Willapa Hills State Park Trail – state parks quest #36

When I moved to Washington nearly three decades ago, I quickly acquired a small collection of books about the maritime Northwest. One of those books was Robert Michael Pyle’s Wintergreen: Rambles in a Ravaged Land, about the Willapa Hills. This region of southwest Washington, bounded by the Pacific to the west, the Olympic Mountains to the north, the Puget Trough to the east, and the Columbia River to the south, has few features that inspire delirious Instagram posts or listicles in travel blogs. The Willapas are mild hills, their rain-soaked ancient trees logged long ago. “These are devastated hills,” Pyle wrote, “doing their best to recover, to grow green things in time for the next devastation. A ravaged land, awaiting the next ravages. It is no wilderness; and yet it is wild and elusive.”

Pyle’s clear-eyed essays about the region sparked my curiosity, and I developed an abiding affection for the area. I’ve driven over Highway 6, the two-lane state road through the Willapas that roughly follows the Chehalis and Willapa rivers, exploring old logging towns and visiting farms. I’ve hiked a bit around the edges, but there weren’t many recreational trails in the hills. 

That changed with the development of the Willapa Hills State Park Trail, a converted railroad grade that runs 57 miles from South Bend to Chehalis. A welcome recreation option for hikers, bikers, and equestrians, the trail, which follows an abandoned Northern Pacific branch railroad route from Chehalis to Raymond, passes some of the region’s prettiest scenery and most expressive landscapes.

State Park Trails

Washington has five long-distance state park trails, part of an agency effort to create routes that, taken together, will cross the state on an east-west axis. State park trails offer a different kind of recreational opportunity than classic state parks. According to the Washington State Parks and Recreation Commission, a State Park Trail is “a linear state park area, distinct from other units of the state parks system, and designated primarily for non-motorized recreational trail activities (e.g., hiking cycling, horseback riding, etc.).”

A different kind of state park demands a different approach for visiting. In keeping with our goal of gaining a deeper understanding of each state park, we decided to tackle Willapa Hills in sections, cycling and hiking from several trailheads over a couple of weekends.

Chehalis to Adna

We started at the eastern end, in a parking lot within shouting distance of Interstate 5. Cyclists gathered for a group ride to Rainbow Falls State Park, about 15 miles west, while families loaded strollers and strapped on helmets. We set off on our bikes and immediately encountered what became a familiar feature: an imposing, repurposed train trestle. Now decked with wood planks, this big bridge is the first of dozens along the trail and one of the most scenic.

The trail is paved for the first five miles, to just past the Adna trailhead. Perhaps someday the entire trail will be paved, but for now it’s a mix of surfaces, with asphalt for a few miles at both east and west ends, and gravel and dirt between. It’s a reminder that the trail is a work in progress, dependent on available funding for restoring bridges and new surfacing. We continued on packed gravel for a while, then turned around to return to the parking lot, loaded the bikes on the car, and drove to our next starting point. 

Rainbow Falls to Pe Ell

Although the trail does not offer camping sites along the route, Rainbow Falls State Park makes a good bike-camping destination from the Chehalis trailhead. A sixteen-mile ride gets you to the signed turnoff for the park a few hundred feet to the south. We started our second segment at Rainbow Falls and rode to Pe Ell, about 7.5 miles west. The packed-gravel trail was easy to navigate, and we enjoyed riding next to the Chehalis River, well below cars on Highway 6. 

On a friend’s recommendation, we stopped at The Tin Snug in Pe Ell for lunch. It had been months since we’d eaten at a restaurant, and we decided to soak up the sun at an outdoor table. In Wintergreen, Pyle called Pe Ell a “tired logging town,” and it’s a fair, sad description. Many storefronts in the small downtown are empty or boarded over, and we spotted a new dollar store—sure sign of a struggling local economy—under construction at one end of town. The Tin Snug is a welcome contrast, a comfortable eatery in a historic brick building on the main street. We recommend any of the smoked bratwurst sandwiches and the roasted vegetable salad. 

The Chehalis River valley

Riding back, Mount Rainier peeked over the horizon, a focal point in the distance above the farms along the trail. The Chehalis River valley is a productive and precarious agricultural hub. Productive because the temperate, reliably rainy climate is good for growing a variety of crops and livestock. Precarious because the Chehalis floods regularly and often devastatingly. The most recent 100-year flood occurred in 2007 after heavy rains inundated the Willapa Hills and caused the Chehalis to overflow its banks. The flood shut down Interstate 5 for four days, washed out roads and bridges throughout the valley, and caused at least $166 million in damage. According to the City of Chehalis, the river has flooded 18 times in the last 20 years, and has experienced four major, or “significant, life-threatening catastrophic” flood events since 1990. Climate change will exacerbate these events, endangering the valley’s agriculture and residents.  

