Well this is a first. I always imagined if I left California it would be to head north to Washington state. Now I am certain of it!
Madison Park leaves a nice slice of real estate as a sanctuary for beavers
IT’S A PRETTY SWEET neighborhood by any definition. Madison Park, located just east of Montlake and south of the University District on Lake Washington, has a picture-book quality to it, like an imagined neighborhood in a Spielberg movie, upscale without being flashy, vintage without feeling old and adjacent to Seattle’s most beloved collection of trees at the Washington Park Arboretum. It’s a great place to live if you’re a human, but it’s an ideal place to live if you’re a beaver.
The Beaver Lodge Sanctuary is announced by a monolithic sign etched into a handsome upright slab of old-growth wood. The name is simultaneously descriptive (it is, in fact, a beaver lodge, and a sanctuary for beavers) and inappropriately grandiose for such a small place (most of which is underwater), but somehow it still fails to capture the quiet beauty of the spot, a little oasis of calm with a hell of a view.
Apparently Madison park is already one of the nicest places to live in Seattle. How much better will it be with a beaver sanctuary? Why didn’t Martinez think of that…
Situated in the northernmost nook of Madison Park on Lake Washington’s Union Bay, the sanctuary is a small stretch of marshland, not much more than a couple of residential lots, and standing in the middle, you can see all of it. The entrance is hidden among the twists and turns of a residential neighborhood. There is no parking lot, and you have to traverse a wooded path lined with what look like moss-festooned high-end Hobbit houses before reaching a somewhat ramshackle dock that sticks out like a rickety but serviceable tongue into the marsh like a driveway, the last few feet of which require visitors to get their feet wet if they want to visit this plot of land’s flat-tailed residents. The dock currently is unsafe to walk on, and is blocked off.
Beavers won’t care about the doc, but they will be happy to have the privacy!
The lodge itself rises up in front of the dock, a pile of dirt and sticks and collected logs built by the lords and ladies of that castle, its resident beavers. Locals say the beavers are most likely spotted by humans at dusk or dawn, sleeping the day away inside the lodge like college party animals, but paddleboarders and kayakers claim to have seen them poking their little heads out at all hours. These are North American beavers (Castor canadensis), and they hold the valorous distinction of being the largest rodent on the continent (and the second-largest in the world, after South America’s similarly aquatic capybaras).
This is a nice slice of real estate, abutting the crisp green expanse of the tony Broadmoor Golf Club to the west and a stone’s throw from the lush Arboretum to the south. Doubtless this ideal patch of land would have been claimed by some lucky human, except that it is city land, a little public right of way down to the water. In the near distance, the white ribbon of the Evergreen Point Floating Bridge stretches across the panoramic vista of the Cascades like a space-age highway dreamed up in the ’60s, a clean, futuristic sign of human habitation passing politely across undisturbed wild. In the far distance, the twin flanges of Husky Stadium rise up over the landscape like a pair of reversed gullwing doors on a DeLorean.
Just imagine waking every day to walk to a beaver lodge that YOU DONT NEED TO FIGHT THE CITY TO KEEP!!! Imagine never going to a city council meeting again! I’m swooning.
Shh this is my favorite part:
Though the titular beavers are clearly the architects of this structure, they are excellent hosts, and at any given time, the place is hopping with guest birds aplenty (blue herons, ducks and geese), as well as fat little muskrats and the clever otters who are said to hang out in a neighboring boathouse. The myriad birds that flock here seem livelier than other places, letting all their feathers hang out and drying their wings in the sun. A visitor will see countless merry little ducktails bobbing up and down in the clearish water, happy to hang out at one of Seattle’s best party houses on any given sunny afternoon.
