Soundings: Improved Tumwater Falls Park marks 50th birthday

This year marks the 50th anniversary of a community gift that keeps on giving – Tumwater Falls Park.

The 15-acre park embraces the final quarter-mile of the Deschutes River, plunging 82 feet over a series of three waterfalls, pools of river water and jumbled piles of basalt rock deposited millions of years ago.

Towering fir and maple trees hug the steep canyon walls and a half-mile looped trail linked by two footbridges make the canyon, which sits in the heart of the Tumwater Historic District, an accessible place for all ages.

Some 250,000 visitors per year take advantage of this urban oasis. While 75 percent of the visitors are Thurston County residents – and fully half of them visit the park weekly or monthly – more than one-third of patrons are unaware that this is a private park dedicated to free public use by the Olympia Tumwater Foundation. The foundation is a charity created in large part by Schmidt family members, founders of the Olympia Brewery.

The fall colors and the adult chinook salmon returning to Tumwater Falls fish hatchery to spawn make this a great time of year to visit the park. If you’ve been away for some time, you’ll notice some changes, noted John Freedman, executive director of the Olympia Tumwater Foundation.

“This is the best the park has looked in years,” he said on one of his daily walks on the canyon trail, which takes off from the park office and nearby picnic area along Deschutes Way.

On the west side of the river canyon directly below the Falls Terrace Restaurant, there’s a new Washington Salish Native Plant Garden, a collaborative effort with the Nisqually, Squaxin Island and Chehalis tribes. The garden features a variety of native plants used by native people for food, healing and clothing, including plantain, thimbleberry, ocean spray and kinnikinnick.

Nearby, cracked and broken retaining walls on both sides of the canyon have been replaced with handsome walls of  granite from a South Thurston County quarry. The 300 tons of rock are pieced together like a tightly woven jigsaw puzzle by Bill Lenker of Lenkerbrook Stoneworks of Olympia.

And work continues to remove the English ivy and other non-native vegetation that was introduced with the best of intentions, but overran the canyon over the years.

Much of the habitat-restoration work at the park has been funded by the Angela J. Bowen Conservancy Foundation. Bowen, a longtime Olympia physician, medical researcher and philanthropist, has been an ardent supporter of the park for years and serves on the Olympia Tumwater Foundation board of trustees.

The Tumwater Falls Park trail also is adorned with several interpretive panels, complete with informative text and historical photos that show how the river canyon and waterfalls were home to the first American settlement on the shores of Puget Sound in 1845 and, by 1874, home to eight water-dependent industries. Walk the trail and you catch glimpses of the original Olympia brewhouse built by Leopold Schmidt in 1906 at the base of the lower falls and the newer, now-abandoned Olympia Brewery built overlooking the upper falls in the early 1930s after Prohibition ended.

The original park opening was set to coincide with the opening of the Seattle World’s Fair in spring 1962. The Schmidt family envisioned fair visitors streaming up Interstate 5 from the south to stop and visit both the park and the brewery.

But a regional labor strike by ironworkers that spring delayed park construction. The picnic tables and playground opened in July, but the rest of the park wasn’t completed until after the summer tourist season.

It costs about $230,000 a year to operate the park, which is open all year from 8 a.m. to dusk. Historically, the foundation has relied on revenue from investments from a trust fund created by the Schmidt family, grants and donations to keep the park open.

“At one point, the foundation board looked at charging a park entry fee, but that went by the wayside,” Freedman said.

The Olympia Tumwater Foundation also was rocked by an embezzlement case involving a former foundation administrator charged in September with stealing nearly $100,000 from the foundation’s operating fund. She was terminated in 2011, and the foundation since has recouped its losses from its insurance company.

“It’s changed the way we do operate,” Freedman said. “We have more stringent accounting, auditing and security.”

Recently, a donation box for park users was installed outside the park office. Freedman and the foundation board continue to seek new ways to keep the park on solid financial ground, perhaps by partnering with the City of Tumwater.

“We’d like to link the park with other trails along the river corridor and open a trail to the nearby Tumwater Historical Park,” Freedman said. “We want to better involve the community with the operation of the park.”

The park maintenance is ongoing, with many aging infrastructure to replace. The loop trail needs about $60,000 to $80,000 worth of upgrades to keep it safe for visitors, Freedman said.

“The park was a gift primarily from the Schmidt family to the community,” he said. “The family’s legacy lives on through the park, but for a successful future, the foundation has to reinvent itself.”

John Dodge: 360-754-5444
jdodge@theolympian.com