A Walk in Elton Bennett Park

I took the camera for a walk today, to Elton Bennett Park in my hometown of Hoquiam, Wash.

The plan was to participate in the Wednesday Walk with @tattoodjay and the worldwide community that has gathered around his #wednesdaywalk challenge.

A local tourist guide describes Elton Bennett Park as “a 9-acre wooded site located in north central Hoquiam, providing a picturesque mile-plus hiking trail through (a) densely forested landscape.”

The park is on a hillside, and the trail loops generally up and back down, with plenty of dips and rises and trickling streams in between. There are a myriad of ‘picturesque’ nooks and crannies in the park, and they present an interesting challenge, for me, in learning how to capture through a camera the beauty I see just walking through.

The first thing I noticed today is the skunk cabbage blooming in a line along the stream. You can’t see the stream, but it’s there in the little dip on the right.

And here’s a view of a particularly grand skunk cabbage that I found a little ways up the trail.

Heading up....

… and looking back down.

Usually I ignore the handful of signs in the park, especially when I’m taking photos, but today this one caught my eye. It does offer a fuller sense of the park to share it, I suppose.

The parks department has some work to do, when they can get around to it.

Here you can actually see one of the trickling streams I referred to earlier. Hoquiam is on the Pacific Coast in western Washington. We have a Mediterranean climate, with two seasons: rainy and not-so-rainy. It’s still the rainy season, so there’s plenty of water running down the hill.

A place to sit...

...and a place to walk.

Below, and in the headline shot, that’s Elton Bennett’s former house peeking through the trees. According to what I’ve pieced together, from oral tradition and some reading, Elton Bennett was a
silkscreen artist and local teacher. He owned the land the park is on and loved walking there, as I think we can all understand. After he died in 1974, in a plane crash, his daugther gave the land to the city of Hoquiam for a nature park.

And finally, I’ll leave you with my view just before heading home, looking down Grand Avenue from the trailhead.