What a Difference Two Days Make: Closing A Trail Loop in Puyallup

By Alan Carter Mortimer

The City of Puyallup has an extensive system of urban parks, complete with greenspaces, and a network of trails. This spring, when weather kept us in the low country, WTA volunteers spent a weekend constructing a short section of trail which provided the missing link to complete the 5.5-mile Clarks Creek Park loop, linking six City of Puyallup parks together with a soft-surface hiking trail.

The route includes six parks and open spaces: Clarks Creek Park, Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife's Clarks Creek Open Space, Dead Man’s Pond Open Space, Brown Community Garden Park, Silver Creek Open Space and Meeker Creek Open Space.  

It's amazing how fast you can accomplish a lot of work with a few volunteers and tools! Photo by Emma Cassidy. 

Many of the trails making up the loop already existed, following urban soft-surface trails of varying character with a few short connections between trails using sidewalks or surface streets with little traffic and city sidewalks. But the City of Puyallup wanted to make the parks more user-friendly, so they created walking routes connecting these trails. 

It was a great way to get some exercise and explore some gems within the City of Puyallup, but there was something missing. Between Brown Community Garden Park and Silver Creek Open Space the city had purchased a parcel of land without an official trail.

The loop offers several trailheads and allows visitors to enjoy a 5.5 mile stretch of trail. Photo courtesy City of Puyallup.

They scoped a potential route (shown above), and through the mostly-open plot of land, and WTA got to work. Over two days, the crew laid out the trail, dug up sod, removed lots of roots, hauled gravel to surface the trail and packed it down to make a pleasant walking surface.

The weekend of hard work resulted 600 feet of beautiful finished trail -- an impressive amount of work for just a couple of days! The project helped the City of Puyallup offer a much longer loop hike; making Puyallup more walkable.