Guided by the University of Washington's landscape architecture department, school children contributed ideas and models to the design process of the environmental center.

They gave up after only 100 feet of clawing.

Today, a trail-blazer is punching through bramble walls to create a network of paths past uprooted trees and eerie moss-covered nurse logs. A suspension bridge will soon span a ravine that funnels stream water to the estuary at Blakely Harbor on the property's southern edge. A floating classroom will rest atop a four-acre pond, a forest canopy platform will offer a front-row seat to the treetops.

At this moment, the site is being transformed as resolutely as her trudge through ankle-lapping mud one recent spring day so she could show off a huge bog deep in the woods. She and her husband, Paul Brainerd, bought the land before it could be developed for houses. Now one of the most ambitious residential environmental learning centers in the country, especially one so close to a major city, is rising there.

Debbi Brainerd, the driving force behind the center, has overseen the details of creating one of the most ambitious residential environmental learning centers in the country, especially one so close to a major city.

Including the $5-million land purchase, the Brainerds have donated $25 million and are working to raise $26 million more so the nonprofit Puget Sound Environmental Learning Center can host several thousand fourth- and fifth-graders on three-night stays each school year. Inner-city kids, often left out of overnight field trips, are a priority.

By the time the center is fully opened next year, it will be the sum of thousands of engineering, architectural, educational and cultural details. It will support a graduate program, offer family and adult overnight courses on weekends, and house three lodges, staff quarters and a five-classroom learning lab. Technology, art and history will incorporate with natural science.

It is hard to say whether the project will meet its lofty goals; there is no boilerplate for exactly what they are trying to create. But it is attracting support, both for the ideals behind it and for the Brainerds' holistic approach to protecting the site while using it to teach a sense of place.

The property is 255 acres of mostly second-growth Western red cedar, Douglas fir, big-leaf maple and alder with a watershed that, besides the stream and pond, includes wetlands and a cattail marsh.

Red-winged blackbirds, buffleheads, mallards and great blue herons all visit the cattail marsh on the center's property.

Hugged by roads and houses on three sides, it seems left behind, but it has long been defined, in its own way, by function.

It was thick old-growth when Native Americans used it for seasonal camps. Shortly after Capt. William Renton established his prodigious sawmill at the foot of the harbor in the 1860s, the land provided product. When his business and the bustling town of Port Blakely needed fresh water, millworkers walked up the hill into the woods, built an earthen dam at the head of the ravine and created "Mac's Pond."

For five decades after the mill went out of business in the 1920s, the land was cleared in pockets as a stockpile for Port Blakely Tree Farms. When island logging became too expensive, the company tried to develop a massive housing project on it and 850 adjacent wooded acres. That set off protests and crystallized local angst over growth.

Soon, this property - one of the island's last undeveloped parcels in private hands - will be filling its newest mission as an outdoor school offering lessons no book can hold. Biology will be taught from the treetops and each link in the watershed. The cemetery of immigrant pioneers at the center's western edge will be part of the history lesson. Children will test water quality and use handheld computers to chart pileated woodpeckers' favorite haunts.

The bog is a rare habitat, a sprawling peat island that accumulated naturally the past 1,000 or more years. The only nutrients it gets come from rain or dust that may blow in, so only hardy highland trees like Western hemlock grow there - at a fraction of their normal pace. Labrador Tea, which thrives in the Arctic, takes root in the bog, as does the Sundew, a plant that has learned to snack on insects.

It is a curiosity of adaptation, but one that's easily overlooked. So an elaborate treehouse classroom is being built 10 feet high on one edge so 4-foot-tall kids can see and feel it.

AS WITH ANY major evolutionary step, this one was sparked by a chance encounter and gathered momentum through the right convergence of forces.

John Muir Elementary students, from left, Maxim Rivera, Marvin Oguntawase, Troy Taylor and Candino Blue learn about wildlife and fauna along Mac's Pond at the Puget Sound Environmental Learning Center on Bainbridge Island.

