Naturalist Trip - Duwamish Waterway

We’ll meet at 8:00 am at the Duwamish Hill Preserve parking lot located at 3800 South 115th Street in Tukwila. 

The small pocket parks we will visit do not have restroom facilities. Be sure to use the restroom before you arrive.  The last time I was at Cecil Moses Memorial Park the bathrooms were closed but there was a commercial portable toilet  available.  

The goal is on birding.  We will walk together at a slow pace and stop often to listen and search for birds.  We will spend about 3-4 hours on our tour of  3 Tukwila parks along the Duwamish River, Duwamish Hill Preserve, Duwamish Gardens Park and Cecil Moses Memorial Park. 

Duwamish Hill Preserve is our first stop. We'll walk to our 2nd stop, Duwamish Gardens Park. These are fairly new parks that encourage community cultural activities, salmon recovery and rewilding of areas that were once used for farming, warehousing and dumping. The rewilding efforts are amazing. Here are a couple of videos that describe these two areas:

Duwamish Hill Preserve–Watch this guided tour here

Duwamish Gardens Park–Watch this guided tour here

We’ll drive to our last location of the day, Cecil Moses Memorial Park which is located at 11013 W Marginal Way S. This is the site of Coastal Salish Native American legend & cultural site known as North Wind’s Weir. According to Coast Salish tradition, there once was a war between the North Wind people and the Chinook Wind people who lived further up the Duwamish. North Wind covered the land with ice and snow, and stretched a dam of ice across the river to keep the salmon from running upstream, thus starving the Chinook Wind people. Eventually, the ice weir was shattered, its remnants were turned to stone, and the ice and snow retreated. The stones are visible from the  river bank.  You can read one version of the oral tradition of the North Wind’s Weir here.

You can view a short video of the area here.