Seward Park

Author's Comments

Most people walk the perimeter loop and call it done. The paved path is pleasant, the Rainier view from the southern tip on a clear winter morning is genuinely something, and the eagles along the western shore in February will reward anyone willing to stand still long enough. I have made that walk many times and I do not regret any of them. But the park I keep returning to is the interior. There is a stand of Douglas fir at the heart of the peninsula that has been growing since before the city existed, and on a wet morning in November the light comes down through the canopy in slow vertical columns and the forest floor goes the color of damp moss and bark. It is quiet in a way that surprises me every time, given that I am still inside Seattle. The trails through the middle are unpaved and less walked, and they ask for a different kind of attention than the loop does. Come early. The morning fog off Lake Washington works its way into the trees and softens everything, and the contrast between the open shoreline and the deep interior is the whole reason to be here. A wide lens for the lake. A longer one for the trees, where the compression makes the trunks read as the cathedral they actually are.

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