By QUINTON SMITH/YachatsNews
YACHATS – What seemed like a simple idea almost three years ago took root – literally – this weekend when dozens of volunteers painstakenly planted hundreds of native plants in two small “pocket parks” along Ocean View Drive.
Members of the city’s Parks & Commons Commission, the Yachats Trails Team and other volunteers spent much of Saturday and Sunday digging and planting tufts of native clover, meadow sedge and fescue in carefully marked areas of the parks.
While there’s still some work to do, the weekend plantings represent a big step in a small, seemingly simple project that got stalled for years in city hall turmoil and management issues.
“It’s great to have some progress,” said Adam Altson, who started working on the idea with trails team member Bob Langley in early 2021, only last year joined the Parks & Commons Commission and is currently its chair. “It feels really good.”
The whole idea is to provide a small area where the many walkers along the adjacent 804 Trail – now separated from the one-way street by delineators – can stop to sit on benches and admire the view.
The city only recently decided to go ahead with the work despite the torturously years-long process of Lincoln County turning over ownership of Ocean View Drive to the city still not completed.
In order to do the plantings, the city hired a contractor to scrape off several inches of compacted gravel next to the adjacent 804 Trail. But that could only be done after hiring an archeological specialist to determine – and get it OK’d by Oregon State Parks — if the gravel removal would not disturb any Native American shell middens.
The contractor also removed oversized boulders initially placed between the trail and the 1,200 square foot parks and replaced them with smaller rocks. The contractor then poured concrete slabs for benches – but only after the city’s insurance company weighed in to recommend the benches be 21 feet back from the edge of the cliff.
There’s still some work to be done.
Another bench is coming for the northernmost pocket park at West Sixth Street.
And, at the insurance company’s suggestion, there will be a short wooden fence along the bluff with plantings in front of it. Once the plantings get big enough to keep people back from the edge, then the fence will come down, said mayor Craig Berdie, who championed the park project when he was on the Parks & Commons Commission. A wheelchair accessible gravel path in the north park will also connect the 804 Trail to the bench area.
It was Berdie who helped push the parks idea to the city council, which in October 2021 allocated $25,000 to pay for work not done by volunteers. That included buying nearly 1,400 small native plants that advocates hoped could be planted right away – but ended up being stored for two years at a state parks nursery near Beaver Creek.
But after the weekend work and years of frustration, the end is in sight.
Joanne Kittel, the longtime Yachats trails advocate, said the delineators installed last year make the trail safer for walkers and the small parks — when finished — will provide a great spot for a respite, especially for the disabled.
“The 804 Trail is the only one in the area that is accessible for the disabled and the pocket parks are perfect for them and anyone else to stop and take in the ocean views,” she said.
Kittel also praised members of the Parks & Commons Commission for not giving up on the idea.
“The commission never let go that this project needed to be done … ” she said.
This makes me so happy.
Great article!