10 Green Lake to Lake Washington TRACING A HISTORIC CREEK

This somewhat strenuous trek along streets, parks, and the Burke-Gilman Trail follows the original drainage of Ravenna Creek.

For thousands of years, Green Lake and Lake Washington were connected by Ravenna Creek, which flowed southeast down what is now RavennaBoulevard before veering slightly north and continuing through the densely forested ravine of what became Ravenna Park. The creek emerged from the ravine into a sphagnum bog that spread across the area now covered by University Village. Its journey ended in Lake Washington at Union Bay, which historically extended north to modern NE 45th Street, about one-half mile north of today’s shoreline.

Ravenna Creek vanished from its upper reach when workers put the water into a pipe as part of the North Trunk Sewer system. Built because of concerns over typhoid and cholera in contaminated drinking water, the North Trunk consolidated outflow north of the soon-to-be-built Lake Washington Ship Canal via 22 miles of sewer pipes, the largest of which had a 12-foot diameter. The system extended from West Point on Magnolia to Green Lake, with the Ravenna pipe section completed in 1911. Following the elimination of the creek, the city opened the 160-foot-wide Ravenna Boulevard, which included a bridle path, planting strip, and roadways. In 1961, the city replaced the original paths with grass.

The riparian corridor from Lake Washington to Ravenna was likely used by Native residents, in particular to access liq’təd (Whulshootseed for “red paint”), a sacred spring a mile north of Green Lake, which was known as dxʷƛ’əš (meaning unknown). Green Lake would have been a good source for fish, such as suckers, and plants, such as tule and salmonberry.

This one-way walk traces the historic route of Ravenna Creek and explores the many changes along the drainage including the lowering of Lake Washington and drying out of the bog, the felling of the massive trees in Ravenna Park, and the filling in of part of Cowen Park with dirt and debris from the construction of Interstate 5. This is one of the more difficult walks in the book, in part because it goes on gravel paths through Ravenna and Cowen Parks and the Union Bay Natural Area, so you will need to pay a bit more attention to route-finding than on other walks.

Start on the eastern shore of Green Lake between the community center and ball fields.

Green Lake originally covered what are now the park’s ball fields and the community center and its parking lot. A General Land Office survey around the lake found a forest of Douglas fir (eight feet in diameter), western red cedar, western hemlock, red alder, and maples, both vine (closer to the creek) and bigleaf. Along the lakeshore were dense, brushy areas of salmonberry and willow.

The fertile land attracted settlers and developers, including Guy Phinney, who built a small mill at the lake that could cut 10,000 board feet a day. Although the land was far from the center of population in Seattle, a trolley connected Green Lake to downtown. The tracks initially ran along the eastside of the lake and around to the north end but ultimately completed a loop around the lake and back down the west side.

Three years after Ravenna Creek disappeared into its pipe, the city, on the advice of park designer John Charles Olmsted (of the Olmsted Brothers landscape architecture firm), lowered the lake seven feet, which added 100 acres of new land to the park, primarily around the lake’s outlet. By this time, most of the lake had been logged, streets had been platted, and numerous houses had been built.

Walk east from the lake on the paved path between the community center and the ball fields. Cross E Green Lake Way N so that you are on the north side of NE Ravenna Boulevard, next to Gregg’s Cycles. Walk east on Ravenna, and cross the odd three-way intersection of NE 70th Street, Woodlawn Avenue N, and Ravenna to the east side and in front of a triangular building topped by a clock. Look near that building’s front door for a map of Green Lake in the pavement.

Artist Carolyn Law created this map of the lake in 2010. The green terrazzo marks the modern lake edge, and the line surrounding it indicates the historic shoreline. The largest of the buildings on the lake’s edge is the community center, with the wedge-shaped Aqua Theater closest to Ravenna Boulevard and the sort of ear-shaped wading pool at the lake’s north end. Law hoped that as this neighborhood developed and people had to slow down for increased traffic, they would pay attention and notice the details of the lake.

Continue east on Ravenna Boulevard until you are under Interstate 5. As you walk along, note the large caiman sculpture filled with plants on the lawn in front of the John Marshall School. Observe also the tall trees growing along the boulevard. These include English oaks, sycamore maples, and red maples, none of which are native. Also, if you do the walk when the trees have no leaves, look for the many squirrel nests, which look like balls of clumped leaves.

Artist Sheila Klein completed her art piece Columnseumin 2007 by painting more than 250 columns in the 10-acre space under I-5. Klein’s websitenotes that “rather than fight the massive existing infrastructure, the project works with the site’s own visual vocabulary: parking paint and concrete columns. The lot was painted with simple shapes drawn from parking lot vernacular (white stripes/blue handicap) to minimize the dark space and accentuate the architecture.”

