Tuesday, March 1, 2011

Exploring Green River Natural Resources Area


So the new apartment is about six miles from work and I’d noticed a couple markers for trails at both ends. I was wondering if they might connect and perhaps biking to work might be something available in the future. Most of the internet resources I found suggested this was the case but they stop short of what I need to be sure. Saturday I decided to try out a new set of insoles and walk to the Green River Natural Resources trail head. From there I would wander down that path to see where it connected to the Interurban Trail. Later in the week I thought I might take a walking lunch, find the closest Interurban Trail connection and see how far I get coming from the opposite direction.


The Green River trail is through a wet lands and provides a living space for many creatures within the local urban sprawl. Here you can see trying my pathetic zoom lens again to capture the image of a bald eagle perched on a utility tower right above me. Most assuredly he was ready to swoop down on any rabbit, mouse or creature of similar size as his afternoon meal.


This map turns out to be handy and I need to go back and take a bigger picture of it to meet my biking routing aspirations. You can see the big loop called the Lakes Trail. I live on that man made lake and walk around it every early morning with the wonder dog. So you can see Saturdays progress as I walked to 64th avenue, to the Puget Power Trail, to the Green River trail and ended at Van Doren’s Landing Park. I took this picture before I made the turn around and it is amazing this picture stops at that point.


The east trail is covered mostly with sandbags as a protection against winter flooding. Only a few inches of that side of the trail are exposed for walking.



So I tried to cross the bridge to the trail without sand bags. Thing is the bridge is one of the wire mesh kind and that totally freaks bogie out. His eyes must miss the details of the grading and appears to him that we are walking on thin air. So I decided this time to venture down the side with the sand bags.


So this is where we turned around for this excursion. I would imagine we walked about three miles before turning around for a total of six miles of exercise. It is nice to know a park is in the middle in case I have bike problems or need to use the rest room on the way to work. I haven’t ridden a bike to work in about twenty years, so this is still a theoretical assumption but one I like dancing around in my noggin.

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