Trail improvements and park additions are underway at the Hundred Acre Wood, an oft-disputed 82-acre stretch of forest in south Bellingham where city employees are protecting habitat and developing a multi-use outdoor classroom.
The classroom — still under construction — is part of a city partnership with Recreation Northwest, a Bellingham-based foundation launched in 2013. The group has installed a patio and new seating, as well as a native plant garden in the park.
The addition of an outdoor classroom, which is “just about completed,” is a major success for the city, said Nicole Oliver, Bellingham’s Parks and Recreation director.
“We’ve heard about [this] from our recreational needs assessment from teachers and students and people who want to have a place to gather and explore education,” Oliver told council members Monday, March 13.
Park improvements, including trail signs, habitat protection and wetland restoration, are mandated by the park’s master plan, approved by the Bellingham City Council last year. Restoration efforts are underway but will take several years.
“It’s some major infrastructure improvements that are going to start happening,” Oliver told members of the city council. “This year, we’re going to resurface some of the trails. Then next year, it’ll be more focused on new boardwalks and drainage improvements.”
In the coming years, the city will decommission select trails, add new boardwalks, improve the existing East-West trail from Fairhaven Park to the Interurban Trail and add habitat fencing in the Hundred Acre Woods.
Oliver said the park is protected “forever” by a land easement that mandates strict uses of the land. The easement is currently held by the Chuckanut Community Forest Park District (CCFPD), a local tax district formed to help pay off the cost of the 82-acre purchase over a decade ago.
The district, which fulfilled its mission of paying off a $3.2 million loan from the city in June 2022, will need to transfer the easement to another conservation entity before it formally sunsets in September this year, or risk losing environmental protections for the forest entirely.
The current easement has “extensive limits” on the property that forbids residential construction, industrial mining, hunting, fires, baseball fields or logging, Oliver said.
“There’s no value to this property except as … a nature park,” Oliver said. “That’s what we heard from the community, loud and clear. They want to keep it as a nature park.”
City staff have agreed to significant revisions to the easement, initially signed in early 2014, but additional changes may not be workable, Oliver noted.
“We’ve agreed to a considerable amount of revisions [to the current easement], and we’ve gone as far as we could go,” she told the council. “There’s other revisions that have been proposed that would make it impossible for us to manage this as a nature park, and it would also make it impossible for us to do the work that we’re now undertaking in the park.”
Oliver said there’s “a lot to celebrate” at the park, including the passage of a master plan, and council members agreed. Council member Skip Williams, chair of the Parks and Recreation committee, called the park a “wonderful, wonderful accomplishment.”
“It was quite an accomplishment to get this to this point,” he said. “I’m just glad to see it is moving forward and it’ll become what we thought it was going to be.”
A previous version of this story misstated the land easement had undergone revision. City staff have agreed to changes to the easement, but haven’t received council approval yet. The story was updated to reflect this change at 10:10 a.m. March 14. Cascadia Daily News regrets this error.
