Embrace an old place to make it new and lovely again

What a pleasant surprise to arrive at Lake Isabella State Park the other day and see that the main trail system was 99% litter-free. I also noted several cars at the trailhead parking lot - I was expecting none - and soon realized that good ol' Lake Isabella was embracing the first waves of spring 2022 as a most healthy and welcoming park.

From the surprising sample of visitors I saw, I estimated the park playing host daily to dozens of hikers and dedicated dog walkers.

I hadn't visited the park in more than two years. It was somewhat on the decline during my last time there, with its champion oak that towered over a grove of gnarled apple trees succumbing to layers of party trash. Shading a secluded spot that featured a classic tire swing and pleasant picnic table, the poor old oak was getting buried in bottles, cans and plastic wrappers apparently too difficult to carry out the same way they were carried in.

Sadly, the oak itself is gone. It toppled over the past year or so, landing square on the picnic table and both now lay in a lovers' suicide embrace. Huge limbs, which once supported three or more children in their elbows aloft, lay crushed into sections on the ground, the massive trunk under a pile of its own arms.

Kiter's paradise

A chief feature of Lake Isabella State Park is its enormous, rolling central field. It is large enough to host a Woodstock-size music festival, open to the skies and covered in waving grasses - a kite flyer's paradise.One trail loops through a former tree farm on the other side of the road. Another main trail follows the field's perimeter along the eastern edge, circling eventually toward the lake, then crossing diagonally back to the trailhead through the center of the field, like a rural Kansas two-lane rolling between rows of tall corn.

Safety in numbers

Happy to have 12 litter carriers on my Saturday TrashMash pickup event but disappointed, ironically, that there was no trash, I led the posse from Lake Isabella to the City Center Shelton exit, and onward to the closed gate at Miles Sand and Gravel.

Along here is a 1-mile stretch of former Simpson Railroad tracks that run to a trestle crossing Goldsborough Creek, then continue through mostly wooded terrain another 8 miles or so to the old Simpson Mill 5, now closed, on the road to Lake Nahwatzel.

These are the tracks that, for years, halted automobile traffic on Railroad Avenue as a fresh load of logs rumbled in-bound to the waiting, whirling teeth of Simpson's saws, or, just as often, brought the railroad crossing arms down as flat car after flat car wheeled out of town, loaded with pale, fresh-milled, sweet-smelling lumber.

No more will we hear the train whistle, the railroad crossing's warnings and the grinding of steel wheels.

Shelter, rest, rust

The rusty old tracks make an easy trail to follow. Hundreds of feet of wooden flume, hollow and wrapped in tin ribbon like an elongated barrel, follow beside the tracks. (This was once a source of water for the mill, I believe.) The top planks are missing from several portions and you can see inside the wooden tunnel, which is wide enough to hold a sleeping adult, easily.

Indeed, along with fallen leaves, we find old clothing inside the flumes, as well as bottles, cans and food wrappers.

Farther on we come upon the first of several small camps abandoned recently. Clothing, blankets, sleeping bags, pieces of nylon or plastic tarp - all of it wet, some of it reeking. My crew is phenomenally fast and efficient, scraping the area down to the dirt, rooting out tuna cans, tin foil trays, plastic forks and broken glass.

A yell goes up when one of us finds needles. I've learned to rejoice when I find a bottle of Starbucks Frappuccino or Mickey's wide-mouth malt liquor with their caps still on; they make the perfect container for holding hypodermic syringes.

Certain "laws of litter" become slowly clear to me, and one is The Law of City Limits and Where the Shadows Go. For the most part, people seeking shelter outside also are seeking seclusion. You need to hide so you can rest, and you don't want to be making and breaking camp daily. That's why the wooded, industrial and uninviting areas of a city's outer limits draw those who live on the edge.

But the reverse is true, too. A scary, wooded, industrial or otherwise uninviting area can be "born again" and reclaimed as a safe and vibrant public trail or park.

Lake Isabella was far from becoming a homeless encampment, but not long ago it did have problems with litter and neglect. With the new state park sign, trash can and regular pickup service, its newfound hygiene has inspired more hikers to visit, and those visitors, in turn, have motivated the party-goers and litterers to find someplace else.

Camp busters: Who you gonna call?

We cross the Goldsborough trestle and walk farther up the tracks. TrashMasher Gale Glenn has cautioned us about a large homeless camp a short distance ahead. It is a huge enterprise of tarps, tents, ropes, bundles of blankets, food and drink containers scattered over a muddy hillside with a small stream running through it. We find so many syringes that all we can do is contain them in a large plastic box.

We do not take down the tents and structures, but only remove the most obvious trash, including bicycle wheels without tires. There is too much to carry out. We leave a giant pile of plastic bags on the tracks.

Note to self: Who do I contact when the trash is too much? Who will come get this stuff, who will care?

We double back and follow a spur trail downstream to the Goldsborough Creek Trail and Hillburn Preserve. This old trail, rejuvenated and reclaimed with the help of the Capitol Land Trust, is going through the same "beauty renaissance" as another of their Mason County projects, the Bayshore Preserve on Oakland Bay.

We find very little litter but encounter several other walkers, with and without dogs. It is a beautiful, flowing trail system, offering scenic views of the old concrete fish ladder.

I'd like to encourage more people to walk the Goldsborough Creek Trail, as well as the Teresa Johnson Shelton Creek Trail, which follows the lovely, dreamy gorge down from Mason General Hospital to the Shelton Timberland Library.

Good people act like lights on these trails. Shine on and they will remain safe places to walk.

■ Mark Woytowich is a writer, photographer, video producer and author of "Where Waterfalls and Wild Things Are." He lives in Potlatch with his wife, Linda. His "On the Go" column appears every other week in the Shelton-Mason County Journal. Reach him at his website, http://www.wherewaterfallsare.com, or by email at [email protected].