(click to enlarge photos)
Published in The Seattle Times online on Sept. 3, 2026
and in Pacific NW Magazine of the printed Times on Sept. 6, 2026
Path to Change:
How Seattle neighbors created the Burke-Gilman, the nation’s first urban rail-to-trail
By Jean Sherrard
Two-year-old Erik stood at his front window near Matthews Beach, watched a Burlington Northern engine rumble along the tracks below and shouted, “Train! Train! Train!” It was a toddler’s unwitting farewell to an era.
In those days, families walked the tracks to the beach, crossing the trestle above Sand Point Way. That tradition was facing an end.
When Burlington Northern announced in April 1971 it would abandon the line, a dozen neighbors — including Erik’s mother Merrill Hille — organized: They created a template that became the nation’s first urban rail-to-trail conversion.
“We had no idea that the project would take six years,” organizer Sandy Wood says.
Opposition rose from varied lanes.
“A lot of people out there were concerned about criminal activity from a trail,” Wood says. The effect on property values also was a concern. Meanwhile, rail enthusiasts hoped to run a steam excursion train from University Village to Kenmore.
Trail supporters outworked the detractors.
Committee member Estell Berteig spotted then-Mayor Wes Uhlman standing alone at Seattle Center during an event. “I only recognized him from newspaper pictures,” she says.
She lifted her newborn daughter from the stroller and walked over. “Who’s this?” she remembers him asking.
“I said, this is a little girl that’s going to need a bicycle trail.” He laughed.
Her daughter, Alissa, rides the trail to this day.
On Sept. 12, 1971, Uhlman marched south along the rails toward Matthews Beach while King County Executive John Spellman came from the north. Where they converged, at an 11-mile “hike-in” that Hille had organized, some 2,000 people rallied.
The next day, Uhlman wrote to neighborhood committee chair Jim Todd: “No longer can it be alleged that this facility is desired by a small or homogeneous group.”
The mayor had his own name for it — “the linear trail park concept” — which the women resisted but he kept using anyway. Perhaps bureaucratic fog was the point: A thing nobody can remember is a thing nobody can organize against.
But what to call it, really?
Hille, Mamie Rockafellar and Berteig all had read Robert Nesbit’s
1961 biography of Judge Thomas Burke, who founded the Seattle, Lake Shore & Eastern Railway with financier Daniel Gilman. The book, “He Built Seattle,” was pressed upon them by University of Washington archivist Richard Berner.
Sitting in the Berteig living room, the three shouted the answer simultaneously: Burke-Gilman!
“Such an enormous achievement,” says Peter Breyfogle of Fix the
Burke-Gilman, a Seattle Parks Foundation partner working to rebuild the trail’s oldest and most worn miles. Nearly half a million people now use the trail each year. “After 55 years, we need to ensure that legacy by maintaining and enhancing the Burke-Gilman for future generations.”
The trail today, with a gap in Ballard, runs about 20 miles from Shilshole Bay in Seattle to Bothell.
WEB EXTRAS
To see our narrated 360 degree video shot near the Burke Gilman trail at Matthews Beach, click here!
And don’t forget the 55th anniversary celebration of the Burke-Gilman “Hike-In”: 9 a.m.–3 p.m., Sept. 12, Matthews Beach Park, 5100 N.E. 93rd St., Seattle; free. More info: burkegilman50.org