The East Lake Sammamish Trail is an 11-mile (18 km) recreational rail trail in King County, Washington that runs along Lake Sammamish from Marymoor Park in Redmond, through Sammamish, to Gilman Boulevard in Issaquah.
The trail had initially encountered fierce political resistance from nearby homeowners through whose property the former BNSF Railway right-of-way runs. An interim trail, with a packed gravel surface suitable for walking and mountain biking, had been scheduled for completion by January 2006.
After losing a federal lawsuit brought by the Cascade Land Conservancy and Friends of the East Lake Sammamish Trail before the U.S. Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, however, the homeowners relented, and the trail was finally completed and opened on 21 March 2006.
Famous quotes containing the words east, lake and/or trail:
“The East is the hearthside of America. Like any home, therefore, it has the defects of its virtues. Because it is a long-lived-in house, it bursts its seams, is inconvenient, needs constant refurbishing. And some of the family resources have been spent. To attain the privacy that grown-up people find so desirable, Easterners live a harder life than people elsewhere. Today it is we and not the frontiersman who must be rugged to survive.”
—Phyllis McGinley (1905–1978)
“What a wilderness walk for a man to take alone! None of your half-mile swamps, none of your mile-wide woods merely, as on the skirts of our towns, without hotels, only a dark mountain or a lake for guide-board and station, over ground much of it impassable in summer!”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“The ghosts of the villages trail in the sky
Making a new twilight”
—William Stanley Merwin (b. 1927)