Jordan LaCroix: Park issue isn’t about bikes; it’s about us all

Published 1:30 am Saturday, April 9, 2022

By Jordan LaCroix / Herald Forum

I live near Snohomish County’s Lord Hill Park. I hike and bike at this park, and I’ve also been volunteering at this park on pedestrian and bike trails for two years.

I have an incredible privilege to live within walking distance of Lord Hill Regional Park where I’m surrounded by many homes on five-acre parcels that go well above $1 million, pricing out most of the working class in the county. To be honest, when I used to run the register at Wendy’s back in 2007, I would have never thought I’d spend my free time writing to a newspaper or caring about government processes.

With all the commotion centered around mountain biking at Lord Hill, I realized something at the park’s department public meeting a few days ago when the county refused to expand parking which has been overflowing for hikers and bikers every weekend at the park. This issue was never about mountain biking. It was about you! The 99.9 percent of the county who need to drive to this regional park from all over the county.

The current park plan does not explicitly ban mountain bikers, it just bans the trails they love, to discourage their use, and I see it as no different than converting my favorite hiking trails going through old-growth forests into gravel forest roads.

We shouldn’t discourage people from using this park. We should encourage it. We should have more recreational opportunities that people want here. We should have more parking. We should have Americans with Disability Act-accessible entrance trails. If we don’t make this a community park, we’ll never have the community volunteering to help build it!

While I was originally intending to write this to promote the idea of supporting mountain biking, I think it’s more important to focus on the general issue of making this a true regional park for all of the county.

I know we’re all too busy working or sitting in traffic to spend time on this, but please email your county officials and push for expanding recreational access, parking and accessibility trails into Lord Hill Regional Park!

Hikers, bikers, whoever, if you do want to support your local rag-tag group of mountain bikers more openly, come join us for a social ride April 10 at noon starting near the barn at the park’s north entrance! You can ride my bike, I’ll hike behind you!

Jordan La Croix is a software engineer and lives in Snohomish.