Can Dwellers Save Martha Lake? -- Real World Of 1990S Threatens To Foul A Quiet, 57-Acre Expanse

Meeting on lake

-- The Martha Lake Stewardship Day is scheduled from 11 a.m. to

4 p.m. Sunday in the Martha Lake Community Club, 164th Street S.W. and Motor Place.

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-- MARTHA LAKE

When friends visit Diane McClary's Martha Lake home and watch trout jump and ducks paddle lazily on the 57-acre body of water, they say to her, ``Why, this is like coming to the mountains; the city seems so far away.''

``It's the peaceful and relaxed feeling,'' says McClary, who has lived the past 17 years on the west side of the little lake in southwest Snohomish County. ``I often feel that way, too.''

Martha Lake - ringed with tall second-growth conifers - may seem like another world to McClary and her visitors, but the real world is close at hand.

A short distance from the sound of chirping birds and rowboats with creaky oarlocks are exhaust-belching cars, strip shopping malls and a population crush fueled by humankind's insatiable desire to build large wooden nests side by side.

The water that drains into the lake from I-5 on the west, from hills and houses to the north and from heavily fertilized lawns on the shoreline is not as pure as that which flows from a mountain meadow.

Nor is the effluent, occasionally seeping into the lake from the septic tanks that serve most of the surrounding homes, conducive to healthful swimming.

Trying to preserve the little lake's character and purity in the 1990s has become an obsession with lake dwellers like McClary, a leader in the Martha Lake Homeowners Association.

In reality, what happens to Martha Lake is important to a lot more people than those fortunate enough to have waterfront homes, says Marilyn Freeman, a surface-water management planner for the Snohomish County Public Works Department.

The lake is stocked with trout by the state Wildlife Department, and several hundred people a day may launch boats from the public fishing area. In addition, many people picnic or swim from the grounds of the Martha Lake Resort & Tavern, just off 164th Street Southwest.

The lake, Freeman says, is like a jewel in a sea of urban sprawl, a place to find temporary respite from exhaust fumes and traffic jams.

``Preserving Martha Lake isn't like spending millions of dollars on trying to clean up Lake Washington or Green Lake,'' Freeman adds. ``It's something the people themselves can do.''

To that end, the Snohomish County Public Works Department is midway through a yearlong, $150,000 study to find out if there really is a water-quality problem in the lake, and, if so, to determine what simple and relatively inexpensive measures can be undertaken by visitors and residents to make it cleaner.

A plan for the future will be drawn up by mid-1991, says Freeman. He notes, optimistically, that so far tests have not shown that the lake is unsuitable for swimming even though the bacterial count has run a bit high at times.

There are, however, undeniable problems with algae, assorted water-blooming vegetation and sediment washed in from adjoining property. The lake once was believed to be 48 feet deep at its deepest point. Few believe it is now anywhere near that deep.

To heighten awareness of the struggle to preserve the little lake, a Lake Stewardship Day has been scheduled for Sunday.

A committee formed to encourage the purchase of the Martha Lake Resort & Tavern as a public county park will have a booth and hand out literature.

There will be brochures on how to preserve the lake, refreshments served by Martha Lake Boy Scout Troop 24 and artwork by pupils at Martha Lake and Oak Heights elementary schools on the theme, ``What a Clean Martha Lake Means to Me.''

Visitors may take a self-guided tour of five homes opened for the day to show the idyllic nature of life on Martha Lake.

One of those opening her home will tell how she keeps an emerald-green lawn without using fertilizers, which can drain into the lake and cause vegetation to clog the lake's bottom. Another will show off his miniature wildlife habitat.

Back in 1912-13, when the lake was named, it was ``miles from Seattle'' and smack in the middle of a big Merrill & Ring old-growth logging operation. A Martha Lake Station was established along the tracks of the electric interurban that ran between Seattle and Everett. But for many years there were far more vacation cabins than permanent homes.

Now Martha Lake - perhaps prettier than it has been at any time since the settlers first discovered it - is at the crossroads.

Whether it continues to resemble a mountain lake or becomes a large algae-filled pool may depend a great deal on attitudes fostered at affairs like Sunday's Lake Stewardship Day, says Freeman.