The Road Not Taken -- Mercer Island's Intricate Trail System Is Fast Becoming The Preferred Way To Get Around

Island guide to happy trails

-- The Mercer Island "Trails Guide," a pamphlet with a map and description of the island's trails, is available at City Hall, 9611 S.E. 36th St.

The plain fact is, Mercer Islanders don't like streets.

In a community where average family income is $60,000, roads are frequently rough and often dead-ended. That's not just because terrain is steep - and certainly not because nobody can afford to lay asphalt.

People moved to an island for seclusion, and a nice paved road would entice more drivers to speed past their doors. There have been historic battles, some still raging, to create cul-de-sacs where none were intended.

As a consequence, while you can toss a rock from one point to another, you might have to drive three miles to get there by car.

Thus much intra-island transportation depends on an unusually elaborate system of pedestrian walkways: not just recreational paths but routes to schools, churches, shops, neighbors' homes and bus stops.

Perhaps unique among Washington cities, in fact, Mercer Island has a six-year trails plan along with its state-mandated six-year street plan.

Like most street plans on which it is patterned, the island's trails plan exists in dreams. Planners imagine expenditures from $200,000 to $500,000 a year, while actual funding has been $60,000 to $70,000.

Still, Mercer Island has a lot of trails, and an enthusiastic Road and Trails Board is constantly identifying and creating more - along roads, through city rights-of-way and developers' easements as well as throughout the island's 475 acres of parkland (including Luther Burbank County Park and state land surrounding Interstate 90).

In all, Mercer Island has 50.5 miles of trails, 5.7 miles of themwithin parks and 14.7 miles in off-road paths. The remaining trails border some of the island's 78 miles of streets, and along the local thoroughfares the preferred substitute for traditional sidewalks is meandering dirt or gravel pathways.

There's even a special pamphlet mapping and identifying the island's trails.

In the guide, Road and Trails Board member Dave Soracco, a retired naval officer and walking enthusiast, has defined interconnecting trails as routes to activity centers as well as pleasant recreational walks.

Most of Mercer Island can be walked by anyone in reasonably good condition, although terrain can be steep and some challenges - the immense ravine in the northeast quadrant of Pioneer Park, for example - are there for the tackling.

The Mountaineers organization holds an annual winter hike on Mercer Island when snow drives the less hardy to the lowlands. Volksport holds several walks on the island, including evening treks in summer and a 10-kilometer hike in March. Other groups, among them a midweek walking club sponsored by the city Parks and Recreation Department, also organize walks on the island, where much greenery has been preserved despite encroaching development.

Mercer Island's trails development has followed its citizens' preoccupation both with fitness and environmental awareness. In the late 1960s, residents told their young city government that motorized traffic was bad, trails were good. So pressure built to open up rights-of-way and easements.

In 1979 the road committee was restructured into the Road and Trails Board, with "trails" given added emphasis.

In 1990 came the six-year trails plan, and board members began mapping and installing bollards with trail markers at entrances to paths the public could be using but hadn't known about.

"The trouble is that trails frequently start by going down somebody's driveway," says former Mayor Ben Werner. "If you know where you're going, you can find the trail, but a stranger gets lost."

Werner thinks signs should be more prominent. "The word is `public,' " he emphasizes.

"What we've been doing is pointing out a lot of shortcuts nobody really knew were there because people didn't want them to know," says board vice-chairwoman June Lindsey, who's been walking around Mercer Island since the early 1960s.

"Historically, the city has platted a number of easements known to people in the immediate neighborhoods, but not to the community at large."

Some residents have objected to the trails, sometimes by blocking them or developing public land to make it look like part of their yards.

The city won a judgment in Superior Court against a landowner who had built a bulkhead cutting off half of a 20-foot trail easement west of The Lakes housing development. City Attorney Ron Dickinson says the property owner has appealed, and oral arguments are scheduled before the state Court of Appeals early next month.

It's only in recent years that the city has adopted an aggressive policy of keeping public rights-of-way open and usable, and other disputes thus far have avoided the courts.

Many property owners have cooperated with the city's efforts to identify trails. "After we installed a trail sign in the West Firs neighborhood," Lindsey recalled, "an owner moved some of his trees and shrubs so people could walk where they're supposed to.

"Another resident, when he learned of a trail easement in front of his house, incorporated a trail into his landscape plans. That suited everybody's needs - and is what we like to see people do."

At the bottom of the stairway that is the easterly terminus to the Tarywood Trail, connecting Island Crest Way with East Mercer Way and Clarke Beach Park, the trail was obliterated when a new house was built. The owner, said Lindsey, rebuilt the right-of-way into "a very nice trail with his own labor."

For 1993, the city has budgeted $80,000 for improving and signing trails, far short of the hoped-for $202,000 allocation shown in the six-year trails program, which would add new trails to the current system.

The Road and Trails Board is charged with bringing its six-year plan back into line with budgetrealities, according to assistant city manager Rich Conrad.

By 1994, he said, the city hopes to have $100,000 a year for trail improvements, partly as a result of an additional real-estate excise tax approved late last year by the City Council, but also from an infusion of $285,000 annually that would be freed up should voters approve annexation to the King County Library District on Feb. 2.

A number of public rights-of-way and easements, some hidden by private lawns and shrubbery, remain available for future trails. Over the years, adjacent property owners have asked the city to give up the public's rights. Most, although not all, have been turned down.

Former City Manager Larry Rose recalls that when he arrived in 1975, "there was a debate in the City Council, led by Ben (Werner), on the theme that the city must never, ever surrender or dispose of easements or rights-of-way, because they can never be reacquired.

"Ben made it plain that we cannot anticipate the needs of the future: today it might look as if land wasn't needed, but a generation or two from now, folks might tear their hair out in anguish asking why did that dumb council ever do that?"