On the morning of July 7, a small crowd gathered on a gravel path overlooking Irvine Slough to dedicate a bench. It sits about halfway along the Port Susan Trail, facing the marsh grass and the tidal flats that flood and drain twice a day behind downtown. The bench itself is unremarkable to look at. What's worth knowing is where it came from.
A local man named Haddock has spent years collecting plastic film, the kind that comes wrapped around cases of water bottles or stacked over pallets, from three businesses in town: Camano Island Coffee Roasters, Stanwood Ace Hardware, and the Stanwood-Camano Food Bank. He hauls it weekly. The program he started with used a national recycling initiative that traded plastic for park benches, but that initiative ended, replaced with a school-supply incentive instead. Haddock kept collecting anyway, because the benches were already funded and he'd already built the relationships with the businesses. His plastic has now paid for benches at the Port Susan Trail, at the Leo Club in Burlington, at Freedom Park, and at the food bank itself.
That's the part of this story that doesn't show up on a trail map. The bench dedicated on July 7 went to the Hamilton family, whose name is stamped on the Hamilton Smokestack, the old lumber mill chimney that still stands at the trail's far end. Stanwood's communications specialist, Nicole Strachila, said the dedication carried extra weight because the Hamiltons themselves came to see it unveiled.
What's actually walkable right now
If you haven't been out there yet, here's what exists on the ground today rather than on a future plan. Phase 1, completed in 2022, runs along Highway 532 on top of a flood berm, connecting 88th to 92nd Avenue. Phase 2, just finished, adds 1.2 miles of hard-surface trail starting at the Stanwood Park and Ride, looping around the Public Works campus, and ending at Hamilton Landing Park. It includes a boardwalk crossing over Irvine Slough and parking at both ends.
Put those two segments together and you get roughly two and a half miles, according to AllTrails' tally of the current route, of level, paved walking that didn't exist five years ago. What's still missing is the rest of the loop: a stretch through the west end of downtown to Heritage Park, then back to the Park and Ride, which the city expects to finish by 2030 as part of a five-mile ring around the lowland core of town.
A city council member put it plainly back when the second phase was still just a design contract:
I'm very excited that we're moving forward with this.
That was February 2022. The construction contract for that same phase wasn't awarded until the summer of 2024, and the boardwalk over Irvine Slough only opened after that. If you're wondering why these things move slowly, part of the answer is in the next section.
Built from what the city already had
Look closely at the route and a pattern shows up. Phase 1 sits on a flood berm the city had to build anyway for drainage. Phase 2 loops around the wastewater treatment lagoon on an access road that already existed for maintenance trucks. The whole thing terminates at a mill site the city had already redeveloped into a park. None of this is a coincidence. Stanwood didn't clear new land for a five-mile amenity. It threaded a walking trail through infrastructure the town had already paid for, one piece at a time, as budgets allowed.
That's also why the bench story fits so well here. A city didn't commission custom seating. A resident with a truck and three loyal drop-off points solved that problem on his own timeline, using what the town already had lying around in break rooms and stockrooms. The Port Susan Trail, in other words, isn't a park built from scratch. It's a town's existing bones, dike, lagoon road, retired chimney, walked and made visible for the first time.
Hamilton Landing Park itself tells the same story. The lot at 26810 98th Ave NW was a working lumber mill for decades. Today it has a public boat launch open dawn to dusk, a kayak launch, picnic tables, restrooms, and a bike rack, but the smokestack from the old mill still stands over all of it, lit up for holidays. The city didn't tear it down to build a park. It built the park around it.
What to watch for out there
The stretch along Irvine Slough is where most of the wildlife shows up. Regulars reported along the boardwalk and berm include:
- Bald eagles perched over the tidal flats
- Northern harriers gliding low over the marsh grass
- Great blue herons working the shallows at low tide
- River otters occasionally spotted in the slough itself
None of this requires a special trip. It's visible from a paved, ADA-accessible path with parking at both ends, which is a different experience than the mudflat scrambles some of the older county parks require.
Where the rest of the loop goes
The unfinished sections have their own logic. From Hamilton Landing Park, the plan sends the trail on a short spur to a Boy Scout overlook behind Mission Motors, then follows the Stillaguamish River around a bend at the future Ovenell Park. From there a footbridge is planned across Irvine Slough toward Eide Road Preserve, where a separate 0.7-mile berm trail already looks out over the estuary. The northern leg would cross Highway 532 through farmland, turn east along Lover's Road at the edge of Heritage Park, then follow the railroad tracks south back into downtown.
Every one of those segments, again, rides on something that already exists: a river bend, a preserve berm, a set of tracks. The city's own trail page still lists the total project cost at roughly $3.8 million across all five phases, a figure that's held steady across years of planning documents even as the design and construction contracts for phase two alone ran past $2 million combined.
A race that already treats it as finished
You don't have to wait for 2030 to see the trail put to use. Every January, the Smokestack Out'N Back 5K starts and ends at Hamilton Landing Park, running along calm county roads and the existing Port Susan Trail with the old smokestack visible for most of the course. The race held its second annual running at the start of this year, which means local runners have already built a habit around a trail that, on paper, is only two of five planned phases old.
That's probably the clearest sign of how this project actually works in a small town. Nobody waited for a ribbon-cutting to start treating the trail as theirs. Haddock didn't wait for a new recycling program before he kept collecting plastic. Runners didn't wait for Phase 3 before building a New Year's tradition into the route. The infrastructure gets used in pieces, by people who live here, long before it's officially done.
If you're out on the berm this fall, past the boardwalk and toward the smokestack, that bench overlooking Irvine Slough is worth a stop. It's a small object with an unusually specific supply chain behind it, and it says more about how Stanwood gets things built than most ribbon-cuttings do.
For everything else happening around Stanwood and Camano Island, from waterfront listings to the kind of local detail that doesn't make it into a portal search, CamanoIslandWaterfront keeps a close eye on the ground here. If a walk out to Hamilton Landing Park ever turns into a conversation about what your own property is worth or what's quietly changing in the neighborhood around you, Julie Love is always glad to talk it through.
