Forever Wet -- Bellevue Takes A Walk On The Wild Side

WHEN SIEGFRIED SEMRAU TOOK over as Bellevue parks director back in 1962, it wasn't long before some folks thought him . . . well, "a little strange," as one of his assistants put it. Why was this man so doggone obsessed with the marshy land south of downtown? After all, you could barely make your way through the thickets of willows and hardhack. It was too wet for ballfields - just about the only kind of park development people were clamoring for back in 1962.

Semrau had his own peculiar notions about the land. As a self-professed "nature guy," he decided to build a trail on 62 acres of city-owned wetlands south of downtown Bellevue beside a slow-moving waterway known as Mercer Slough. He hacked out two miles of trail, created a wildlife pond and built an observation platform beside it.

On his way to work every morning, he stopped to walk the trail, from the shade of a mature forest to the open sky where birds, wind and small streams made the only sounds. He looked for animals among the skunk cabbage that could have come from the Jurassic Park set, and amid the impenetrable hardhack with its soft lavender flowers. He marveled at how the wood-chip trail literally floated on top of the light, spongy peat. And he dreamed of a much larger nature park - something that existed in no other city on Puget Sound.

A strange man, Semrau. In those days, before anyone besides scientists used the term "wetland," people spoke of mosquito-breeding marshes, of worthless land waiting to be bent to the human will.

People have done almost everything imaginable to alter Mercer Slough. They've changed its shape; dug channels to drain it; farmed it and dynamited whatever got in the way; laid roads and railroad lines; filled it with pesticides and industrial pollutants; built office buildings, houses and a marina.

The surprise is how much of the slough has survived. Semrau's vision has prevailed on 311 acres. The largest remaining wetland on Lake Washington, it is a refuge for plants and animals, a filter that helps keep the lake clean, a greenbelt beside the Eastside's two busiest freeways, and, just minutes from downtown Seattle, a promise of escape to a primeval world. What once seemed of dubious value is an uncontested natural treasure.

Semrau's successors in the Bellevue Parks Department face a new challenge: how to manage the park so large numbers of people can visit without destroying its habitat value. Parks officials seem confident they can do that. But Mercer Slough has a way of surprising those who come to it with grandiose plans.

THINGS WENT tragically awry for the first white homesteaders, Aaron and Ann Mercer. Aaron built a cabin in 1869 beside the waterway that bears his name. His eighth child, Tommy, was born there. But before his second birthday, Tommy toddled into the slough and drowned. Four months later, the family moved back to Seattle.

For the next 40 years, only a few hardy souls settled along the two-mile-long waterway. Boom times arrived shortly after the turn of the century, when a sawmill set up shop beside the slough. The mill cut most of the old-growth timber from the land between Lake Washington and Lake Sammamish, and shipped the finished lumber by boat and by train. Collapse followed the economic boom. First, the mill lost its water link to Lake Washington when the Army Corps of Engineers opened the Chittenden Locks in 1916. That lowered the lake and slough by nearly nine feet, leaving the mill's wharf perched uselessly above a shrunken stream. The final blow came three years later, when loggers cut the last of the Eastside's trees.

Lowering the lake drained the marshes around Mercer Slough. Hundreds of acres of rich organic soil were suddenly available for farming. Agriculture flourished in the 1920s, with a profusion of vegetable farms, a daffodil and iris bulb business, azalea greenhouses, and a nursery that turned out nationally recognized rhododendron hybrids.

The farmers used dynamite to blast the beaver dams that flooded their land. They blew up logs buried in the peat soil. They formed a drainage district to dredge the slough and keep their farmland dry.

Drying out the saturated land proved more difficult and expensive than anyone anticipated. When landowners could no longer afford the drainage district's steep property tax levy, they disbanded the district and paid bondholders 10 cents on the dollar. All but the most determined farmers eventually gave up. Today, abandoned blueberry farms can be found on both sides of the slough. In what amounts to an agricultural ghost town, the old greenhouses are rotting away and the greenhouse boiler has turned to rust. Once-prized rhododendrons are growing wild in a wooded swamp.

