The Trail of success and regret

If ever there was a tree that bore fruit in the orchard of ideas, it is the East Lake Sammamish Trail.

The interim trail opened last week to a bit of fanfare; dozens of people showed up for the ribbon-cutting and started treading on the white gravel. The trail, currently off-limits to horses but available to just about everybody else, is the final seven miles of bickering and legal motions tamped down to a navigable walkway along the trees and homes of the East Lake Sammamish shore.

For friend and foe, it is the end of a bitter battle and the beginning of a new kind of neighborhood. For some, it is defeat and resignation, and the final frustration of waging a fight against local government.

For the region, it is impossible not to acknowledge the East Lake Sammamish Trail will be one of the gemstones of an interlocking pathway that reaches from Puget Sound to well east of the Cascades.

"The Trail," as it is simply known in that community of waterfront homes and suburban angst, cannot be underestimated as a milestone in the way the region is changing. The railbed stretch of homes that delightfully perched on the shores of Lake Sammamish is changing to much higher density, more traffic and more everything.

The Cascade Land Conservancy was instrumental in the first acquisition of the trail-bed, which raised distress flags up and down the middle portion of the future trail. Those homeowners, questioning every legality and every nuance of the federal and state rulings over old railroad lines, most often felt the train was rolling over them rather than the rusted tracks.

I felt for them. Sitting in their homes or puttering along the lakeshore in a small boat, the rural face of East Lake Samm was changing forever under the relentless zoning of King County. For a while, the Sammamish Plateau was a free-fire zone under county sovereignty — the only rule was which stand of trees to take down first.

Thus the classic NIMBY argument: How much of this hillside should we save from development?

The idealistic answer was a trail 11 miles long to preserve what development was going to put asunder. The rural and somewhat pricey character of parts of the Lake Sammamish shoreline would be saved in a sense, from its future, by making it public.

Lost in the trail's opening is a piece of history, when cottages went in during the 1940s and Lake Sammamish was as distant as Lake Chelan is today.

If the trail is a huge success for the walkers, joggers and cyclists of Puget Sound, it is also a reminder of what has been lost. When I last walked the trail — probably illegally because it was still under contention — it was a little like walking through someone's yard. Fences and clear pathways will help reduce that sense of intrusion, but something of the sleepiness of the Eastside is gone, some sense of isolation from the city.

The two bookends of the East Lake Sammamish Trail — Issaquah's big-box stores and Redmond Town Center — are becoming as urban as Ballard. Between the lake and the Sammamish Plateau that rises to the east and becomes a confluence of suburban homes and dreams, is The Trail. Remember when it was a path through the summer woods and nothing more.

James F. Vesely's column appears Sunday on editorial pages of The Times. His e-mail address is: jvesely@seattletimes.com