2015-07-23 47 -122

Location

On 65th, a few blocks up from Sandpoint and the Burke-Gilman Trail.

Participants

Thomcat

Plans

Initial scouting before work. Will also snap photos of the trail and the park.

Expedition

Drove right past this spot yesterday (twice) and the day before, but I don't routinely wander onto front lawns and snap pictures. Then again, I already have the perfect Déjà Vu geohash.

I drove back to the spot today with open eyes, looking for interesting things. Found plenty! First, Bryant Park (across from the Puget Sound Consumers Co-op). Next, I spotted a Little Free Library (Charter #21770, the "Bad Dog" library) with no books at present.

Arriving at the spot, I saw an unusual thing immediately - a parking meter! Seattle meters have mostly been removed, replaced with large boxes that exchange credit card info for little stickers. This one was labeled "Wishing Meter" and was expired. For good geohash luck, I added a dime (which granted me approximately 10 minutes of wishes).

Immediately next door was a raised bed devoted to some sort of vegetables and, at the corner of that, the geohash point. I danced with glee and then danced again as the point drifted several meters away - too many clouds perhaps? Eventually I snapped and uploaded appropriate pictures from the spot and nearby. These include one angled down the hill, towards the trail and the park.

Seattle's Burke Gilman Trail runs around a quarter of Lake Washington, leading from Ballard to Bothell. In 1885 Judge Thomas Burke, Daniel Gilman and ten other investors set out to establish a Seattle-based railroad. Their plan was to continue this line north of Bothell to Sumas and eventually connect with the Canadian Transcontinental line. Their Seattle, Lake Shore and Eastern Railroad, though it never got past Arlington, Washington, was a major regional line serving Puget Sound logging areas - it was acquired by Northern Pacific in 1913 and continued in fairly heavy use until 1963. In 1971 Burlington Northern applied to abandon the line, and shortly after a major chunk of this was purchased by Seattle and turned into a multi-use recreational path. Many bicycle commuters use it today to travel along the northern corridor.

I wasn't going to be traveling that way today, however - not enough time and too many more spots to visit. Also, the trail fragments heavily into Ballard, requiring surface street interactions with many motor vehicles. Instead, I coasted further downhill into the park.

Magnuson Park is 350 acres of beach, sports field, kite hill and off-leash dog park in what used to be a Naval Air Station. The sports fields are where I was the previous two evenings, umpiring baseball games. The field was still unlocked (and the mount not-yet tarped, tsk tsk!) so I wandered to home plate for another few photos. 800 meters from the geohash point, not quite in my office (so to speak) but darn close.

Leaving the games previously, I noticed the pond (many areas of Sandpoint are also wetlands) had been drained for some reason. I blame the Californians. Anyhow, I took advantage of this opportunity to go look where foul balls have frequently traveled. I found hundreds of them, some clearly socked into the dried mud, others that had floated free. The many baseballs were in various states of decay, but I will observe that the laces are clearly the first thing to go. After time, the balls are about the same color as the mud, so spotting them in my photo may be difficult - but I saw at least 10 in that shot alone.

Bidding farewell to Thursday morning fun, I headed off to work. My job that afternoon - puppeteer!