Washington Trails Association’s professional trail crews recently built a staircase in Spokane’s High Drive Bluff Park trail system. The new staircase, also known as the Rocket Gulch Stairs, replaces a steep gully, providing safe and more sustainable access to the southern end of the park. Friends of the Bluff and the City of Spokane worked in collaboration with WTA to make the project possible. As of this fall, the stairs are officially open for use.
- Trail advocates make it happen
- “The stairs have been on our agenda for approximately ten years. Jeff Lambert gets a lot of credit, as the immediate past president, for initiating the work on the stairs. Jeff called about 10 different people to find a suitable place for the WTA crew to camp and did a lot of work behind the scenes,” said Laura Ackerman, president of Friends of the Bluff.
- “We are thankful for the help of the City of Spokane Parks and Recreation, the Parks Foundation, WTA, and the Friends of the Bluff Board and supporters.”
High Drive Bluff Park is the premier trail system in the South Hill neighborhood of Spokane. It’s popular with neighborhood hikers and dog walkers, and serves as the main trail system for the local mountain biking community (some users bike to the park right from home). But most of the trailheads are in the upper half of the park, and the trail that was replaced by the staircase was steep, treacherous to navigate and prone to erosion. This renovation provides formalized neighborhood access.
“The entire south portion of the trail network was lacking in access from the north and east. There was an access trail, but it was narrow — bordered closely on either side by private property — steep and unsafe. Building the stairs will allow more people to spend more time enjoying the trail rather than driving or walking on roadway,” said Dorothy Tibbetts, a volunteer coordinator with Friends of the Bluff.
Friends of the Bluff is a community-based organization that helps steward the park. They recognized the issues with safety and accessibility and worked hard to get the project off the ground. And as the scope and size of the project came together, it became clear it would require a consistent team of highly skilled trail workers to tackle some of the more technical complexities involved. That’s where WTA’s professional Lost Trails Found crews came in…