August 28, 2025
Reconnecting people and place
By ANNA SPOONER and TRACY DRURY
Anchor QEA
Spooner
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Drury
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Located in a steep ravine on the north end of Edmonds in Snohomish County, Meadowdale Beach Park has long been a popular public access point to Puget Sound.
But for decades, visitors could only reach the beach by ducking through a narrow six-foot box culvert beneath the BNSF Railway, a route that was often flooded, choked with sediment and seasonally impassable. Some parkgoers began crossing the rails, raising serious safety concerns for the public and the railroad.
This same culvert also blocked fish passage, cutting off juvenile salmon from a critical estuarine transition zone.
Today, Meadowdale Beach Park is a very different place.
Completed in 2023, the Meadowdale Beach Park and Estuary Restoration project replaced the culvert with a 130-foot railroad bridge, restored a pocket estuary and introduced a fully ADA-compliant trail leading to the beach. The result is a civic and ecological success that is influencing shoreline infrastructure thinking across the region.
A FIRST-OF-ITS-KIND CIVIC RESTORATION
Led by Snohomish County Parks and Recreationin collaboration with the Tulalip Tribes, BNSF railroad and other project partnersthis is the first pocket estuary restoration along BNSF’s 46-mile shoreline corridor between Everett and Seattle. It removed a section of railroad embankment and replaced it with a five-span bridge, reconnecting Lunds Gulch Creek with Puget Sound and reintroducing tidal and sediment processes vital to estuarine function.
It is also Puget Sound’s first full restoration completed beneath an active railway line. While other projects adjacent to existing trestles have enhanced shoreline and fish habitat, Meadowdale is unique in restoring a tidal estuary by removing a constrained culvert and constructing a new bridge along the active railroad’s mainline.
By pairing infrastructure upgrades with habitat restoration and public access, Meadowdale provides a replicable model of civic-minded ecological engineering. This integrated thinking among engineers, landscape architects, biologists and planners was central to the project’s success.
POCKET ESTUARIES: TINY HAVENS, BIG IMPACT
While the estuary at Meadowdale covers just 1.3 acres, it provides tremendous value to the threatened Chinook salmon, the preferred prey of Southern Resident orcas. Chinook need safe, brackish water areas to transition physiologically from freshwater to saltwater, and pocket estuaries like Meadowdale serve as vital rearing and resting zones along their journey to the ocean.
Prior to the restoration, the constrained channel upstream of the culvert concentrated flows and offered no refuge for fish migrating up Lunds Gulch Creek. During rain events, high-velocity water pooled at the culvert outlet, creating a steeply graded channel that was difficult for fish to ascend.
The urgency of restoring these habitats became especially clear in the wake of findings that confirm that not all juvenile salmonids reside in their native estuaries; some travel long distances and pop in and out of these small pocket estuaries.
This underscores the conclusion that restoring large river mouths alone is not enough. A network of smaller pocket estuaries is needed along Puget Sound to increase salmon survivability.
Meadowdale is now one of those essential waypoints, and as a result, projects of similar scope and size are in discussion and design along Puget Sound’s eastern shoreline.
ENGINEERING AND ECOLOGY IN CONCERT
The Meadowdale site presented an array of technical challenges. Situated in a steep ravine, the park lies within a designated landslide hazard area. The old access road was too narrow and unstable for heavy equipment, and the park’s natural constraints and surrounding neighborhood limited staging space. The project also took shape as live-track railroad operations continued, with as many as 50 trains passing daily.
To maintain railroad operations during construction, the team drove bridge foundation piles through the old embankment with minimal disruption, resulting in only two 24-hour closures during bridge installation. Track monitoring measures, including the use of prisms, provided rail safety throughout construction.
At the park entrance, a pile wall now stabilizes the access road, with lightweight foamed glass aggregate used as backfill to reduce loading on the slope. Diamond Pier foundations support the timber boardwalk to minimize wetland impacts, while salvaged large wood helped restore complexity to the creek and estuary.
These elements allowed the new design to reestablish natural sediment transport and ecosystem processes that had been constrained since the railroad was built over a century ago. Historical maps combined with hydrodynamic modeling of existing and proposed conditions informed the channel’s realignment to promote long-term resilience under changing tidal and stream flow conditions.
Delivered more than $1 million under budget, the approximately $15.4 million project earned strong community support through intentional, multilingual engagement that began early and continued through construction.
PUBLIC ACCESS REIMAGINED
Meadowdale Beach Park is now one of the most inclusive natural shorelines in the region. The gently sloped ADA pathway winds through forested areas, across a new pedestrian bridge and under the trestle. It concludes at a beachfront plaza with environmental signage and seasonal beach mats that extend wheelchair access onto the sand.
The restored park preserves a portion of the existing lawn, improves stormwater drainage and adds a picnic shelter, while upgrading and enclosing portable toilets. A long-standing county master plan, which seeks to balance ecological goals with civic amenities, guided these enhancements.
The project also considered long-term operations and safety. Replacing the culvert with a bridge eliminates the need for frequent sediment removal, a costly and habitat-disrupting effort. In addition, the underpass design and enhanced security fencing discourages trespassing across the railway, significantly improving public safety.
The park now serves as a living classroom. Volunteer groups, including students and staff from the Meadowdale School District, are participating in salmon monitoring efforts alongside the Tulalip Tribes as part of Snohomish County’s long-term restoration monitoring plan. The site invites the public to witness tidal processes, observe fish migration and engage in environmental education, experiences rarely available in such an accessible, urban-adjacent setting.
A CIVIC MODEL WITH STAYING POWER
As Puget Sound communities grapple with urban growth, climate adaptation and declining fish populations, Meadowdale demonstrates that infrastructure doesn’t always have to come at the expense of ecology or public use. When designed thoughtfully, it can serve all three.
Salmon returned to the site immediately after the culvert was removed and the trestle completed, and a ten-year post-project monitoring program is now underway to track sediment movement, habitat evolution and fish use. Continued data collection will help drive similar efforts in the region and refine future pocket estuary designs.
Projects like this are difficult. They require substantial coordination across agencies, including funding from state, local and federal grants, as well as a shared commitment to working within the constraints of both landscape and infrastructure. But they are certainly worth the effort.
The Meadowdale Beach Park and Estuary Restoration project illustrates that integrating public access, environmental restoration and infrastructure resilience is not just possibleit’s imperative. Meadowdale reconnects more than just a creek to the Sound; it reconnects people to place, engineering to ecology, and civic design to long-term public good.
The project’s blend of ecological restoration, civic infrastructure and public engagement earned it the prestigious National Recreation and Park Association Innovation in Conservation Award, the first Washington state project to claim this honor. It also won the VISION 2050 Award from the Puget Sound Regional Council, and was recognized by the American Council of Engineering Companies, Washington Chapter of the American Society of Landscape Architects, American Society of Civil Engineers and Construction Management Association of America.
Anna Spooner is a principal landscape architect and Tracy Drury is a principal engineer at Anchor QEA, the project’s prime engineering, restoration, and construction management lead.
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