Continue east on Ravenna Boulevard to Brooklyn Avenue NE.

At this point, the subterranean, six-foot-diameter North Trunk Sewer pipe carrying Ravenna Creek continues southeast under the ridge that begins to rise to the east and descends to a connector near what is now University Village. Contractors initially attempted to dig the pipe’s underground route through the 17th Avenue ridge with a boring machine, which worked on roughly the same principle as the much larger, modern descendants used for light rail and State Route 99 tunnels. However, this first-ever attempt at tunnel boring in Seattle failed because of mechanical problems. The contractor then came up with the novel solution of digging the tunnel by hand with picks and shovels and lining it with brick. Workers advanced through the ridge averaging about 50 feet per week.

Turn left and enter Cowen Park at NE 61st Street.

Real estate developer Charles Cowen donated 12 acres of land to the city for this park in 1906. He is honored by a sign on the park’s gates at University Way NE. Originally dominated by a ravine with a meandering Ravenna Creek, the park changed substantially in 1960 with the addition of 100,000 cubic yards of fill from the construction of I-5. Although many neighbors approved of eliminating the ravine, which they thought was the “biggest nest for juvenile delinquency in the city,” others called the filling of the ravine “outrageous.”

Follow the dirt and gravel path in Cowen Park that curves left, or north, down and into the Ravenna Park ravine until you are under the high concrete bridge.(Numerous signed trails run through the park. This route takes you along the main trail in the bottom of the ravine.)

A two-level wooden pedestrian bridge formerly crossed the Ravenna ravine at 15th Avenue NE. The bridge above you, which marks the boundary between Cowen and Ravenna Parks, was built as a Works Progress Administration project in 1936 and reflects the Art Deco aesthetic of the era. The apex of the graceful arch is 60 feet above the creek. Farther east is the 20th Avenue Bridge, built in 1913–14 for about $55,000. It was closed to motor vehicles in 1975 after engineers determined it needed costly upgrades for continued automobile traffic. Both bridges are city landmarks.

Ravenna Creek follows a route that is a bit anomalous in Seattle. The city’s predominant topographic features are north–south trending ridges and troughs that developed during the last Ice Age. (For more information, see Walk 13.) In contrast, Ravenna Creek and the nearby Lake Washington Ship Canal cut against the grain in northwest–southeast trending channels. Geologists propose that the waterways follow topographic lows that developed under the ice and were then enlarged by water at the base of the glacier. Why the channels trend the way they do is less clear. They could mirror either an unrecognized tectonic structure or a deeply buried structure in the bedrock, but there is no undisputed evidence for either structure. No matter what caused the ravine that Ravenna Creek follows through Ravenna Park, it formed one of the great geological curiosities of our local topography.

Although the upper part of Ravenna Creek is locked into a sewer pipe, numerous seeps, springs, and small tributaries provide enough water for the creek to flow year round in Cowen and Ravenna Parks.

Continue along about half a mile until you cross over the creek on a wood bridge to an open space with a bench, cistern, and flagstones.

In 1888, Reverend William W. and Louise Beck began to purchase land near Union Bay, including the property that the previous owners George and Oltilde Dorffel had named Ravenna Spring Park after Ravenna, Italy. (The great Romantic poet Lord Byron wrote of “Ravenna’s immemorial wood.”) On part of their new land, the Becks established the town of Ravenna, which later had a post office, grist mill, and Seattle Female College. The City of Seattle annexed Ravenna in 1907.

The Becks fenced off part of the ravine and charged visitors 25 cents to enter. Attractions included a sulfur spring cleverly named the “Wood Nymphs Well”; “Ye Merrie Makers’ Inn,” a 40-by-90-foot pavilion; and several picnic shelters and wading ponds. The small concrete cistern-like structure surrounded by flagstones near the creek is the location of the sulfur spring. A public works project during the Depression sealed off the spring because of concern that it was a public health hazard.

But the biggest attractions, literally and figuratively, were the towering Douglas firs, or what some referred to as “vegetable skyscrapers.” To attract attention to the trees, the Becks named several of the biggest, honoring people such as pianist Jan Paderewski (Louise Beck taught piano), Theodore Roosevelt, and Robert E. Lee. Apparently the Becks also felt that a little hyperbole would help: they claimed that the Lee tree topped out at more than 400 feet. But it couldn’t have reached quite so high—no Douglas fir that tall has ever been found. More believable is that one tree had a circumference of 44 feet, though the Becks measured it closer to the ground than modern tree-circumference fanatics would. But these great trees did not survive long into the 20th century.

