Most of us pick one Normandy Park walk and wear a groove in it. The loop from Marvista, the shortcut past City Hall, the drop down to the beach when out-of-town family visits. What almost nobody does is treat the city's trails as the single, deliberately-linked system they actually are, with a creek quirk at its center and a 5.7-mile perimeter route hiding in plain sight.

The claim, in one paragraph

The City maintains three color-coded walking loops that share edges with each other, and both of the town's nature preserves sit inside or against those loops. The Normandy Park Walking Trail system consists of three interconnected loops: a Red Loop of roughly 2.2 miles that originates at City Hall Park, a Yellow Loop of about 2.6 miles that starts at Natural Trails Park, and a Green Loop of about 2.3 miles that begins at Marvista Park. A more challenging route of 5.7 miles can be walked by following the outside perimeter of the three loops. If you have only ever done one of them, you have seen roughly a third of what the city built for you.

Walker Preserve, and the trick with the creek

Walker Preserve is the trail most residents drive past without registering. It sits behind a "No Outlet" sign on 2nd Avenue SW, with a four-car parking lot and a picnic table. The 30-acre woods known as the Walker Preserve was formerly owned by Ron Walker, a Normandy Park developer and early city councilmember whose style of building houses retained mature trees around them, so a few houses are visible from along these trails but not enough to detract from the arboreal atmosphere of the preserve.

The odd fact worth knowing before you go:

The creek you cross on the footbridge is Walker Creek, but the creek you can catch glimpses of from the Walker Preserve trail is actually Miller Creek, the same creek that comes out at the Normandy Park Cove. Miller and Walker Creeks run roughly parallel at this point, and Walker Preserve is mostly on a ridge between the two creeks.

That single sentence explains the whole layout of the preserve. The Main Trail runs as a lollipop along the ridge, with a Miller Creek Loop peeling off north and a Walker Creek Loop peeling off south, and a spur that drops steeply to Walker Creek itself. Behind the trailhead map sits the piece of local set dressing nobody expects: an old railway tanker car, refurbished in 2016, painted with the city seal, and labeled "1953 NPRY" in honor of Normandy Park's incorporation.

Bring binoculars if you have them. Barred owls, western tanager, and pileated woodpeckers live in the preserve and are often active during the day, and there are no restroom facilities at or near the preserve. If you are walking without a car, the trailhead is one of the few in south King County served by transit: accessible by bus via King County Metro route 166.

The three loops, decoded

The loops are the connective tissue. They are what turns a weeknight dog walk into a coherent circuit around the town. Here is what actually distinguishes them from each other, because the City's own descriptions are easy to blur together.

Three practical implications flow from this table. The Red Loop is the training loop, because it stacks the most elevation into the shortest distance. The Green is the stroller loop and the "after dinner in July" loop. And the Yellow is the loop that puts you on Marine View Drive for the longest stretch, which is the one to pick when you actually want to look at the water while you walk.

Marine View Park's staircase

The one segment of the network that is not a loop, and not a preserve, and not a road walk is Marine View Park. It deserves its own paragraph because it is where the whole system opens onto Puget Sound.

Marine View Park consists of 27.37 acres of heavily wooded bluffs and ravines, located between Marine View Drive and Puget Sound, south of 208th Street. The park's official loop trail is short but not casual. The Marine View Park Loop Trail covers 1.1 miles with an elevation gain of 252 feet. To put that in perspective against the rest of the network, a mile-plus of the Red Loop climbs about the same amount but spreads it over three times the distance. The Marine View climb is concentrated, and it happens on the way back up, which is why nearly every review mentions the return trip and not the descent.

The payoff is a piece of civic infrastructure that visitors always photograph and locals sometimes forget exists. The paved section and the primitive trail network meet near the top of a wooden staircase, and the hike continues down a short wooden staircase, then along a wooden walkway that connects to an impressive three-story folded staircase structure, ending at the beach. The strip of public beach is 0.2 mile long.

Two logistics worth knowing before you drive over. There is parking for about 20 vehicles, and the park is open 7:00 a.m. to dusk. There is no water on this hike, so bring your own. If you want the easier version, the beach access road is paved. A popular plan in good weather is to take the pavement on the way down (0.4 mile) and the trail system on the way up (0.5 mile or more), because both have benches, but the primitive trails offer shade and better views.

How to string them together

Here is the part that turns three parallel guides on the internet into one map for someone who lives here.

The Green Loop passes within a block of 208th, which is the street you turn on for Marine View Park. If you begin at Marvista, walk the Green Loop clockwise, and detour west on 208th, you can add the staircase-and-beach segment to a Green Loop day for roughly an extra mile round-trip. That gives you a walk that starts among houses, crosses a bluff, drops three stories of stairs to salt water, and returns to the same coffee you left.

The Yellow Loop and the Red Loop both touch Shoremont Avenue and Marine View Drive, which is the same corridor Walker Preserve empties toward on its way to the Cove via Miller Creek. If you drop into Walker Preserve first, then pick up the Red Loop at City Hall Park, you have effectively walked the arc of a single watershed, from the ridge between two creeks down to the neighborhood where those creeks reach the Sound.

And the 5.7-mile perimeter is the one worth putting on a Saturday calendar once a season. It is the only walk in town that lets you see every loop's starting park, both preserves' trailheads, and the water, in a single circuit.

A last practical note

Summer in Normandy Park is short and specific. The days when the Sound looks flat and Rainier is out are the days worth spending on the Marine View staircase or the Walker Preserve ridge, not the days worth spending on a treadmill. The network is here, it is free, and it is more coherent than the three separate Google results make it look.

If knowing your neighborhood at this level of detail is the sort of thing you also want in the person representing your home, Michelle Codd Homes writes, walks, and lists in the same places. Reach out when the walk turns into a conversation about what's next.