Creating Accessible Events that Redefine How We Connect to the Landscape

While Charley stages the five other llamas for our Lead-a-Llama event, Mary delicately steps back up into the trailer at Indian Camp and starts munching. She’s much more interested in her hay than in the introduction our participants are getting to the Teanaway Community Forest (TCF)—the largest community forest in the state – within the Mountains to Sound Greenway National Heritage Area (NHA). Besides, accessible recreation is her job, so talk of pack animals and a scenic driving loop is hardly news to her.

Every summer, the Mountains to Sound Greenway Trust works with land managers, the TCF Advisory Committee, and many volunteer experts and enthusiasts to host a series of free interpretive events. The overarching goal is to help connect people to this incredible landscape in ways that build their understanding of the Teanaway’s management, habitats, and geology, and that build their commitment to stewardship.

The focus of our event series for 2025 has been on high impact events that are low impact on the body and land.While we love biking, hiking, and horseback riding, you don’t have to hit the trails (and hit them hard) to experience the joys and benefits of the outdoors. There are many ways to engage with the lands in the Mountains to Sound Greenway NHA, and we hope to provide useful models, especially while the Teanaway’s West Fork Trails system is still in development.

Lessons From This Year’s Events

Picnic Table Birding and the Importance of Habitat Preservation

We kicked off the 2025 season with Picnic Table Birding. Participants met at the Teanaway Camping Area’s walk-in campsites, where a table was spread with birding guides and freshly baked scones donated by a local business owner, Traci from Teanaway Country Store. From that spot, the group learned about birding basics and the species you can spot in the TCF from Deb Essman and Martha Wyckoff, two TCF Advisory Committee members who’ve been on the committee since its inception over a decade ago. There are some truly amazing birds that can be sighted in the community forest: violet-green swallows, American dippers, nesting Harlequin ducks, nighthawks…and nearly all of them can be seen when you look not further, but longer.

The group saw or heard almost 30 different species of birds out of the over 180 that can be spotted in the Teanaway, all from within 200 feet of where they parked. They also heard about the history of the forest, including how this 50,000-acre headwater to the Yakima River Basin was logged several times over before going up for sale in the early 2010s, when communities around the state rallied to protect the land and its 400 miles of undammed streams and rivers for its essential water supply, habitat, and locally beloved recreational opportunities.

Since Deb and Martha have been involved from the very beginning, they were able to offer a wealth of TCF knowledge alongside their fascinating stories about the birds. They emphasized the importance of habitat preservation: from how the upgraded camping area’s placement of walk-in sites along the river lowers fine sediment deposits to how in-stream restoration for fish simultaneously builds riparian habitat for birds.

Forest Bathing and Examining our Relationships to Nature

Our second event with guest speaker Dawn Ambrose of Woodland Findings again encouraged not looking further, but this time closer. Forest Bathing (Shinrin Yoku) is a practice of connecting with your sensations in nature. Dawn taught participants to engage with their senses and the wonder of the world around them just a few paces from the camping area as she shared the benefits and techniques of Forest Bathing. The group participated in several “invitations”: prompts to find something new, find something small, or look at clues on a landscape to decipher its story.

The story of continuing human impact can be seen in the West Fork Teanaway riverbed. There are scars deep into the bedrock that tell of splash damming—an innovative process that was effective at carrying logs out of the Teanaway…and carrying out everything else in the river, too. Berms, dikes, and rail lines wrinkle the historic floodplain and recount a time of railroad logging, using technology to provide for the development of towns and cities across the state. Even up until the 1990s, understandings of what made a “good” or healthy river skewed toward the straight and clear channel—a DFW scientist recently found a 1991 photo of a bulldozer in the Teanaway riverbed as part of a river “cleaning” effort.

Now, with a better understanding of what a healthy river looks like, when we see heavy equipment in the Teanaway, it’s being used to push gravels from old berms and dikes back into the riverbed, or to place large woody material in the river, making it more complex andmessy. Partners from the Yakama Nation Fisheries, Mid-Columbia Fisheries, and agencies are giving the river the tools to restore itself and hoping to share tools with the local communities so they can recognize elements of a healthy river. It’s very similar work to what the Greenway Trust is doing in Issaquah Creek.

The Forest Bathing event invited participants to reimagine not just their own relationship to the natural world around them, but to question their assumptions about what that natural world and its management “should” look like.

Lead-a-Llama and Planning for Accessible Recreation

The Lead-a-Llama event similarly raised a challenge to participants: what could recreation look like in the context of community benefit, in a community forest? Attendees met in the Indian Camp equestrian expansion—a camping area specifically designed for equestrians and trailers for stock—to learn about pack llamas, multiuse trails, and the route of the planned scenic driving loop. Charley Rosenberry, a Teanaway local who runs Rocking R Ranch, introduced the group to five of his llamas: Mary, Violet, Josie, Dot, Kate, and Peggy, who he trains on trails around the community forest so they can support people with Parkinson’s on packing trips.

Pack animals can make recreation more accessible to people with disabilities or who might struggle with conventional backpacking. They can also support crews in maintaining trails and recreational access by carrying in materials and tools.

Participants led the llamas up a stretch of the planned scenic driving loop to an overlook where they could see sandstone slabs and monoliths peeking out of the woods with a sliver of Mount Rainier in the distance. This scenic driving loop was included in the TCF recreation planning to ensure that community members, especially elders, could access views like this. It’s a pieced together string of former logging roads that DNR is improving rather than decommissioning.

Proactively creating the infrastructure to handle higher density and higher impact recreation can help protect the landscape in the long term. In this way, work on the scenic driving loop is similar to the work of the West Fork Trails Coalition: they concentrate recreation on a road or trail that’s specifically designed to absorb impact in a sustainable way, considering a whole range of users.

River Poems and Connection to Place

Recreation isn’t all active hiking, biking, riding, or even driving: it can be anything you do outside. Our final Teanaway Interpretive Event of the season, the River Poems workshop with T. Bambrick, is an example of this alternative recreation. Nationally acclaimed poet T. Bambrick was raised right here in the Mountains to Sound Greenway NHA, and their dad is a member of the TCF Advisory Committee, so this area holds a special place in their heart.

Sitting on the incised bank of the West Fork, just downstream of planned restoration work, participants read through a set of river poems, discussed imagery and line breaks (a turn in the poem like a riverbend), and wrote a collaborative poem together. Like the Picnic Table Birding event, River Poems took participants just a couple hundred feet down a path in the established camping area, yet the group still came away with deeper, more nuanced understanding of the forest and river.

An event doesn’t have to involve some sort of athletic achievement to be meaningful. In fact, expanding how we conceive of outdoor recreation can broaden our reach, ease strain on recreation infrastructure, and add depth to our communities’ experiences, encouraging them to love and care for the landscapes in the Mountains to Sound Greenway NHA in new ways.

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