The Brainerds had been married less than a year when they went looking for getaway property on Bainbridge Island one day in 1997. The tree company had scrapped plans for the much-protested development and was preparing to sell its holdings in more palatable 20-acre lots. Still, when the Brainerds toured it, they felt there must be some better use.

"It was a sunny fall day," Paul said. "We were walking along and a buck comes out of the woods. We looked at each other and talked about what a shame if this all ended up as houses. We wondered if there was a way to preserve some of it."

At 53, he is no stranger to ambitious projects. In 1984, he started the Aldus Corp., which developed the revolutionary desktop publishing software PageMaker. While running the company, he preached focus and flexibility, and when he sold it in 1994 for $525 million, he made about $120 million for himself.

Since then, he has applied that ethic to philanthropy and environmental causes. The Brainerd Foundation funds projects throughout the Northwest. His Social Venture Partners is a much-emulated nonprofit organization that uses venture-capital principles to help new philanthropists learn how to find causes and get more involved with them.

Each bunk bed inside the three lodges being built at the center has its own small window. Students told designers early in the planning the touches they wanted, and seeing the trees from their beds was high on their lists.

Debbi loves children and is nurturing the dreams behind the project. She wants "magical moments" that will imbed lifetime impressions. A soft-spoken 44-year-old Seattle native with degrees in clothing textile design and molecular biology, she came up with the idea a few weeks after the tour.

"I told Paul, let's be proactive; let's combine our interest in the environment, education and children. Let's teach kids about the place they live so they understand it and make better decisions in the future."

That sounds like an environmental-education center, Paul told her; there must be a bunch of those, but go ahead and check. Debbi, a former community-relations manager for Nordstrom, took the challenge.

She spent the next six months researching and talking to educators such as Tony Angell, supervisor of the state Office of Environmental Education. She learned that although Washington requires environmental education, only about half Seattle-area students get any overnight, nature-based exposure, and poorer school districts often go without.

Paul put down earnest money as she traveled to about 30 centers across the country. She stayed in the dorms when possible and asked everyone, from the directors to the cooks, what they would do differently if starting over. Then she brought directors of top centers to Seattle for three days of brainstorming.

Paul has handled the budget and administrative work and helped keep focus, but Debbi has led the project. Her six-day work weeks, attention to detail and cordial manner have helped make inroads with diverse interest groups.

The Brainerds settled on the current site after instructors, biologists, naturalists, cartographers, geologists and historians determined it held the best learning potential on the tree-farm property. Then they met with artists, archaeologists, school administrators and environmental educators, Native Americans, craftspeople, island residents, children and potential donors to seek advice and help.

"This is not Paul and Debbi's project," says Paul, a former journalist. "We want it to be the community's project. We knew we needed to connect with people on the island and in Seattle and with kids and teachers, but little did we realize that three years later we would still be doing it almost every weekend and that the number of people who contributed ideas would be in the thousands."

AFTER DETERMINING what the land had to offer and what they wanted to create, the Brainerds wrestled with details, concepts, key questions. How do you accentuate the land while respecting it? How do you engage a child's sense of wonder without becoming a wooded Disneyland?

Buildings, including the sleeping lodges, were built with environmental lessons in mind. Solar and photovoltaic technology will furnish most of the energy, and much of the wood came from the site.

The first chore was to get a handle on the property itself. When purchased, it was a wild mess of trees and brush choked with acres of invasive plants like English ivy. It had one path, an old logging trail, which ran from the upper wetlands down to where the stream slides through a culvert and into the estuary.

A Seattle firm, Community & Environmental Spatial Analysis Center, used aerial photographs and records to build maps showing the site's characteristics and evolution. Landscape architect Linnea Ferrell of The Berger Partnership and trail-builder Carroll Vogel spent days thrashing through undergrowth to inventory the property. It helped Ferrell judge terrain and how lighting changes with seasons. Vogel discovered a stunning cathedral of the ivy-covered trees on the south end, and remnants of a second dam built farther down the stream.

