Meadowdale Beach updates give fish, hikers more room to roam
EDMONDS — After nearly two decades of planning and two years of intermittent closures for renovations, Meadowdale Beach in Edmonds is back open. The park’s coastline provides key habitat for salmon recovery, but project managers say human visitors will find plenty of updates to enjoy, too.
The park, located 7 miles north of downtown Edmonds, is a swath of lush green forest surrounded by the bustle of traffic and neighborhoods. To get to the beach itself, you’ll have to park at the top and hike about a mile down to the water. But most visitors find the trek is worth it once they reach the shore, said Rob Marchand, a senior park planner with Snohomish County Parks and Recreation.
In the last stretch of your stroll, though, you’ll find a narrow concrete tunnel is the last obstacle before the beach. It’s the only way to safely bypass the BNSF train tracks running parallel to the coastline, but after heavy rains, it’s prone to flooding, sometimes enough to submerge the entire park waterfront. To avoid the waterlogged crossing, visitors would sometimes scramble over the tracks instead, Marchand said.
The Chinook salmon that visit the park each year faced a similar bottleneck. Lunds Gulch Creek flows through the park and into Puget Sound, and the estuary where the two meet provides crucial habitat for young salmon making their way to the ocean, said Elisa Dawson, a county surface water management planner. Before making the final leap into the Pacific, the fish will spend time in the brackish estuary growing, feeding and preparing for the transition to saltwater.
https://www.heraldnet.com/news/meadowdale-beach-updates-give-fish-hikers-more-room-to-roam/