Tukwila, WA

Tukwila Interurban/Green River Trails

Run Time: 60:28 + 2-minute kick

This was a great day all around. I hit all 5 of my sales stops and had quality visits, plus made it to 3 more optional stops. It was one of those perfect summer days in the Northwest – 75 degrees, sunny, light breeze. Rain earlier in the week had left all of the foliage clean and crisp. I drove with the window down for stretches. Glorious.

I stayed at the Courtyard by Marriott, which was clean and beautiful and new, a far cry from the America’s Best Value Inn in Kelso, where I stayed the night before. The Tukwila Interurban Trail ran right behind the hotel. Just what we want. It snaked around and under a freeway, where the smell of urine was strong, but then it met the Green River Trail and stayed away from the rush hour traffic.

I ran past soccer fields and industrial yards and mud banks and blackberry bushes. Ah, blackberry bushes, my old friend. It was good to see you again. I have spent much of my life in close proximity to blackberry bushes. As a kid we used clippers and hockey sticks to slash tunnels in the berry bushes in the field below our house. When the berries ripened, we’d pick them at their sweetest plumpness, and my mom would bake blackberry pies. I got many, many scratches from blackberry bushes. The thorns have some kind of natural defense nastiness to them that reddens the welts and reminds you to take care when you mess with them.

Blackberries are a nuisance plant, and they will grow quickly right where you just cleared some other brush, or where there has been a fire. In the 1930s and 1940s there were 3 major forest fires in the Tillamook Forest in Oregon, and it basically burned 200 square miles of old growth timber to the ground. My dad was a kid then, and they would go up into the mountains after the fire, and he said they were covered in blackberry bushes. By the time I was hunting elk with him in 1976, that forest was mature again and looked like it had been like that for years. One of my favorite places in the world, the Tillamook Forest. Nothing like it.

Maybe the Olympic Peninsula on the other side of the Puget Sound is lot like the Tillamook Forest. I’ve never been there. You can be out walking in the Tillamook Forest for a half-hour, an hour-and-a-half drive from a large city, and you will look around and know that no human being has ever stepped right where you are stepping that moment. Maybe someone from the Chinook Tribe 400 years ago, but even then probably on the trail nearby and not between the cedar and the fir you’re walking between, ducking under the old hemlock log that fell and created a root crater fifteen feet deep.

I just got the email with the link to the drawing results for hunting elk in Michigan (I did not draw a tag). There is a large elk herd in Michigan, maybe 1000 elk, they think. In Oregon, there are probably a 1000 elk harvested by hunters every year. Hunting elk in Michigan is basically a once in a lifetime thing. If you draw an either sex tag and do not shoot a bull, you can apply again 10 years later. If you draw a bull only tag, that’s it for life. No more applying, even if your hunt is unsuccessful. In Western Oregon, most of the hunting units are still wide open, non-draw. I could fly to Oregon the day before elk season, buy an out-of-state license and tag, and hunt elk the next day. And I might.

One of the coolest things about the Tillamook Forest is that the mountains are killers – steep, crumbly, majestic – and yet the highest elevation in the Forest is under 4000 feet above sea level. From the top peaks and ridges on a clear day, you can look west and see the Pacific Ocean. Some of the canyons look like they go below sea level. When you’re in the bottom of one and have to climb your way back out, on a cold, windy, rainy day in November, you find out the true nature of your physical and mental ability and endurance.

The elk can be hard to find in Western Oregon. They are there, but there is ample cover. I have hunted for an entire four-day elk season and not seen a single elk. Multiple times. In nearly 40 years of elk hunting there, I have taken five bulls. I am not culling the herd by any means. The herd is culling me. I hunt alone a lot, which my wife does not like. As I get older, the danger of being out in the woods alone grows. I am aware of that. I am more careful about where I step and how far I wander.

What does all this have to do with the Tukwila Interurban Trail? Not a whole hell of a lot. I could blather on about elk hunting in the Tillamook Forest for 200,000 words if you’re up to it. Let’s go!