In 1910, the city acquired the park through condemnation proceedings from the Becks for $144,920. Within a few years, the Parks Department had cut down the Roosevelt tree, noting that it was a “threat to public safety.” Hugo Winkenwerder, dean of the University of Washington’s College of Forestry, declared the trees healthy and not in need of any additional assistance from the Parks Department, but more cutting ensued despite assurances from Parks Superintendent J. W. Thompson. People cited car pollution, storms, and chimney smoke as justification for the removal of the trees. Seattle Parks Department historian Don Sherwood, however, noted that unjustified tree cutting regularly occurred in the parks. “Just label it ‘diseased’ and out it went,” he said. All of the big trees were gone by the end of the 1920s, and no physical evidence of them, such as stumps, remains.

Continue along the creek (don’t ascend out of the ravine) until you reach wood fencing and a junction with a trail on the left, across from wood logs on the side of the path.

More enlightened stewardship has dominated Ravenna Park in the past few decades, particularly along the bottomland of the ravine whereUniversity of Washington students, private citizens, and groups such as EarthCorps have restored habitat. This has included removing invasive plant species (which is an ongoing endeavor), planting native ones, and mulching. Small flags often indicate ongoing restoration sites.Do not disturb them.

Arguably the most dramatic restoration occurred along the lower reach of the creek. More than a decade of debate and planning between the city, county, and citizen groups such as the Ravenna Creek Alliance led in 2006 to daylighting Ravenna Creek and restoring it to more than 650 feet of its historic route through Ravenna Park. No longer would the creek drop into a sewer pipe and disappear underground. Now it flows aboveground, providing habitat for a wealth of plants and animals. The restored creek starts approximately where you stand.

Continue along the path and around the left side of the ball field, past the drain where Ravenna Creek returns to a pipe, which carries the water to Union Bay. When you reach a flight of steps, ascend them. (If you want to return to Green Lake here, via a slightly different route, check the map for a red-dotted line that will guide you back to the starting point. This shorter roundtrip walk is 3.7 miles.) Turn right at the top of the steps, walk to Ravenna Place NE, and turn left, or south, on Ravenna Place. Follow Ravenna until it intersects NE Blakeley Street. You are now on the Burke-Gilman Trail.

On April 15, 1885, Thomas Burke and Daniel Gilman led a group of Seattle investors in forming the Seattle Lake Shore and Eastern (SLS&E) Railway Company, with plans to cross the Cascade Mountains to eastern Washington. Heading north out of downtown, the tracks went through Smith Cove (present-day Interbay), past Salmon Bay, and around the north ends of Lake Union and Lake Washington. Burke and Gilman chose this route for several reasons: the route south out of Seattle was taken by another railroad company, and the two hoped to connect their route to a spur of the transcontinental rail.

Workers laid the SLS&E tracks in nine months to the town of Yesler, about a half mile farther east from where you stand. The roundtrip from downtown to Yesler took 90 minutes. The tracks eventually extended to present-day Bothell and farther. Trains used the tracks on a regular basis until 1963. In 1971, Burlington Northern (a later manifestation of the Northern Pacific Railroad, which had acquired the SLS&E in 1901) abandoned the line. Pushed by citizen activists, the city acquired the rights to the train tracks and opened the first section of the Burke-Gilman Trail in 1974. Four years later the full route from Kenmore to Gas Works Park was completed.

Cross 25th Avenue NE, and continue east on the Burke-Gilman Trail to 30th Avenue NE.

Historically, a spur line of the SLS&E veered off the main route at this point to the small town of Yesler. The railroad made this large curve around what is now University Village Shopping Center because, prior to 1916, the lowland was a sphagnum bog. Like most local bogs, the Ravenna bog was a complex landscape of open water, floating mats of decomposing plants, and an overstory of shrubs. After the construction of the Lake Washington Ship Canal and the lowering of Lake Washington by nine feet, the bog began to dry out. (For more information, see Walk 9.) University Village opened on the former bog in 1954.

Continue east on the trail across a wooden bridge and around a curve to a flight of stairs on your right at 36th Avenue NE. Descend the stairs, cross NE 45th Street, and continue south on 36th Avenue NE to NE 43rd Street.

You are now in the heart of Yesler. If you had been walking down this road in the 1890s, you would have been on Thornell Street, named for William Thornell, former general manager of the SLS&E and the man who helped bring Seattle’s first professional baseball team to town. In 1888, Henry Yesler platted his eponymous town on 23 acres of land he had purchased from Joe Surber. Surber had homesteaded 165 acres in 1872, mostly east of here, and is infamous for killing what some claim was the last cougar in Seattle in 1895. Yesler is best known for the first sawmill on Elliott Bay, which became Seattle’s first important business in 1852.