A twisting, narrow ribbon, the Chehalis River seems oddly undersized for the broad, flat valley, and that’s due to its geological origins. The river follows an ancient channel carved about 14,000 years ago during the last Ice Age. As the ice sheet that covered the Puget Sound lowlands began melting, water spilled through a gap in the Willapa Hills into what’s now Grays Harbor. That drainage channel now holds the much smaller Chehalis River, and its gently sloping valley makes for easy cycling.

We’d ridden about 25 miles and gotten a good sense of the eastern part of the trail in Lewis County. Next time, we’d pick up where we left off and explore the western portion to its terminus in South Bend, Pacific County.

The Willapa River valley

Two weeks later, we returned to Pe Ell, enjoyed another tasty lunch at the Tin Snug, and walked west on the Willapa Hills Trail for about a mile. At the western edge of Pe Ell, the Chehalis River comes in from the south, turning east beyond the town and eventually north and west to the ocean. But the trail and Highway 6 continue west through a narrow opening in the hills, picking up the Willapa River drainage in about six miles and following it to South Bend. We were headed there eventually, but first stopped at Walville, a logging ghost town close to the trail and almost exactly on the Pacific County line.

Walville 

Almost nothing remains of Walville, where a logging outfit operated from 1898 to 1930, but the site evokes Pyle’s lament: “The woods of the Willapa have been ravaged, along with its soils, rivers, and communities. It’s a simple tale in many ways—great trees gone, boomtowns busted.” Walville was one of those boomtowns, where perhaps 200 workers milled the big trees felled in the hills. Those trees left the Willapas by rail, on a branch line built by the Northern Pacific Railroad in the 1890s to serve South Bend, 30 miles west. The Great Depression brought the inevitable bust, and Walville disappeared. 

But not quite. A half-mile down Walville Creek Road from where it crosses the trail, a small clearing surrounded by a slowly collapsing wood post-and-rail fence houses a tiny cemetery. A faded sign with Japanese symbols stands at the entrance. Translated, it says, “Here, we pray for all Japanese who are resting in the cemetery, 1996 May 26.” Inside, bunches of artificial flowers are carefully placed. Look closely to find small metal plates attached to moss-cloaked crosses.

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Walville Logging Company employed about 75 Japanese workers to work the night shift at the mill. They lived separately from white employees, who worked the more desirable day shift. Some of the Japanese had families, as seen in pictures by Clark Kinsey, a notable photographer of the Northwest woods. The small cemetery has nine graves, most of which appear to be infants and children. Local accounts describe more graves on the hillside around it, so adults may be buried there as well. Shards of Japanese pottery were once a common find in the area.

It’s a short, worthwhile detour from the trail, both for the cemetery and for the utter lack of any other evidence of the once-thriving community. Once the forest was felled and shipped out by rail, most of the people left. A forest has returned, mostly alders and a few evergreens, and erased most signs of the logging town. This is the recurring story of the Willapa Hills.

Westward

Where the trail crosses the Walville Creek Road, we stopped to chat with a cyclist heading west. He’d come to the trail weekend after weekend from his home in Winlock, endeavoring to ride the whole 56 miles in one day, and it looked like today might be his day. From this point until about five miles from the end, the trail surface was chunky rock or hard-packed dirt, which on previous weekends had melted into a tire-sucking mud. But the weather was fine, the trail was dry, and he was optimistic. He rode off, and we continued on.

The highway corridor is narrow here, and the slopes seem close on both sides. We spotted a small herd of elk grazing on the hillside just north of the trail, a treat for cyclists and drivers alike. 

In another mile, the trail passes Pluvius Hill, named for the Latin word meaning rainy, and goes under Highway 6. A sign on the hill notes this is Weyerhaeuser land, a managed forest replanted in 1983. Not yet 50 years old, the trees seem both tall and paltry, spindly ghosts of the giants that once cloaked the Willapas. Just past the highway bridge, the trail leaves the highway corridor to curve around some hills before crossing Fern Creek and rejoining the road corridor. This is the wildest section of the trail, winding over the hills between the Chehalis and Willapa river drainages, and the bridge over Fern Creek isn’t yet upgraded.

The trail continues through tiny Frances, center of a decades-old Swiss farming community, and on to slightly less tiny Lebam, a railroad town whose glory days corresponded with those of Walville and other logging communities, from the 1890s to about 1930. 

Along the Willapa

Five miles further west, the trail crosses the Willapa River over a restored trestle, providing a good place to pause and admire the views down the broad river valley, where the straight edges of farm fields fold and bend against the river banks.

Another few miles brought us to Menlo, a rural community and home of the Pacific County fairgrounds. The trail here is straight, paralleling the highway and passing the grave of Willie Keil, the “pickled pioneer.”

