Westside Park

There was this place, just down the street from the house I grew up in, that was the best to play in the world. Westside Park, right on 156th between the Banks' house and The Meadows housing development. There was playground equipment and a play field, and a great huge thicket of blackberry bushes cut through with tunnels and forts. The focal point of the park was the trails and the woods. Pardon me, The Woods. The park was developed near 156th but then it stretched all the way down to Marymoor Park to the east. The Woods were situated covering a wooded gully with trails on the south ridge and down the middle, kind of. The trails on the south side of The Woods went all the way to Marymoor, the ones in the middle petered out about halfway down. Looking at it now on Google Maps, The Woods look entirely too small.

Is it possible that the park shrank in the lat 20-30 years? Global warming?

The Woods were huge when we were kids. We would spend hours down there, doing who knows what, but having a great time doing it. Stinging nettles were a risk, the old well (a giant ring of concrete) was a spooky old thing to explore, and the trails were fantastic. They were narrow and slippery in the rain, and running down them or racing down them on bikes was like nothing else. It was a gas. We had dirt clod fights (Deano and Shawn), firework fights (Dean and Andy), and the best snowball fight ever (The Honeywell family).

At some point, someone hung a huge heavy rope from a branch near the well. It was the best, and most dangerous, rope swing I have ever used. The take off and landing was a super steep bank and the apex of the swing was out over this huge concrete cylinder. You could play it safe and take off low and not get a lot of height, or you could get a running start and peak out about thirty or more feet over the floor of the gully. People were doing crazy stunts; hanging on with one hand, flipping upside down, riding two at a time. It was way too much fun. Until Jeff Peterson fell off over the creek that ran down the middle and had to be pulled out by the Redmond Fire Department. The firemen went to length of cutting the rope swing down. Someone hung it back up soon after that, but it was never the same. The Woods were, but the rope swing became more of a legend than anything else.

Several years ago, right around the time my parents were selling the house on 156th, I went back down to the park to see what had changed. The blackberry bushes were mostly gone and the trails had all been 'improved' to wide gravel walking trails, in order to improve access to The Woods. Everything in The Woods seemed so much smaller to me. As a kid this was a HUGE expanse of forest, some place that you could get lost in for hours on end. As an adult you realized that you could see housing developments and houses from one end of The Woods to the other. These houses had always been there, it was that as kids you were able to block them out of your sight and not let them get in the way of your fantasy land.

Westside Park and The Woods were the best playground a kid could ask for. Name me another place where you and a friend could build a scale model of a suspension bridge and then blow it up with fireworks (Andy and I). Just because you wanted to see what would happen.

It was a great place to spend a childhood and I wonder where that place will be in my kids memory.