Spring is in the air, spring robins are out early getting the worm and Nature Consortium is ready to spring into action to celebrate Earth Day on April 21st.  Spring conjures up ideas of rebirth, renewal, and revitalization; plants bud, flowers bloom and the natural world springs to life.  Earth Day is an opportunity to celebrate the beauty and bounty of spring as well as that of Mother Earth.  To celebrate Earth Day, Nature Consortium will be partnering with EarthCorps to host close to 600 volunteers during Duwamish Alive at Pigeon Point Park to do restoration work removing invasive plant species and spreading mulch in the West Duwamish Greenbelt.

Nature Consortium is one of several organizations participating in Duwamish Alive hosting a restoration event along the Duwamish River on Earth Day.  Duwamish Alive collaborates with community, municipalities, non-profits and businesses within the Duwamish River watershed to preserve and enhance habitat for people and wildlife working towards improving the health of Puget Sound.  Volunteers up and down the river will unite to restore our river during a day of collective action and impact.

Earth Day provides a unique opportunity for the community and the natural environment to harmonize together, the 7th annual Duwamish Alive Earth Day event will be a day of fun and action.   After registration, volunteers will follow leaders from Nature Consortium and EarthCorps into the forest at Pigeon Point Park to perform restoration work.  Sleeves will get rolled up and hands dirty as volunteers remove invasive plant species like Himalayan blackberry and English ivy restoring Seattle’s largest contiguous forest.  Local musicians will join the celebration and stewardship of the earth accompanying the restoration work playing music and spreading joy.

After the hard work finishes up, volunteers from all of the Duwamish Alive sites will join the volunteers with Nature Consortium and EarthCorps at Pigeon Point to celebrate Earth Day and the hard work during Duwamish Alive!  Volunteers from the other sites will arrive at Pigeon Point Park for the Earth Day and Duwamish Alive festival from 2:30pm-3:30pm.  Free pizza and drinks will be provided to satisfy hungry appetites after a hard day’s work.  Music will continue and there will be free giveaways during the festivities.

Connect with Nature Consortium and Duwamish Alive during Earth Day and help restore our river and our forest.  Good times and fun will be had by all!  Sign up on our page to volunteer and check out the rest of Duwamish Alive website to find out more information about the event.  Do something good for yourself, your community and your planet by making a difference with Nature Consortium this Earth Day on April 21st!

We are amped at Nature Consortium to be partnering with EarthCorps to do restoration work at Pigeon Point Park in the West Duwamish Greenbelt as part of Duwamish Alive on April 21st! As our day for collective restoration draws near, we are getting excited to work with 500 generous volunteers at our site to restore Seattle’s largest contiguous forest.  Stretching nearly 500 acres from Alki Beach to Burien, the West Duwamish Greenbelt is indicative of Seattle’s forests as it is under threat from the presence of invasive plant species.  As part of the Duwamish watershed, restoring the West Duwamish Greenbelt’s health will go a long way in furthering the restoration on the river and its continued rejuvenation.   The restoration work happening at Pigeon Point will be one of 10 sites along the Duwamish River working to restore the river and watershed on April 21stduring Duwamish Alive!

As volunteers flood the Duwamish watershed with passion and dedication, volunteers with Nature Consortium and EarthCorps will remove invasive plant species at Pigeon Point Park in West Seattle.  Before the restoration gets started we’ll have coffee and breakfast items donated by REI for volunteers so everyone can get fueled up and ready to work.  Leaders from Nature Consortium and EarthCorps will instruct volunteers on what restoration activities will take place, introduce tools and tool safety, and demonstrate how best to restore the forest during the day before leading volunteers into the forest.

Duwamish Alive is always a lot fun, not just sweat and toil!  Musicians will be joining us in the forest at Pigeon Point to fill our ears with joyful noise as we get down and dirty yanking out invasive blackberry and ivy.  Guitars, clarinets and beautiful voices will shine down to create a fun and lively day of restoration.  There are few things more enjoyable and rewarding than working side by side with a fellow volunteer, jamming to good tunes and making a difference for Mother Earth.  Grab friends, family or co-workers and enjoy a day making a difference in the community.

