100% Wheelchair Accessible So We Can Zoom Zoom Zoom

Posted byC. M. DeverPosted inAdventure, Disability, Hiking

Miner’s Corner County Park || 6/19/26

A new park!  Well, new to us.  And honestly, it IS relatively new.  Welcome to Miner’s Corner County Park.

How pretty is this?
Pretty map of the park

This park was built as part of the appeasement process for all of the NIMBY’s who were cranky about the Brightwater Treatment Plant going in.  The Brightwater facility boasts a popular event venue, walking trails and park space, and has not been stinky or gross at all.  That said, I am really glad that this park got built.

The park is bordered on two sides with fairly busy roads, and the perimeter trail goes alongside them, so that part can get a bit noisy.

Opened in 2014, Miner’s Corner is a real community park.  It’s meant to be 100% accessible (assuming they specifically mean for wheelchairs, as I didn’t see braille alongside the interpretive sign or the Park Info paper, for example) and was Snohomish County Parks’ first such exertion.

No braille here. Not even a tactile map as far as I could tell.
No braille here, either. And this interpretive sign is so damaged that even sighted people are going to have trouble reading it. Would have been a really cool opportunity for a tactile map.

There’s an nice playground with an elevated ramp-accessible walkway (apparently one of the tallest in the world???), a large structural sand play area, and a small creek for kids to play in.  The creek might actually be the fountain they claim to have that I didn’t see because I didn’t want to make Sieh go near little kids.  There’s a basketball court with hopscotch, four square, and some other kind of game painted on the surface.  There’s a large, covered picnic table area that can be reserved, and some substantial-looking bathrooms.  Pets aren’t allowed in the bathrooms so I didn’t get to check them out to see how actually accessible they are (I would assume no lift, but someone said that there’s a large concrete bench inside that could be used as an adult changing table.)  There are expansive lawns throughout the park, perfect for playing sports, picnicking, and hosting gatherings.

I get hopscotch and four square, but what is this rectangular ladder thing?
Close-up of hopscotch
Everybody get up, it’s time to slam now! We got a real jam goin’ down! Welcome to the Space Jam!  Here’s your chance, do your dance at the Space Jam!
Lots of room for activities
Cool art

We were mostly interested in the 1.5 miles of trails that interlace the park, including a perimeter loop.  The trails are all paved, and are, aside from one section that is wanting repair, smooth and easy to roll.  There is one particularly bad spot that some wheelchair users might not be able to pass, but hopefully they’re planning on executing repairs soon.

How lovely is this?
There were several little trails like this from people playing in the woods.
Most of the trail is smooth and level like this.

We zoomed around for a while, getting the lay of the land,  and then spent some time working on leash-training with Leeloo and Sieh walking alongside Yunnie.  To begin with, they’re a bit rusty on their heeling (it’s been years since we were hiking on a regular basis), but they actually did really well considering how new they are to hiking with Yunnie.  It’s going to take work on all three of our parts before we can be a smoothly functioning unit with beautiful leash manners again.

All three of my kids are in this picture
He’s so happy because he found grass XD
Also making a good effort at trying to eat the grass
Doing pretty well walking alongside Yunnie!
Shout out to my The Green Pet Shop Cool Pet Pad! It’s like 15 years old and still going strong. Like, it still works just as well as it did when I bought it. A fantastic purchase.
A really nice cat mom stopped to chat while I was feeding Leeloo and Sieh their Churu, so Sieh climbed in with his sister for comfort.
We rolled a total of 3.3km. It was pretty roasty toasty out and the park is only so big, so we didn’t stay a super long time.

There’s very little about this park that doesn’t please.  The omnipresent Himalayan blackberries are always a bummer to see, but they’re to be expected since it’s an eternal act of maintenance to keep them down.  For hot summer days it would be nice if there was more tree cover to provide shade, but this is complicated by the presence of the power line corridor.  

These invasive blackberries are a pain in the ass. We call them “Himalayan blackberries,” but they’re actually native to Armenia and Iran. They did use them to breed marionberries, though, so I guess they do have a single redeeming quality in the states
The powerline corridor is actually really pretty, just no shade, obviously.

A rare triumph of wheelchair accessible design, I truly hope that Snohomish County and other parks systems can bring us many more parks like it, while retrofitting existing parks to be more accessible as well.

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