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:
“Sublime tobacco! which from east to west
Cheers the tar’s labour or the Turkman’s rest.”
—George Gordon Noel Byron (1788–1824)
“A lake is the landscape’s most beautiful and expressive feature. It is earth’s eye; looking into which the beholder measures the depth of his own nature. The fluviatile trees next the shore are the slender eyelashes which fringe it, and the wooded hills and cliffs around are its overhanging brows.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“And Change with hurried hand has swept these scenes:
The woods have fallen, across the meadow-lot
The hunter’s trail and trap-path is forgot,
And fire has drunk the swamps of evergreens;
Yet for a moment let my fancy plant
These autumn hills again: the wild dove’s haunt,
The wild deer’s walk: in golden umbrage shut,”
—Frederick Goddard Tuckerman (1821–1873)