Seeing Seattle step by step is climbing in popularity

When Susan Ott Ralph and her husband, David Ralph, decided to see Seattle on foot they didn't travel on familiar streets or tramp through parks. Instead they opted to see the city by stairway.

Over the past year the Montlake couple have climbed every stairway in Seattle, traversing what Susan Ralph says was at least 100 miles.

It all began in 2009 when Susan Ralph, 62, and her husband, 64, attended a talk where the speaker, Thomas Horton, had made a map of all the stairs in Queen Anne. Ralph's husband had just had heart surgery, and they needed to exercise, so the couple decided to hike the stairs in that neighborhood.

When they finished, they made a New Year's resolution to climb all the stairs in Seattle. So they contacted the Seattle Department of Transportation and got a file showing all of them.

"It turned into a treasure hunt," said Susan Ralph. "We had to find them. Sometimes the map was wrong, and we spent a lot of time on a Google map Street View to find them."

The couple spent much of their time on weekends in their stair quest. They figure they climbed stairs about six days a month.

The longest and toughest climb — more than 300 stairs — was East Howe Street, from South Lake Union to Capitol Hill. One stairway in Wallingford had just three stairs.

"This is a really neat thing to do to get exercise and see the city, and it got us places we would never have seen," said Susan Ralph. "We're pretty confident we got them all."

One stairway gave her problems. It was on a street called Porter and she couldn't find a Porter Street in the city, so she went to the Seattle Public Library, found old maps from two decades ago and finally located a little decrepit stairway almost hidden from view.

While she was busy photographing and blogging her pursuit, she ran into Craig Soper, another stair climber who also climbed all the stairways in the city with his running friend Tony Gaetjens.

Soper, 59, said it began as a challenge with his running group to run all the city stairways so he, like Ralph, contacted the city and got a list of all the stairways. He said it took him two years to climb more than 500 stairways.

Altogether, said Soper, he figures he went up 25,000 individual stairs, climbing more than 12,500 feet. Using the city's map, he said 23 of the stairways were either closed, torn down or he couldn't find them and he added 41 stairways that he discovered in his wanderings.

One of the toughest, he said, was Perkins Lane West to Magnolia Boulevard West, in part because the stairs are not in very good shape. One of his favorites was a stairway on Queen Anne, on Eighth Avenue West and West Comstock Street. "It is a beautiful old stairway designed in 1917 by W.R.B. Wilcox and was built as part of the Olmsted Brother's Queen Anne Boulevard," wrote Soper in detailing his climbs.

"We would run Green Lake every Saturday so when this opportunity came up we saw the challenge. This was a fantastic way to see the city of Seattle. We went to neighborhoods we'd never been before."

The only rule: He had to run up the stairs. "I used to avoid stairways like the plague," Soper said. "As I've gotten older I appreciate what stairways can do for you and take you to unusual places you'd never go. We're always on the lookout for ones we may have missed."

Mary Beth Turner, a spokeswoman with the Seattle Department of Transportation, said the agency gets a handful of requests each year from people who are interested in walking Seattle's stairs, particularly on Queen Anne Hill and in West Seattle.

"This interest in stairways is much higher than it was five or so years ago because of the growing interest in walking and in encouraging others in the community to get out and enjoy neighborhood features that they might not notice when driving," Turner said.

John Buswell, who manages the city stairs for the Department of Transportation, agreed that interest is growing in Seattle stairways.

He said some stairways are more than 100 years old, built when the hills were so steep the street couldn't continue so the city built stairs instead.

He said many were built in the 1920s and 1930s when the city tore out its streetcar system, and the old concrete panels between the rails were used to build stairs, along with the rails themselves. "A good 25 percent of all stairs are made of recycled streetcar material," Buswell said.

And there's another stair resource. Jake and Cathy Jaramillo have a website, http://seati.ms/hb6rNL, where the Seattle couple recorded all their stairway climbs. They hope to write a book on the subject.

"We want to not just list the stairways but drill down and give neighborhood information, interesting things exploring the city by neighborhood," said Jake Jaramillo.

The city also lists the stairs on its walking map at http://seati.ms/hgcYA5. http://www.seattle.gov/transportation/walk_map.htm.