Kittitas County couple’s dedication helps keep Puget Sound park in top condition

NORDLAND, Wash. — Any public-lands agency that relies heavily on volunteers loves people like Howard Briggs and his wife, Joanne.

Ask Briggs, 70, if he would enjoy spending more of his retirement soaking up summer sun in a Barca-lounger, and you might as well shove rotten eggs under his nose.

“I hate that,” says Briggs, who since his retirement from Pacific Northwest Bell has found the time to work as chairman of the Kittitas County Snowmobile Grooming Council and serve on his community’s water commission. “To me, what’s relaxing is doing light work.”

So for each of the last nine years, Howard and Joanne have traveled from their Central Washington home near Elk Heights to Fort Flagler State Park on Marrowstone Island in the Puget Sound, to spend two to six weeks doing volunteer work that is often anything but light.

As he stands on a bluff, pointing out remnants of a century-old military gun battery site, the extent of that effort becomes very clear.

“This place was five and six feet high with scotch broom,” Briggs says. “You could not even see this place. In fact, there was a deer trail coming in here — that’s how I found it.”

Now, of course, the battery across the bluff near the island’s northern tip is just one of many cliffside attractions drawing people to Fort Flagler, which was built — along with Fort Warden near Port Townsend and Fort Casey on Whidbey Island — to protect Puget Sound from would-be naval invaders.

Today, the battery is wide-open, cleared of the choking jungle of scotch broom, salal and ferns, and is a regular stopping point on a well-marked hiking trail used by park visitors.

Almost everywhere the trail goes, in fact, that same jungle once existed. Many of those vintage armaments from the fort’s 1899 construction and others from World War II, now so easy to find and inspect, were once all but invisible behind impenetrable thickets.

Volunteers from Friends of Fort Flagler — a group in which the Briggses are now active, after initially just signing up as volunteer hosts — once found an old rifle range so overgrown they had no idea what it was. Because they found a gate and some old hay bales, they thought it might be a horse-feeding station associated with a nearby farm. Only after more rooting around in the overgrowth did they find the eight target stations.

Battery Lee, a 1900-era structure on the extreme northeast bluff of Marrowstone Point, is now accessed by a winding, descending trail wide enough for a passenger vehicle. But it took volunteers three years to clear that path through the labyrinth of vegetation.

“This place was so creepy before,” Joanne Briggs says, standing on the wide, concrete Battery Lee span that once contained two five-inch rapid-fire guns. “It was just so dark.”

Adds Howard, “You couldn’t even walk down here in the old days.”

The level of disrepair wasn’t because nobody cared.

“This has been a state park since 1955, but the rangers didn’t have the manpower to do much,” says Bob Brown, a Marrowstone Island resident whose wife was the first president of the Friends of Fort Flagler and who remains arguably the group’s most ardent volunteer. “It only takes a couple of years for nature to take over.”

These days, though, nature is at bay.

Battery Lee is bathed in sunlight on any blue-sky day, easy for tourists to find and marvel at. Where once were jungles are now fields and trails. And whenever Howard and Joanne or other park volunteers or employees encounter visitors exploring the park’s military legacy, the guests are likely to serenade them with choruses of how great everything looks, and how much more there is to see now.

“It’s always people that have been here before,” Howard says, “but years ago …”

“… Before all this work was done,” Joanne says.

•   •   •   •

Of course, the work at any state park is never done.

One day Howard and Joanne Briggs might be painting a spotlight building in classic army green. The next they might be reinforcing a perimeter fence to keep guests from dangerous missteps along the bluffs that are inexorably eroding away. Or they might be out hacking away with weed-whackers or machetes.

While there are only a handful of state parks that have a “Friends” group like Fort Flagler — which has about 130 members, perhaps a tenth of whom are as active as the Briggses — volunteers are crucial for the ongoing operation of virtually every park. In 2007, volunteers worked slightly more than 300,000 total hours at 121 state parks throughout Washington, equivalent to 138 full-time staffers who never take a vacation.

“Hosts are very important. We have to have them,” says Sarah Oldfield, a volunteer coordinator with Washington State Parks, which has been actively recruiting volunteers for nearly three decades.

“Every park will have their hosts doing something slightly different,” Oldfield says. “They call them campground hosts, volunteer hosts, interpretive hosts, Environmental Learning Center hosts, docents, a variety of things. Two parks in particular have marine hosts; they have to have a boat, helping people with docking up and that kind of thing.”

At Fort Flagler State Park, having hosts conversant in its history is important.

Because much of the World War II-era military housing is now a retreat center, not only the campground but also the old barracks themselves are routinely filled with visitors anxious to find out more about the fort. And while much of that can be gleaned during a trip to the park’s museum, manned by the Friends of Fort Flagler, nothing beats hearing about it from people who love the place and its history.

Which is where people like Howard and Joanne Briggs come in.

“It’s the best park in the state,” Bob Brown says, “because Howard’s here. Anybody that comes that distance, you’ve got to realize the park has some attraction.”

Certainly, it does for the Briggses, who first visited the park nearly four decades ago.

“When we first came here we liked it,” Joanne Briggs says. “We thought it was just a fantastic place, and we wanted to keep it looking that way. That’s why we spend a lot of time here.

“It’s just one of our babies, you know?”

• For more on how to volunteer, click here

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