Most people who live in Shorewood have driven past the trailhead a thousand times without seeing it. It is a short cul-de-sac off Shorewood Drive SW, just before the road makes its sharp turn, sitting quietly next to the gated entrance to the wastewater plant. There is room for two, maybe three cars. Beyond an unremarkable gate, the ground drops into 88 acres of second-growth forest that the City of Burien and King County jointly own but neither has ever finished developing.
That is the whole thesis of Salmon Creek Ravine. It is the largest green space attached to the neighborhood, and it has stayed the largest green space attached to the neighborhood precisely because no one ever built a proper parking lot, a signed kiosk, or a paved loop. What looks like municipal neglect is what keeps the ravine feeling remote thirty seconds after you step off the pavement. Summer is when the trail dries out enough to walk the full network without slogging, and it is also the season the ravine tells the most of its story if you know where to look.
Where the trailheads actually are
There are five ways in, and none of them are obvious from a car window. In order of usefulness:
- Main trailhead, Shorewood Drive SW. The cul-de-sac tucked to the left of the wastewater plant fence. According to Washington Trails Association, this is the only access with room for two or three cars. Everything else is street parking in front of somebody's house.
- 16th Avenue SW at SW 131st Street. Look just to the right of a yellow fire hydrant, next to the "Shorewood on the Sound" neighborhood sign, where 16th curves into 131st. A narrow singletrack drops straight down. Hiking Project notes the first quarter mile is rough enough that most residents miss the entrance entirely.
- West ends of SW 122nd, 124th, and 126th Streets, off Ambaum Blvd SW. These are the classic "park at your own risk" spurs. The 122nd Street branch was, at last public report, still collecting old furniture and mattresses, so pick one of the others.
If you don't want to move your car at all, the main trailhead sits on the King County Metro 120 line, with stops on Ambaum just east of the park. That detail matters more than it sounds. The ravine is one of the few large green spaces on this side of Burien that a resident without a car can actually reach on a weekday afternoon.
Once you are in, there are two main trails and a handful of side branches. The longest runs from Shorewood Drive up along the creek toward Ambaum, roughly following the buried sewer line the whole way. Locals have a name for that trail that involves the word "poopy." It is not inaccurate on a warm day. The upper trail, coming down from the 16th Avenue entrance, is the drier and prettier of the two, especially in July when the sword fern and horsetail are at full height. String the network together and the round trip runs close to five miles.
What you are walking over
The ravine reads like a quiet park until you start noticing the ground. The wide, oddly graded sections of the lower trail are not natural. They are traces of skid roads, the crossways-log tracks that ox teams used to drag timber down to Puget Sound in the 1890s. Samuel B. Carr and Thomas Hood, the first loggers to work northwest Burien, tried Salmon Creek in 1891, gave up after a year on account of the steep, wet hillsides, and moved their operation up onto the White Center plateau, according to the City of Burien's history of the ravine. The skid marks stayed.
The next chapter is more recent than most Shorewood residents realize. In the 1940s, Joe Burke ran a small sawmill in the ravine near Shorewood Drive. He logged what was left of the virgin timber on Shorewood hill, installed a water wheel and a power plant on the creek to generate his own electricity, and ran wooden pipes wrapped in wire up the hillside to supply water to early Shorewood residents. The mill lasted three or four years before it was abandoned and burned. Burke is also, in a very direct sense, responsible for why the creek carries no salmon today. To eliminate the smell of dead spawning fish behind his house, he set a rock at the mouth of the stream and blocked the migration. The rock is long gone. The blockage effectively is not.
The third layer is the Toonerville Trolley. On weekends in the 1920s and 1930s, Seattle families rode the streetcar out to the corner of SW 116th and Ambaum, got off at Frank Parente's Salmon Creek Grocery, bought sandwiches, and walked the creek down to the Sound. The Lake Burien car line, the only single-tracked private-right-of-way streetcar in Seattle, ran nine miles from Riverside to Seahurst between 1912 and 1931. Parente closed the grocery in 1930 under the twin pressures of the Depression and the streetcar's decline. The line made its last run the following year. What used to be a weekend day-trip corridor from downtown Seattle is now the trail behind your house.
Why "Salmon" is more aspirational than descriptive
The most quietly interesting fact about Salmon Creek Ravine, and the one worth knowing before you walk it, is that Salmon Creek does not really have salmon. Not in any meaningful production sense. The City of Burien's own park page is direct about the mechanism. Two migration barriers sit within the first 800 feet of the mouth of the stream. One is the culvert under Shorewood Drive, whose steep grade, high water velocity, and shallow depth turn it into a wall for anything trying to swim upstream. The result is that 2,860 feet of otherwise-suitable spawning habitat sits just upstream of Shorewood Drive with almost nothing in it. The city estimates as many as 250 adult fish per year are lost to those first 800 feet of pipe.
This is worth sitting with. Salmon Creek was once a four-mile stream draining the White Center plateau, and it supported sea-run cutthroat, coho, chum, chinook, and steelhead. The Haseltons, who farmed the land between 128th and 131st SW from Ambaum to 8th, remembered it as full of nice trout. Today the creek is believed to support small numbers of cutthroat and sculpin, plus juvenile coho that get planted rather than born there. The Shorewood on the Sound Community Club and Trout Unlimited have both worked at chipping away at the blockages and replanting the banks. The Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife proposed as far back as 1993 to add woody debris for pool habitat if the county would fix the culvert. The culvert is still there.
Two other pieces of infrastructure history sit under the surface. The 1980 White Center Drainage Improvement Project finally quieted the flash flows that used to blow out the banks during storms, which is why the trail today is walkable at all in winter. And the Nisqually earthquake on February 28, 2001 triggered a large landslide inside the ravine that reshaped a section of the lower creek. If you have wondered why one stretch of the streambed looks like it was recently rearranged by something much bigger than water, that is why.
A resident's note on July
The ravine feels remote fast. That is its best feature and its most honest warning. Cell reception drops inside the drainage. The main trail funnels between two hillsides that block the sound of Ambaum within a hundred yards. Regulars walk it constantly, especially with dogs, but the park has no posted hours, no ranger, and no cleared sightlines. Bring a friend the first time. Wear something you don't mind getting muddy where the side trails cross the seep zones.
Parking is the other thing worth planning around. Every trailhead sits inside a residential block, and the two-or-three-car cul-de-sac at Shorewood Drive fills quickly on summer weekends. If you can walk from home, walk from home. If you can't, the 120 stop on Ambaum is genuinely the second-best option, not a consolation. And if you are parking on a side street, keep it well away from driveways and mailboxes. The ravine stays open partly because the neighbors around it stay patient with the people who use it.
The story of Salmon Creek Ravine is a story about what happens when infrastructure decisions are left alone for a century. The skid roads stayed because nobody paved them. The trail stayed because nobody widened it. The salmon left because nobody moved the rock, and then nobody replaced the culvert. Walk it in July and you are walking through the compounded consequences of small choices, most of them made before anyone in the neighborhood today was born. That is not a bad way to spend an afternoon.
If you are thinking about the summer ahead in Shorewood, or about what a home in this specific corner of Burien actually connects to, Porter Group is happy to talk. Contact us any time.
