East Lake Sammamish Trail wins award for engineering excellence
The newly completed East Lake Sammamish Trail received a prestigious engineering award in March for successfully navigating a complex design process that involved negotiating access with hundreds of property owners who lived along Lake Sammamish.
The trail was given a National Recognition Award by the American Council of Engineering Companies. It was recognized along with 178 other projects across the United States.
The East Lake Sammamish Trail project has a history spanning over 20 years. In 1997, King County Parks acquired the 11-mile East Lake Sammamish rail corridor, which at that time was a narrow, gravel-level path. Subsequently, the trail underwent expansion, paving, and the addition of amenities. The entire trail was finally completed in October 2023, connecting Issaquah to Redmond along the lakeshore.
Jenny Bailey, a principal consultant from the engineering design firm Parametrix, was the project manager for the trail during the entire process, from design to planning and construction.
For Bailey, the award is about recognizing the trail’s context-sensitive design. As a multi-use trail, the East Lake Sammamish Trail is an important asset that benefits the community, enhancing walkability, livability, and overall quality of life for residents both locally and regionally. And because of how much goes on in the corridor, the design process was very complex.
“There were hundreds of adjacent property owners, a variety of things happening adjacent to the trail corridor, so we were trying to be cognizant of those and design in a way that preserved the ability of neighbors to access their homes and their properties,” Bailey said.
The trail project also crossed dozens of streams and adjacent wetlands.
“There are eleven fish-passable culverts that we designed and were constructed as part of the project and thousands of native plants and trees that went in to try and preserve that natural context,” Bailey said.
In all, the design of the trail incorporates more than 130 walls that minimize the trail footprint and impact on adjacent natural and built environments. It also included 4,700 trees and 98,000 sustainable native shrubs to complement the 10 acres of wetland mitigation and 11 fish passage culverts. The project also reconstructed more than 65 driveway and roadway crossings and 60 stairways adjacent to the corridor.
Although the award was presented to Parametrix as the primary engineering firm, it also acknowledges other firms that participated in the project, including ESA, Global GeoPhysics, Icicle Creek Engineers, American Forest Management, Otto Rosenau & Associates, Universal Field Services, and KLB Construction.
To Bailey, the most gratifying aspects of the trail project are the benefits it brought to the community.
“Seeing the East Lake Sammamish Trail being built and going out there on a sunny day, seeing all the people walking and riding their bikes on it, that’s the reward of our hard work that we appreciate the most,” Bailey said.
