Earth Day event draws volunteers

They met at Mill Creek City Hall April 18 for one reason: to celebrate Earth Day by collecting litter and sprucing up a park and trail with fresh gravel.

“I didn’t know they had built this (trail) up like this, it is so nice,” said Doris Dale, an employee with Amec Earth and Environmental in Bothell.

Dale and her daughter, Jenny, were part of a crew of about 15 who picked up litter along North Creek Trail.

The 30 volunteers included six Girl Scouts, members of Mukilteo Troop 420416, who participated in part to thank the city of Mill Creek for its assistance in a car wash fundraiser.

“The city of Mill Creek has been very good helping us with our car washes,” said troop leader Alice Rolph, one of a smattering of adults who also turned out for the city’s annual event.

Last year, Jackson High School student Cameron Wu took part in the Earth Day event. This year, Wu led about 15 people, mostly Jackson students, armed with metallic trash grabbers as they scurried along the North Creek Trail filling plastic bags with litter.

Other volunteers laid gravel down in North Creek Park, off Ninth Avenue Southeast and at Cougar Park.

Wu’s parents, longtime Mill Creek residents David and Eva Wu, joined the 5-mile procession along North Creek Trail to McCollum County Park and back to City Hall.

Doris and Jenny Dale, clad in red and yellow reflective vests, took their time, carefully searching for stray cans, bottles and boxes.

“Move to your left, Jenny,” mom called out, as the duo teamed up along a trailside slope covered with salal and sticker bushes.

A passer-by in a T-shirt that read “It’s fun and games until the cops show up” thanked volunteers as they stooped along the trail, picking up bottles, cans, papers and even baskets.

The North Creek watershed straddles Mill Creek and Bothell. Mill Creek began planning ways to preserve it, and set the table for what would become Town Center as part of the city’s State Route 527 Sub Area Plan, in the early 1990s, said Tom Rogers, planning manager. A buffer was established and developers were encouraged to protect the areas around their developments.

“We set up regulations to allow trails in that buffered area,” Rogers said. “It took a while — eight to 10 years — but as (developers) came in, we had trails that went nowhere.”

Four years ago, the city began filling in the gaps of those trails to nowhere. The long-range plan is to have the North Creek Trail in Mill Creek meet the North Creek Trail in Bothell in one lone, uninterrupted corridor.

Pamela and Frank Dux, out for a walk with their poodles Sterling, Simone and Baby Zoey, watched the Earth Day entourage streak past.

“We tell people to come walk their dogs here all the time,” Pamela Dux said, “even people who don’t live here. I think it’s really added to Mill Creek.”