Redmond Watershed Park and Preserve

Yesterday was sunny again, so Fiancé encouraged me to once again play hooky and get outside.  I didn’t need much prodding to abandon an afternoon of cleaning the house.  Who does?

After consulting my handy-dandy guidebook again, I elected to check out the Redmond Watershed Park and Preserve.  It is a quiet, pretty chunk of woods and wetlands a short drive from the bustle of Redmond’s shops and offices.

Overall, it is a nice walk in the woods.  Nothing spectacular or splashy to draw big crowds.  There was a very small creek that ended in a still pond just visible through the trees at one point.  But no views or anything.  It’s definitely just a simple place to get away from the city and walk for several hours.

The trail is wide and gentle, with only a few slippery spots where the ground had gotten too soft.  Completely understandable, as the water has to flow somewhere.  The park is large, so most of the looping trails are several miles long.  However, they provided periodic connector trails to make a shorter walk if you want.  The guide book mentioned that the city had made upgrades to the signage, making it nearly impossible for anyone to get lost.  I heartily agree with this observation.  Each intersection was marked with several posts containing directions to other trails or points of interest, mileage to those trails and points of interest, and a map with a kind of “you are here” mark.

I noted with interest that the park is closed to pets, but open to horses.  That means that I encountered much fewer people than at other similar types of trails.  It also meant that I needed to pay attention to where I placed my foot.  I encountered several horses and their friendly riders on my loop, as well as a few bikers.  I think if I go back there I’ll try out the trails that are for hikers only.

This park’s trails are intersected with the Powerline Trail that runs through Redmond along, you guessed it, the power lines.  The natural gas pipeline also runs through the park, perpendicular to the power lines, and one of the park’s trails runs along that as well.  My loop took me along a portion of both.  The Pipeline Trail might be pretty in spring and summer if wildflowers are blooming there, but the section along the pipeline (read: not in the forest) was boring yesterday since there was nothing but grass to see.  The power company had also just come through to add a line, so the downed trees and nasty leftovers from this work don’t do much to make that section of the Powerline Trail attractive.  Bonus is that they planted this area with native replacements (identified by all the pink flags in the photo) before they left.

It wasn’t a waste of time.  I got my exercise, dose of sunshine, and nose full of pine tree smell.  I do love the smell of pine trees!

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