Willie Keil Gravesite 

The story of Willie Keil, a 19-year-old who emigrated over the Oregon Trail embalmed in a coffin full of whiskey, is fantastically weird, and so oft-repeated it’s hardened into received truth. These are the basic facts: Willie’s father, Wilhelm Keil, was a Prussian immigrant and religious revivalist who wanted to found a utopian colony in the Pacific Northwest. He decided on the Willapa River and gathered his followers, but just before they left, his son Willie died. 

The legend says that Willie had been so excited by the prospect of the journey that on his deathbed he begged his father not to leave him behind in Missouri, and the elder Keil complied. He filled a coffin with alcohol and entombed his son’s body inside, placed the coffin on the lead wagon, and set out for the Northwest. When they arrived at this site on the Willapa, Keil buried his son on a small hill above what’s now the roadside pullout for the historical marker, a state park heritage site. Unfortunately, the grave is not visible from the trail or road and there is no public access. Still, it’s worth a few minutes to leave the trail, cross the highway, read the marker, and squint up to the knoll where a couple of trees stand inside a fence, towering over the grave.

Raymond, South Bend, and the western terminus

The trail is chunky gravel here, rutted in places and puddled after rain. It sweeps away from the highway about a mile past Willie Keil’s gravesite, then rejoins it on the outskirts of Raymond. Passing the large steel sign (one of dozens that depict area wildlife and people) that welcomes drivers and cyclists to “Raymond on the Willapa,” we continued into town. The rough trail became packed gravel, then asphalt. 

A lighted crosswalk helped us cross busy Highway 101, putting us just south of Raymond’s downtown district. We continued on the trail, which crossed the river again, then turned sharply away from the road and into a slightly confusing commercial area. To navigate this portion, get on Ocean Avenue just behind the Jehovah’s Witness church and follow it for a few hundred feet to a right turn on Willapa Place Way. The trail almost immediately splits off to the left, past a supermarket and a couple of fast food restaurants. 

The trail passes a few houses and a closed sawmill, then hugs the river for 2.5 miles to the trailhead in South Bend. There’s parking here for a few cars, as well as a restroom, a pet waste bag dispenser, and a bike maintenance station with pump—a nice touch. It’s a short ride into downtown South Bend from here, where a few restaurants offer fish and chips, barbecue, and the area’s best-known food export, oysters. 

An end at the beginning

South Bend marks one end of the Willapa Hills Trail, but it’s not an overstatement to say that the roots of the trail start here. In 1889, the nascent settlement offered riverfront land to the Northern Pacific Railway if it would build a line linking South Bend to the main line between Portland and Tacoma. The railroad agreed and a land rush ensued. South Bend boomed, and in 1893, rail service began on the Willapa Harbor Line between South Bend and Chehalis. The train stopped at nearly 30 communities on its 57-mile run, most of them lumber towns centered on sawmills in the Willapa Hills.

The Great Depression ended nearly three decades of lumber boom, and many of the towns all but disappeared. Improvements to what is now State Route 6 eventually made it possible for lumber and people to move through the hills by vehicle, and demand for rail service dwindled. Rail fans and residents came for the last passenger run in March 1954, although freight hauling continued. In 1970, the Northern Pacific merged into Burlington Northern, and the train operated for another 20 years until BN abandoned it in 1990. In 1993, Washington State Parks acquired the rail bed right-of-way for recreational use, developing the Willapa Hills Trail in the ensuing years.

Today, cyclists, hikers, and equestrians can hop on the trail at former boomtowns like Adna, Ceres, Lebam, Frances, Meskill, and Menlo. The lumber boom is over. The forests of the Willapa are largely managed monoculture plantations and mostly owned by big timber companies like Weyerhaeuser. As Pyle wrote in Wintergreen, “Lacking any national forests, parks, or other reserves, most of the Willapas’ wood has long since been carted off, the hills themselves greatly scarred in the process.” In one sense, the trail is an elegy for the ancient trees that once covered the hills and were shipped out on the now-gone railroad. Yet it is also a symbol of hope that the Willapa Hills and those who live there might forge a sustainable economic and environmental coexistence. A narrow belt linking the hills to the interstate corridor and the coast, the trail ties the Willapas together, a tangible way to experience the region’s “wild and elusive” appeal. 

Fast facts about Willapa Hills State Park Trail

• 757-acre, 56.5-mile recreational trail, open year-round
• Discover Pass required at some trailhead parking areas, $10 daily or, for a very reasonable $30, purchase an annual pass
• Horse trailer parking, picnic tables, restrooms available at certain trailheads, see trail map
• Hiking, cycling, horseback riding
• Camping available at Rainbow Falls State Park, reserve online or by calling 888-CAMPOUT
• trail map