Even for commercial developers backed by all the engineering expertise that money can buy, the slough's soft, wet peat soil has proved a formidable adversary. Consider Norm Volotin's 1970 proposal to build a 127-acre office park and apartment complex, most of it on a 75-acre artificial island.

Volotin hired Max Katz, a University of Washington fisheries professor, to do a biological report. After visiting the future Bellefield Office Park in a tracked, all-terrain vehicle, Katz wrote that he was "particularly impressed with the lack of wildlife of any kind" in the "swampy, low-land jungle. . . This state of development is of no value to anyone unless extensive efforts are made to open up and maintain trails."

Katz called the waterway itself "unattractive, unfishable and unproductive." His recipe for making the slough more productive was to dredge and widen the waterway and to build an office and residential campus.

Volotin built most of his dream. Low-rise buildings are scattered about the island he created, separated by greenbelts with foot paths. Structures cover no more than one-tenth of the land. The developer billed his plan as environmentally sensitive, and by the standards of the time, it probably was.

After Volotin built the office park, however, he encountered problems he hadn't planned on. When the peat was drained, the soil receded, leaving some buildings perched above the ground. Stairways were extended so workers wouldn't have to leap to the ground. Roads and parking lots were rebuilt because they were too heavy and sank in the peat. Southeast Eighth Street, an arterial that crosses the wetlands, also is sinking.

Bill Nye "the science guy" used a flooded parking lot at Bellefield as a backdrop for a TV show on wetlands. "Because of this goofy idea that wetlands are useless," he said in his manic patter, "people have tried all these nutty things. Take a look. What we've got here is a parking lot on top of this 10,000-year-old wetland. It's not working out. In fact the whole place is sinking. . .

"You want to build a building and a parking lot? You might think, `Maybe a wetland isn't the best place to do it 'cause it'll be like - shoop! - gone.' "

Well, not entirely gone. Volotin's engineers had enough sense to put the buildings on pilings that extend through 50 feet of peat to stable soil. Bellefield's problems weren't severe enough to deter other developers from seeing dollar signs in the slough.

THE TURNING POINT came seven years ago, when South Bellevue residents learned that the greenbelt they had taken for granted was in jeopardy. It was the tail end of the office-building craze of the 1980s, and four property owners were poised to pave over 119 acres in the heart of the wetlands. Their plans collided with a growing constituency for the nature park.

Before Semrau retired in 1979, the city and state parks commissions had endorsed his vision and expanded the park to 180 acres. His once-vague goal ("the more land the better") had been refined to a park of about 300 acres, or most of the remaining wetlands.

Neighbors of the slough, meanwhile, began to realize that it was more than a pleasant view on their way to work. They learned that it is the largest wetland on Lake Washington. That it filters pollutants from the creeks that drain most of Bellevue. That it is an important stop for migrating birds on the Pacific Flyway. That it is a passage for salmon and cutthroat trout. That porcupines, foxes, otters and mink still live there. And that, far from being "unfishable and unproductive," the slough is one of Lake Washington's best habitats for largemouth bass.

All this at a time when wetland-dependent animals were in desperate straits around the lake. Seattle's Union Bay and Columbia City wetlands had been used as garbage dumps. Renton's wetlands had been filled. The most devastating loss was caused by the Army Corps of Engineers project in the 1960s to make the crooked places straight along the Sammamish River. The river was shortened by a mile and 2,000 acres of wetlands were destroyed.

Mercer Slough, it appeared, was headed the same way. Angry residents formed the Save the Mercer Slough Committee and turned out in large numbers at community meetings to protest development plans. When city planners said no environmental study was needed for a Northwest Building Corp. office park and retirement center, citizens cried foul - and forced planners to back down.

The key to saving the slough came down to money. Neighborhood activists teamed up with Bellevue and King County parks supporters to win voter approval for city and county parks bonds. By 1990 - 33 years and $11 million after its first acquisition on the slough - the city had assembled what might well be the biggest and best urban wetlands park in the United States.

