It might be hard to believe, but this modest park helped build Seattle. Supplying coal to a rapidly expanding population across the lake, the Newcastle mine that used to operate here fueled the region’s explosive growth at the end of the 19th century. Today, the park still serves the city, but as a refuge from the urban sprawl it once spawned, with a trail through a narrow creek ravine leading to two waterfalls and several excellent historical sites. The trail through Coal Creek Park is surely one of the most surprising hikes anywhere around Puget Sound. Featuring several waterfalls, a small canyon, and an environment typical of the Cascade foothills, the park stretches the boundary between the suburbs of Bellevue and the natural areas of the Issaquah Alps, a green finger pointing from the foot of Cougar Mountain through the rows of houses along Lake Washington’s eastern shore. The greater Seattle area is blessed with many excellent urban hikes, each offering a quick escape from the local neighborhood. What makes Coal Creek Park so unusual, though, is not that it is an undeveloped island in a sea of civilization but that only a century ago it was just the opposite. In the late 1800s, when virgin forest still reached all the way to the shores of Elliot Bay and today’s Eastside was mostly untracked wilderness, the park was the site of the Newcastle coal mine—a substantial industrial operation that, if it were still standing, would overwhelm even the busy neighborhoods that currently surround it. As you hike the trail, watch for remaining vestiges of the mining days, clues to the story of Newcastle coal. Yet the most compelling story in the park is undoubtedly the extent to which nature has reclaimed the land. Most of the time, it’s difficult to imagine that any human development ever took place here at all.
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