Building architects Mithun Partners, best known for designing the Seattle REI flagship store, camped on the site to get a sense of it and gauge the night sounds. Designers kept fourth-grader-sized cutouts nearby through the process as reminders they were working for kids. One of the first diagrams was an "experience flow chart" to show the likely day, from ferry terminal to bedtime.

When Debbi detected a few blank looks during a design-phase meeting she sent Berger and Mithun architects to the Olympic Park Institute. There they, and she, spent three days sleeping in bunk beds, learning from naturalists, keeping journals, telling stories, singing songs.

Then she arranged for a series of brainstorming sessions with about 250 fourth-, fifth- and sixth-graders. Conducted by the University of Washington's landscape architecture department, the sessions were aimed at learning what kids wanted and incorporating as much of it as possible. What should the outdoor learning environment feel like? What were their favorite outdoor memories? What scared them? What sort of nature experience did they find magical?

Vi Hilbert, an elder with the Lushootseed who has dedicated her life to perpetuating that tribe's oral history and culture, was the model and inspiration for the house post that crowns the center's gathering hall. A 92-foot Douglas fir beam retrieved from a Montana mine tops the spine of the building.

Some students translated their ideas to oversized postcards; others erected models of sticks, paper, tape and marshmallows. There were popular themes. They wanted to be high in the trees, beneath the water and have access to tunnels and intricate forest paths. They wanted stories about the place. They didn't want the lodges named after people like their schools were. Boys wanted top bunk beds.

The bridge across the ravine is going in to protect sensitive slopes and give kids not only a thrill but a lesson about the stream ecology. The Treehouse Workshop is designing two treehouses - one accessible to disabled people - to advance curriculum while feeling like a backyard club. The floating classroom will get them out on the pond for aquatic study, water-quality testing and art exercises.

Vogel, whose company, Sahale, builds wilderness bridges, will erect the span across the ravine, the forest canopy and a bird blind on the marsh. But first, he is blazing about five miles of trails. Usually guided by grade and location points, he factors educational and gee-whiz highlights into this project. When he cut a path that students will use to enter the center grounds, he decorated the borders with boulders and logs, moss-side up.

As with buying a fixer-upper, the Brainerds also acquired headaches. The millworkers' earthen dam had so deteriorated that the center spent more than $250,000 to replace it with one that will control silt and withstand an earthquake. English ivy has so overrun trees on the southern slope that it will eventually kill them unless eradicated.

Largemouth bass, planted in the pond long ago, will be removed and replaced by native cutthroat trout. Fisheries biologist Wayne Daily has studied the stream and believes it can be restored to once again support trout and salmon.

And there are the cosmetic touches. Once the projects are finished, landscapers will return to install native plants and trees and get rid of roads built to support construction. "My goal," said Berger's Ferrell as she walked through the site, "is to make it look like we were never here."

IF THE PUGET SOUND Environmental Learning Center was going to walk its talk about conservation and sustainability, it had to limit its own impact.

Berger amassed a series of map transparencies, each showing specific profiles: wetlands, slopes, soil compositions, areas and dates of timber harvests. When the layers were put atop one another it told Mithun the most responsible places to build.

Debbi Brainerd makes sure Gov. Gary Locke notices a bald eagle during a recent tour of the center grounds.

Structures take up about 6 percent of the property, and the main campus is confined to where the tree farm last harvested in 1977. Staff cabins are tucked away on one corner, and the director gets his own house on the southeast side.

The only buildings of size are being created with environmental lessons in mind. Much of the wood comes from the site, and the chaff has either been milled as framing or ground up for trails and landscaping.

Most have roofs designed to catch rainwater and orientated to tap photovoltaic panels that generate electricity and heat water. Various classroom floors are built with different material, from cork to bamboo, to teach alternatives to wood. A countertop made from recycled yogurt containers is being imported from Germany. Door mats are made of recycled tires, foundations are 50 percent fly ash, a coal slag byproduct.