As Seattle grew and logging spread farther from the original town center, Henry Yesler decided to build a new mill on the shore of Lake Washington to more easily exploit forests around the lake. The town of Yesler, which housed sawmill employees, had a one-room schoolhouse, two churches, and a post office. (The postmaster trained his dog to run to the railroad tracks and fetch mail tossed from the SLS&E train.) The mill eventually employed 36 men, who could cut up to 75,000 board feet of lumber every 12 hours. The City of Seattle annexed Yesler in 1907. None of the town of Yesler’s nonresidential buildings remain.

Continue south on 36th Avenue NE and cross NE 41st Street to the south side, adjacent to the Center for Urban Horticulture (CUH).

Established in 1984, CUH is part of the University of Washington Arboretum. The center includes a library, demonstration gardens, classrooms, research facilities, and the Union Bay Natural Area (UBNA; open daily).

Turn right, or west, and walk to the end of the CUH building and a paved path that veers off to the left. Take the path, and cross the small road onto a dirt path, labeled Wahkiakum Lane. Follow the path to a kiosk, where there is good information on paths, birds, and flowers. The Natural Area, about 74 acres of wetland, pond, and shoreline, is unofficially known as the Montlake Fill.

Before 1916, Union Bay was open water that extended north to NE 45th Street and from the base of Laurelhurst across to modern-day Montlake Boulevard. With the post-canal lower lake level, the bay became a cattail marsh. In 1926 the city began dumping trash in the marsh’s northeast corner. The marsh eventually became one of Seattle’s primary dumps, where up to 110 truckloads of garbage arrived every day. Crews burned the industrial and household materials in open fires, but after complaints from neighbors, they began covering the trash with soil in the 1950s. By 1966, when the dump closed, 200 acres of marsh had been filled with trash and dirt, all of which now lies under parking lots, a driving range, storage yards, playfields, CUH, and UBNA.

Large-scale organized restoration of UBNA didn’t start until 1990. By this time, invasive plants such as Scot’s broom, purple loosestrife, and Himalayan blackberry covered the former dump, although native red alder and black cottonwood had colonized wetter areas. Crews began by removing purple loosestrife, followed by blackberry. These removal efforts continue to the present. The University of Washington Botanical Gardens manages the site and has completed more than 40 restoration projects focused on removing invasives, adding native plants, and increasing biodiversity and habitat diversity.

To provide access to visitors, researchers, and students, a little morethan a mile of hard-packed trail winds through the restored landscape. Please note that in the rainy season, the trail can be very muddy and even partially submerged. Birders have reported seeing more than 250 bird species, including Cooper’s hawks, ruddy ducks, barn owls, pileated woodpeckers, song sparrows, and buffleheads. Other inhabitants include coyotes, salamanders, dragonflies, butterflies, and turtles.

Like so many other creeks in Seattle, Ravenna and its outlet are not as diverse as they once were. But the many restoration projects have given these places a new life and new lives. They are ecosystems where visitors have the magical opportunity to encounter the natural world: the beauty of bigleaf maples erupting with golden fall foliage, the stoop of a hungry bald eagle over an unsuspecting duck, the slow deliquescing of mushrooms, or the first rays of the sun on a dewy patch of sedges. As can be seen at UBNA and along Ravenna Creek, restoration is not simply about habitat: it’s also about creating opportunity for plants and animals (including humans).

Follow the main path into UBNA, and take the second left, designated as the Loop Trail on the UBNA’s map on the kiosk, and follow it around the shoreline. This route offers fine birding and great views out over the lake and, if it’s clear, down to Mount Rainier. Stop when you find a nice place to look out over the lake. Wherever you stop would have been underwater prior to 1916.

You have completed all of the walk except for the section to the Metro Bus route 45. The following directions take you to the bus stop (15 on map).

Continue around the Loop Trail to where it joins the main path (Wahkiakum Lane on UBNA map), turn left, and follow it past a wetlands on your left to a bridge that spans a narrow waterway. Cross the bridge, and continue west to a paved walkway heading west between the UW soccer field and the UW outdoor track. The walkway ends at a parking lot. Continue west across the lot (be careful—watch for traffic) to a pedestrian overpass on the far side (look for the two sets of stairs that lead to the overpass). Take the overpass over Montlake Boulevard NE to the Burke-Gilman Trail, turn left, and follow the trail about half a mile to two sets of stairs. The stairs to the left lead down to the light rail station, visible from the trail. To reach the bus stop for Metro Bus route 45, ascend the stairs on the right and follow the road slightly up hill. It will lead you (in about 175 yards) to E Stevens Way NE. The bus stop is on the far side of the road. Take the bus west back to Green Lake.