Nature Is Paramount

There’s a park you don’t know. It’s not on any main thoroughfare. No bus goes by it. It has two things, though, that make all the difference: one of the only reasonably intact peat bogs left in Shoreline and a neighborhood group intent on its restoration and success.

Its border ambles around between 10^th Ave NE and 12^th Ave NE and NE 152^nd St and NE 146^th St, encompassing Shoreline’s southern reach of Little’s creek, before it passes in a culvert under NE 145^th St to the Jackson Park Golf Course. It is the Paramount Park Open Space.

It was logged many years ago and reseeded naturally, as there was no mandate to replant clearcuts in those days. Later, it was haphazardly developed, a few houses here, a few there, and then King County, using Forward Thrust bond monies established it, dug out the drainage and planted a bunch of (non-native) poplars. Then it was pretty much ignored for 25 years and went back to nature. Mr. Littles (the family whose name is on Littles Creek) and others tried again to develop the property in the late eighties/early nineties, but this time the new Paramount Park Neighborhood Group stepped up to stop it, advocating for a larger park and for various improvements to the wetlands, habitat, and trails. They won, mostly, and got enough funding from the Parks Levy to buy out the threatened subdivision. Another development did go through, but things look stable now.

The park is fed by Littles Creek and a couple of its tiny tributaries running in different channels through one original peat bog, one reconstructed marsh/bog, and two more recently constructed ponds, each of which feeds back into the main Littles Creek channel before it disappears beneath NE 145^th St and into Seattle. The park culverts installed back around 1970 were inadequate and today are regularly overtopped by runoff after big rains. This damages water quality, stream quality and the trail itself, which is steadily eroding away. One culvert took the stream out of its natural bed, but a new pipe puts the creek back and restores the wetland. Just east of the little parking lot (at the end of NE 147^th St, off 8th Ave NE) there is a nature trail which allows quiet viewing of the ponds and all the wildlife they nurture, including Pileated Woodpeckers, Pacific Tree Frogs, and many other species. Remember to keep your dog(s) leashed to save the wildlife.

Despite large areas overrun with alien invasive plants like Himalayan Blackberries, Holly, and English Ivy there is some very good habitat to be found. Some of that, around the ponds, is thanks to a lot of good design and very hard work, and it has resulted in one of the best stretches of fish-ready streambed in the city. If we can remove the manmade barriers to fish passage (as Washington State Law requires) it is ready for salmon once again.

Paramount Park Open Space has slipped by under “benign neglect”, according to Janet Way, former Shoreline city councilmember and founding member of Paramount Park Neighborhood Group. While that group has kept it from being overrun and allowed time for nature to repair some of the past’s insults, it hasn’t received the support it needs. On her list of important projects is replacing the old pipes with fish-friendly ‘box culverts’, fixing the trails, removing the remaining stands of invasives, and removing the fill- a soggy lawn- which now chokes some of the original wetland.