The center will use an elaborate treatment system, called the living machine, that employs greenhouses and wetlands to purify wastewater enough so it can be used for irrigation and laundry. Aquatic plants, microorganisms and snails will help break down the matter. The goal is to reduce pollution and show children what wastewater treatment means.

Puget Sound Coastal Salish wood carvers will soon finish a house post in the center's main gathering hall. The model for the figure is Vi Hilbert, an elder with the Lushootseed who has dedicated her life to perpetuating the tribe's oral history and culture. The post serves as the "grandmother" welcoming each child to the center.

Randi Cheatham-Johnson tries out a listening device used to accentuate the sounds of forest creatures.

A 92-foot Douglas fir beam, thought to have been milled at Port Blakely in the late 1800s, spans the spine of the rectangular hall. The beam was found in a Montana mine and donated, as was the helicopter needed to haul it to the site.

Landscape artist Lorna Jordan has proposed building a sequence of gardens designed to accentuate habitat for a variety of creatures and represent various uses of water. Local woodworkers are making tables out of barn siding and railings out of wood from the site.

Every decision had to pass the collaboration test. Did it fit the education mission? The magical element? The sustainability goal? The budget?

"I liken this project to keeping a series of spinning plates upright," said Mithun principal Bert Gregory. "You run between each to keep them all going. Between the mission, all the structures and sensitive ecology, this is the most complex project I've ever been involved with. But it's worth it."

WHILE WASHINGTON LAGS behind other states in outdoor education, there's evidence of change.

The North Cascades Institute, which has offered a wide range of nature programs the past 15 years, hopes to finally open its own overnight residential environmental learning center along Lake Diablo by 2003.

Late this summer, the city of Seattle is opening its day-education center near North Bend. The Friends of the Cedar River Watershed is in the midst of a campaign to raise $2 million to help pay for the center's operation.

The biggest challenge for residential outdoor programs is upkeep. That's why $10 million of the Brainerds' personal donation is designated for maintenance.

"People are much more likely to donate to help a child learn than to fix a roof," Debbi said.

So far, the project has raised almost $9 million, including $1 million gifts from former King Broadcasting chair Patsy Collins and from Visio co-founder Ted Johnson and his wife, Linda. REI is donating outdoor clothing and gear, which is important because some of the kids the center wants to teach have never been camping.

The proximity of the learning center to Seattle - a 35-minute ferry ride and a five-minute drive - will be used to make it more inclusive.

Rick Dupree, president of the community group called Powerful Schools, which works to improve achievement and opportunities for inner-city students, is helping the center staff make connections.

"I agreed to help after meeting the Brainerds," said Dupree. "I've been around and I know when it's sincere. They are aware of the perceptions some communities may have - of wealthy people coming in on their white horses with all the answers, but they're doing it right. They're saying, this is important to us - how do we partner with you?"

The closeness to Seattle and being amid the growth of the island give the center a wilderness-light feel when compared to the protected environments of the North Cascades, Olympic Peninsula or Cedar River. The wear and tear the Brainerd property went through during its logging days is part of the lesson, though, and a bridge from past to present. For instance, the site is plentiful with now-treasured cedars because they weren't valuable when it was logged.

The Bainbridge Island Land Trust bought 20 acres along the shore of Blakely Harbor in 1999 and is working with the Bainbridge Island Parks and Recreation Department to turn it into a low-impact park. Students from the learning center will use the area.

While the mill was once thought to be the busiest in the world, all that's left of it and the town are a square concrete shell of a building tattooed with graffiti, some pier pilings and boulder-sized saw-filing mounds poking from the water.

The estuary that once was a log pond for Captain Renton's mill will soon demonstrate for children the dynamics of saltwater meeting freshwater.

After surveying it from a perch above the estuary one day, Debbi Brainerd turned to face Seattle's Columbia Tower in the distance. That's part of the lesson, too. The island oasis and the city are part of the same place. Everything a kid learns here, she says, he or she can take home.

See a map of the environmental center.

Richard Seven is a staff writer for Pacific Northwest magazine. Benjamin Benschneider is the magazine's staff photographer.