lot; Dean's group built the trail from scratch.

Dean personally led 175 work parties, missing only two.

" 'Excited' probably underestimates the way I feel about this," Dean said as he led his final group of six trail-construction volunteers into the forest. "I've gotten almost euphoric."

Trail construction is much more complex -- and tedious -- than most users realize. For instance, Dean discovered too late that a 0.1-mile stretch of trail was too low-lying to drain properly during the wettest months. It took 20 all-day work parties in 2001 to reroute it onto higher ground.

Last spring, it took three days to move a 41-foot fallen tree uphill about 150 feet, to support the path's edge as it runs along a steep hillside.

The trail begins as a woodsy path, then follows logging roads before plunging back into the forest. At 1.6 miles, the trail meets the old rail corridor, where the tracks crossed over the Stillaguamish. It ends with a 0.7-mile loop near the spot where the railroad recrossed the river.

The railroad was built in 1892-93 and abandoned in 1934. Vestiges of the old trestle lie on both riverbanks near the trail's end, where a side path leads down to the river's edge. A large, rocky outcropping about 200 yards from the bridge remnants offers a perfect spot for a picnic lunch.

On Sunday, the work party shared that vista with an off-duty volunteer, Emi Otsu, who brought a half-dozen friends and relatives to admire the project.

"It's an awesome trail," said Frank Molver, 54, part of Otsu's group. "I like to think about what it would be like 100 years ago when the train went through this gorge."

That means everything to Dean.

"The passing-on from people who built it, to people who are gonna use it, from one generation to the next, is what makes me feel good all over," he said. "It makes seven years of work worthwhile."

Diane Brooks: 425-745-7802 or dbrooks@seattletimes.com

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