Seattle Nonprofits Come Together to Clean up the Magnolia Trail
The Magnolia Trail Community has been working for years to expand and improve a rough social trail that currently links the 32nd Ave West Beach Access, sometimes called “Secret Beach,” with Elliott Bay Marina and a vast network of citywide trails. We’ve received matching grants from the city of Seattle to pay for contractors to conduct surveys, write wetlands reports and offer proposals to improve the trail.
In an exciting recent development, City Councilman Bob Kettle included language in the proposed Move Seattle Levy to “commit resources to expand” the Magnolia Trail to be an emergency access road in the event, for example, that a major earthquake makes the Magnolia Bridge impassible.
There’s been another piece of good news. One of the challenges the community has faced in the trail area has been the encampments that have popped up over the years. In May, after surveying a large encampment high on the hill above the Magnolia Trail where a fire had broken out some years ago, we contacted Seattle Parks. They sent an inspector to look at the encampment.
The inspector was discouraging. “There are three hundred of these camps across Seattle, we can’t deal with all of them,” he said.
When we pointed out that there were gas tanks, propane tanks and other containers suggesting toxins that would leak into the sound and that the site had had a fire some years back, the inspector agreed to send someone else to make a closer inspection and get back to us. We never heard back. We learned, however, that We Heart Seattle, founded by Andrea Suarez, had had success clearing such encampments and contacted them. Again, for months we heard nothing.
Then at the end of August we had a wonderful surprise. We Heart Seattle, working with A Cleaner Alki, had, after getting the consent of the encampment resident and referring him to a shelter, swept into the site with 45 volunteers and cleaned it up over three days.
“We found firearms, human waste, pipe bowls, and hundreds of bottles filled with urine,” says Suarez who estimates it took an estimated 1,000 hours of volunteer labor.
The volunteers found hundreds of wine bottles, propane cannisters, gasoline containers and dozens of bicycles. We Heart Seattle carted away thousands of pounds of garbage that had collected over eight years.
There remains another, much smaller, encampment, closer to water. Suarez says her group is still working on persuading that resident to move. Suarez says that to prevent new encampments from popping up in the areas that have just been cleared, the community should quickly plant native species. Turns out, a Green Seattle Partners forest steward who has been working in other areas of Magnolia had already started a process for doing just that. He has requested that Seattle Parks allow him to begin habitat restoration of Magnolia Parks’ southeast forest section, the area of the former encampment and of Magnolia Trail. If approved, the forest steward would mobilize volunteers to remove invasive species including thick vines of ivy now strangling trees and to plant native species.
We Heart Seattle, is a non-profit that welcomes tax free donations. You can reach them at info@weheartseattle.org or send checks to 1912 3rd Ave. Box J-10, Seattle WA 98101.
