Take a look inside $2.8 million in improvements at Grass Lake Nature Park in Olympia
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- $2.8 million renovation improved access to 200-acre Grass Lake Nature Park
- New 1.1-mile paved trail and boardwalk connect wetland and forest areas
- Trail advances Capitol to Capitol route, adds ADA access and biking options
A neighborhood wetland park on Olympia’s west side has been made more accessible, thanks to $2.8 million in renovations. Now people can take in a never-before-seen view of one the most environmentally intact wetland systems in northern Thurston County at Grass Lake Nature Park.
Project Engineer Neal Glassburn and Laura Keehan, Olympia parks planning and design manager, took The Olympian on a tour of the park on July 25, about six weeks after the park reopened.
The new 11-space parking lot on Kaiser Road that leads to the paved 1.1-mile trail was full by 9:30 a.m. Luckily, there’s extra parallel parking across the street.
The trail leads directly into the forest and to a 365-foot boardwalk that overlooks the wetland created by the headwaters of Green Cove Creek. In the summer, the wetland is mostly mud. In the winter, the water will rise to 5 feet above the ground surface and spill into Grass Lake to the north, up Green Cove Creek and out to Eld Inlet.
Park history
According to the city’s website, the 200-acre park was first established in the late 1980s. Keehan said a master plan was developed for the park’s future in 1998, and it called for a trail through the area to connect to a larger system.
Keehan said it took multiple years of applying for grants and failing to receive funding. The city received a grant through the Washington State Recreation Conservation Funding Board, which was leveraged with dedicated Olympia Metropolitan Park District funds.
Glassburn said he started design plans for the new trail system in 2020, and it took almost four years to get through the permitting process to put the project out to bid and start construction. He said construction started in August 2024 and was completed by this June.
Inspire Olympia arts funding was also allocated to the park to add new signage and sculptures.
“It takes a long time to do anything, and we’re really excited,” Keehan said. “I’ve been with the department for nine years, and we’ve been working on this project that whole time, and even before me.”
Keehan said the park was very unused before the renovations. She said it’s the second largest park in the city’s system, but there were previously only four parking stalls, and few people would pull off the side of the road to check out the park.
The larger parking area includes accessible parking spaces and a bus parking spot for schools to bring students on field trips. Keehan said they met with students at Thurgood Marshall Middle School before the park reopened to talk about the restoration work students had done on the property, and plans for trips back to the park in the future.
Connecting the entire park
At the main entrance of the park visitors will find an open field meant for picnics and playing. Glassburn said before renovations the field was a giant hole. He said crews had to excavate a lot of material for wetland mitigation, which created a half-acre of new wetland adjacent to Grass Lake and a lot of material to fill the hole with.
There are trail markers on both ends of the park, one off Kaiser Road and the other to the southeast on Harrison Avenue. Both trail ends are donned with steel mushroom sculptures with graffiti on their caps. Artist Abe Singer turned an old water tank that was in the middle of the park into the two sculptures, along with a bird blind in the middle of the boardwalk.
Glassburn said the wetland is the big key of the renovation project. He said the wetland divided the park in two and made half the park inaccessible during wetter months.
“By creating this trail, we’ve really connected the entire park so you can make it to all areas of the park, and we’ve added some access to view that wetland that was not visible before,” he said.
Keehan said the park still has soft surface paths for walking and biking, but now there’s a paved, 10-foot-wide path that makes the park more accessible to people using mobility devices. The path is also great for skating.
Keehan said the new trail gives residents access to a park that is topographically much different from other parks in the city. She said other trails like those in Watershed Park and Squaxin Park can be difficult to navigate, especially for those using mobility devices.
Glassburn said when they were wrapping up construction, the contractor said he passed 30 people already checking out the trail.
He said the Grass Lake trail meanders instead of going straight through the park to meet ADA grades. There are rest stops with benches every 200 feet or so to make up for the slightly steeper areas of the trail.
Glassburn said the trail is also meant for commuter bicyclists, which he’s seen a lot of since it opened. The trail connects the far west side of the city to an area more accessible to shopping and downtown.
Keehan said there’s a lot of multi-family housing around Grass Lake and Yauger Park to the south, and the new trail nearly connects the two.
“It’s neat to be able to have a new amenity that can serve so many people, like a pretty dense area with all that multi-family (housing),” she said.
Keehan said the new trail segment is part of a larger one called the Capitol to Capitol trail, which is an effort to connect multi-modal trails from the Capitol Campus to Capitol State Forest. That includes existing bike lanes and other surface street amenities. She said the segment in Grass Lake is the first off-street portion of the trail — and most challenging portion — to be completed so far.
This story was originally published July 30, 2025 at 5:00 AM.
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