After the restoration is over the celebrations will continue.    Volunteers from the other nine Duwamish Alive sites will join us at Pigeon Point Park to celebrate all of the wonderful work accomplished during the day.  There will be free food and drinks for everyone, music will continue to entertain, and hats sporting the Duwamish Alive logo will be available at the celebration.  Food, music and schwag will make for a fun afternoon of restoration and celebration.  It’s going to be a collective day of fun and impact.  Get ready to work with EarthCorps and Nature Consortium on April 21st to restore our river during Duwamish Alive!

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Five years ago, when I started at Forterra (formerly Cascade Land Conservancy), Pieter Bohen, then Stewardship Director, was excited to show me one of the properties I would soon become intimately involved with, the Duwamish Hill Preserve. He described it to me, with unwavering enthusiasm, as an 8.5-acre preserve on the Duwamish River, ecologically, culturally and geologically significant, truly a gem. I couldn’t wait to see it. What he’d forgotten to mention, however, is that it was a diamond in the rough, and I mean rough.

What I saw on my first visit was a hill of invasive Scots broom and Himalayan blackberry; piles of garbage dumped decades ago including rusted car bodies, mattresses, and tires; and, rutted trails created by ORV’s all over the property. The very active police firing range just to the north added to my awareness of the fact that this property is in the middle of a heavily industrialized area.

Why would anyone want to preserve this property?

As I learned the story and got to know the place, I began to understand the answer to that question.

In 2001, the Hill was slated to be dynamited to make room for more industry. Recognizing the potential of this place, a group of community members banded together to form the Friends of the Hill and together with the Cascade Land Conservancy and the City of Tukwila worked tirelessly over the next three years to preserve the site. In March of 2004, the property was successfully acquired and is now owned by the City of Tukwila.

A lot has happened in the intervening years.

Right away, small groups of volunteers began to hold work parties to begin to chip away at the invasives and the garbage. In 2006, a master planning process engaged the local community in envisioning what the Hill might become for the City of Tukwila and the region. The community focused on how to highlight the unique elements of this place and how to provide an experience for visitors worthy of the cultural and ecological significance this site holds.

The Hill is an unusual outcropping of bedrock rising above the Duwamish River that precedes the glaciers of the last ice age.  It is culturally significant for its association with southern Puget Sound Salish oral tradition and history, as a key location in the stories collectively known as the “Epic of the Winds.” Ecologically, a large portion of the Hill historically supported a unique rocky bald habitat – a habitat which occurs on exposed slopes with shallow soils that commonly support mosses, lichens and a significant diversity of herbaceous plants. Community members wanted to create an educational resource, recognizing the opportunity to use the Hill as a place to learn about topics ranging from watershed science and restoration to archaeology and ethnobotony.

With the completion of the Master Plan in May of 2007, work began in earnest on the Hill to achieve the community’s vision. What had been work parties of 6-10 people grew to regular work parties of 25 or 60 volunteers. Soon hundreds of volunteers had logged thousands of hours removing invasives and replanting natives. Rutted paths have been converted to formal trails. An outdoor classroom has been created in the heart of the Hill, and small gathering areas afford views from the Seattle skyline to Mt. Rainier. The Hill is starting to look a lot different.

I also fell in love with the place for all of its uniqueness. Had I only visited it that first time, I never would have loved it the way I do now having seen it on its way to reaching all of the potential that motivated the Friends of the Hill to fight for its preservation.

Join Forterra, the City of Tukwila and Friends of the Hill at the Duwamish Alive! volunteer event at the Hill on April 21, 2012 to help in the ongoing stewardship of this special place.

By Hayes Swinney
Land Stewardship Director

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Hero for a Day 2011: Rescuing a Seattle River

Hundreds of volunteers help revitalize and restore the Duwamish River, which runs through Seattle on its way to Puget Sound and is home to four species of salmon. For more information click here.

