CAMAS — It turns out that trail users and park officials agree on a lot about the parking lot at the north end of the Lacamas Heritage Trail.
There aren’t always enough parking spaces to accommodate the people who come to the popular recreation area at Northeast Goodwin Road and Alexandra Lane.
The parking issue is a familiar one to Don Larson, who uses the trail just about every day. It prompted the 86-year-old walking enthusiast to start a petition campaign.
Larson set up a notebook at the trailhead. He put his signature on the first line of the first page, and invited other walkers and runners to add their names to his request for an expanded parking lot.
Although Larson didn’t know it when he posted his sign-in notebook, city parks officials agree with him about the parking problem. An expansion is in the planning stages, said Jerry Acheson, Camas Parks & Recreation Department director.
“When we put it on our master plan, it was budgeted for 2016 construction,” Acheson said.
One-and-a-half acres already have been purchased for an expanded parking lot, which is about a mile north of Union High School.
The project is a team effort between Clark County Parks, which owns the trail, and the city of Camas, which maintains it.
“We have money budgeted this year to design the overflow parking area,” Acheson said.
When informed of the expansion plan, Larson responded: “Very good.”
“They totally need it,” Peter Delmage, another frequent trail user, said a few days ago at the trailhead. Delmage was one of the early signers in Larson’s petition book.
Larson has put in about 18,000 miles on the trail, he estimated. When he started using the walking path, “there was no parking problem,” Larson said.
“There weren’t that many people who knew about the trail. As more people learned about it, and as more people are getting interested in exercise, (the parking crunch) keeps building up,” Larson said.
“I was shocked there were so few” spots, Shannan McFadden-Sullivan said after finishing a recent run.
The lot has 16 pull-in slots, plus some parallel-parking spaces along a couple of sections of curb. When they are full, some people ignore “no parking” signs and leave their cars along the fire lane, or pull up on the shoulder of Northeast Goodwin Road.
There were a couple of dissenting voices in Larson’s book. One suggested using the bigger parking lot at the other end of the 3½-mile trail.
“But I live on this end,” Delmage said.
One trail user wrote: “Allready too many people here!!! Less parking!!!”
And if a walk is the goal, why not just walk to the trail? The stretch of road isn’t pedestrian friendly, Delmage said, and a lot of drivers exceed the speed limit.
“It would be 1½ miles on a road I shouldn’t walk on,” Larson said.
Larson’s sign-up sheet is his second shot at getting the attention of park officials, he said.
“I talked to the city and county about three or four years ago, and met with the committee that takes care of that sort of thing,” Larson said. “Nothing came of it.”
Well, something is coming of it now. Even though Acheson said he wasn’t aware of the grass-roots campaign at the Lacamas Heritage Trail, city officials have known about the parking problem.
“It’s a very heavily used park,” Acheson said.
So now that everybody is on the same page, so to speak, what happens to Larson’s signature-filled notebook?
“I think I will get some people to turn it in with me,” Larson said, “just to show them that we’re interested.”