THE STORY DOESN'T end there. One land-use battle continues.

Dave Fluke, son of Northwest high-tech pioneer John Fluke Sr., has been trying for eight years to build an eight-story hotel on the Sturtevant Creek wetland. He has been stymied by one curmudgeonly citizen, Geoff Bidwell. Bidwell, an English-born engineer and the sparkplug behind the Save Mercer Slough Committee, hauled the city of Bellevue before the state Shorelines Hearings Board when the city granted permits for the hotel. Bidwell won, Fluke appealed, and the case appears headed toward the state Supreme Court.

Like many other property owners around the state, Fluke has been caught short by our changing perceptions of wetlands. Even if he wins the right to build, he says, the battle has cost him so much money he doesn't have "a snowball's chance in an oven" of making a profit. Because the wetland is separated from Mercer Slough by Southeast Eight Street and several office buildings, the city has not offered to buy the property. His predicament is precisely the kind that property-rights advocates wanted to remedy with Referendum 48. The Nov. 7 ballot issue was written to compensate landowners for government actions that reduce the value of their property.

Fluke's view of his wetland is eerily reminiscent of an earlier developer's characterization of Mercer Slough's marshes as a wasteland. Pointing to the inhospitable reed canary grass on the site, he declares, "There's nothing out there that would give protection to any animal of any kind."

A closer look at the site shows willow shoots gnawed by beavers. Across Sturtevant Creek, red-winged blackbirds perch atop cattails as they jockey for territory. Muskrats have been known to crawl out of the water into a Microsoft parking lot.

For all the sound and fury over a hotel that would cover less than one acre of wetland, the bigger question is how Bellevue will manage its park. So far, the results are encouraging. With the help of artificial meadows and ponds, the number of wildlife species is on the upswing. A pair of great blue herons - apparently tuned in to the 1988 park-bond election results - built a nest in an old cottonwood tree where apartments once were planned. Since then, the heron colony has grown to 13 nests.

For most of the million or so people who live within a half hour's drive of Mercer Slough, it remains an undiscovered treasure. While the parking lot at the nearby Bellevue Botanical Garden overflows on sunny weekdays, the slough's modest parking lots remain empty. But word is starting to get out.

Ask Enatai neighborhood residents Larry and Lynn Parker to name their favorite spot in Bellevue and they answer without hesitation: Mercer Slough. "Some people express surprise that I'm interested in this godforsaken swamp, but I love it," says Larry.

The Parker family, including twins Tristan and Rebecca, regularly walk or canoe through the park. They cherish every infrequent encounter with a beaver, weasel, heron, eagle or owl. A special piece of family lore is their memory of a New Year's Eve when they heard the screaming sirens of fire engines - and then the haunting sound of the slough's coyotes howling in accompaniment.

What is most striking about Mercer Slough is not its isolation but rather its persistence in the face of intense urban activity. Two state wetlands specialists were observing a marsh from an office complex when a mobile espresso stand pulled up. "Where else can you buy a latte while you rate a wetland?" one asked his colleague. "Only in Bellevue."

The slough has yet to face what may be its greatest challenge: How can it accommodate large numbers of visitors without compromising its solitude or its habitat value? Nearly every passing canoe startles herons and sends them flying for safety. The park master plan shows artificial canoe trails, hiking trails almost everywhere, and a five-building, $6 million interpretive center. "The only thing that appears to be neglected is provision for affordable housing," grumbled one of the few skeptics.

The park hasn't yet been overdeveloped. But when it is "discovered" by the public, it may not be so easy to protect its soil, plants and wildlife. Mercer Slough has survived the Army Corps of Engineers, the farmers and the office-park developers. Park advocates have accomplished what their counterparts elsewhere haven't been able to do. They have saved a major, functioning wetland in a urban area. The trick now is to keep it that way.

Keith Ervin is a reporter for The Seattle Times. Tom Reese is a Times photographer.