From Field and Stream – “The way we see it, anyone can be a hero to fish and game or its habitat. Any volunteer who endeavors to give back to the places where he or she has spent so many good days hunting and fishing is a Hero For a Day. This year, Field & Stream has chosen ten conservation-focused projects, happening all over the country, to highlight on our website and in the magazine. Whether large or small in scale we think that they are all important and we’re counting on the support of our volunteer Heroes to make them happen. Answer the call and become a good steward of the environment by volunteering with a project near you.”

Experiencing an error with the video above? Click here.

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Rex Ray, Puget Soundkeeper Alliance volunteer extraordinaire, created this video during the October 15, 2011 Duwamish Alive event and generously shared it with us. You too can participate in this rocking event – check out the Duwamish Waterway Park site for details!

“The Duwamish River, once the hub of Seattle’s industrial prosperity, is now a superfund site which has captured the hearts of the neighboring community. Although the Suquamish Tribe currently hold and use fishing rights to the river, most locals refuse to take fish from the Duwamish due to the historic levels of hazardous pollutants such as polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs), oil, mercury, lead, (and other heavy metals), dioxin, pesticides, arsenic, and even raw sewage. For all the prosperity brought upon Seattle by this waterway, the “thanks” given back by big-business has been years of abuse and disrespect.

Twice a year, hundreds of volunteers clean up debris and re-plant native species of plants along the areas surrounding the Green River/Duwamish waterway. We’re proud to help with restoring the natural habitat of the Duwamish so that future generations of animals and humans can enjoy it’s magnificence! Thanks to everyone who took part in the cleanup. Together, we can return our precious river to it’s former beauty!” – Rex Ray

Ever wanted to go on a hike through the forest, but didn’t want to leave the city?  Well Longfellow Creek is the destination for you.  Running through the Delridge Valley in West Seattle, this destination has a lot to offer.   Boasting a 4 mile trail from its headwaters at Roxhill Bog Park running north almost to the Duwamish River, Longfellow Creek will make you feel as if you were right in the Cascade or Olympic mountains.  The forest surrounding Longfellow Creek is home to many different species of mammals and birds as well as a fledgling salmon run.  So how did this forest oasis come to be?

In the late 90’s Seattle Public Utilities undertook a massive day lighting project of Longfellow Creek.  Work included re-channelizing the creek bed, adding more complexity to the path that the creek took, giving it a more natural look.  The project also included the addition of habitat features that includes large woody debris in the stream, weirs to create pools in the creek channel and planting native trees and shrubs along the creek banks, which is known as the riparian zone.  All of the work helped to create a more natural environment surrounding the creek.

In the early 2000’s with pressure and efforts from local neighbors the City of Seattle began construction of the Longfellow Creek Legacy Trail.  The project combined efforts from local volunteers and Seattle Parks and Rec to create a trail that would take people from the headwaters of the Longfellow watershed to its outlet into the Duwamish.  Along the trail are great examples of natural habitats and features that would naturally occur along a pristine stream.  Visitors of the trail can see wetlands, conifer forests, a beaver pond and art installations all along the trail.  The Legacy trail also connects several existing city parks.

For the last 6 years the King Conservation District has worked to restore a 12 acre area known as the Brandon Street Natural Area (BSNA).  The forested area has part of Longfellow Creek flowing through it, but also has a forested wetland as well as a young forest that is developing.  Over the last several years 1,000’s of trees and shrubs have been planted, 100’s of yards of wood chips have been spread and 100’s of tons of invasive weeds have been removed.  All of these accomplishments were only reached because of the hard work of volunteers.  Without the help of volunteers this urban jewel would not be what it is today.

Come check out all the work that has been accomplished and lend a hand to a forest that will be here for generations to come.  Join the King Conservation District and our partners and get involved with Duwamish Alive and be a part of this living legacy!

- Adam Jackson, King Conservation District

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