"Shoes splashed, shirts soggy, and smiles abound." That's how one Saturday got logged into the weekly results post for Fort Ward parkrun, on a morning when the forecast promised nothing but rain and kept its word. Nobody canceled. Nobody moved it indoors, because there is no indoors for a 5K. The run happened anyway, the way it has happened at 9 a.m. every Saturday since January 7, 2023.
If you live near Fort Ward, you already know the park by its history: the WWII gun batteries half-swallowed by blackberry, the paved beach trail that birders and stroller-pushers share all week long, the boat launch at the bottom of the hill. What's easy to miss, because it happens quietly and on a schedule most tourists never catch, is that this same park hosts one of the more reliable social habits on the island. It's free, it's timed, and it's run entirely by volunteers who show up whether the sky cooperates or not.
An Almost Unbroken Record
Fort Ward parkrun is part of the global parkrun movement, a free, timed 5K that happens every Saturday morning in the same spot, rain or shine. The course is measured at 5,000 meters with a professional wheel and runs out-and-back along the paved Lower Fort Ward Trail, the same flat, wheelchair-accessible path that regulars already walk their dogs on any other day of the week. Start and finish sit at the upper parking lot, where Fort Ward Hill Road NE meets Belfair Avenue NE.
What makes it worth mentioning isn't the course. It's the attendance record. Since that first Saturday in January 2023, the event has been altered only twice, once when ice made the path down from the parking lot unsafe, and once when a downed tree from a bomb cyclone blocked the route. Both times, organizers adjusted the course rather than skip the week. The 100th edition landed on November 30, 2024. By early April 2026, the count had climbed to its 169th weekly run, a pace consistent with almost no missed Saturdays across more than three years.
The people behind that consistency are the same handful of names, week after week: Lee Nathan, Ian Shiach, Dana Amore, Amanda Nathan, Joel Carsley, Nikki Carsley, Doug Salot, and Michael Shiach, with two of their kids, Aila Nathan and Wilder Carsley, now old enough to help run it. It is, functionally, a family operation that happens to serve the whole south end of the island.
Who Actually Shows Up
The results write-ups make it clear this isn't a closed loop of the same eight neighbors. One spring morning, Doug Salot, 62, posted the fastest overall time at 24:53, edging out 72-year-old Steve Husko by 17 seconds, while Tiare Bailey, 67, took the top spot among women at 30:27. Both runners were competing as Silver Striders, a masters running club that had made the trip over specifically for the event. Another regular, Ray Arrington, was marking his 119th career parkrun that same morning, the kind of number that only comes from treating a Saturday habit as closer to a rule than a routine.
That mix, longtime islanders alongside visiting club runners chasing a new course, is part of what has quietly built Fort Ward parkrun's reputation past the edges of the neighborhood.
The Coffee After
The run doesn't actually end at the finish line. Every week, the group relocates for coffee and to process results at The Marketplace at Pleasant Beach, at 4738 Lynwood Center Rd NE, a five-minute drive into neighboring Lynwood Center. It's a small detail, but it matters for understanding how the habit actually functions: Fort Ward supplies the course, Lynwood Center supplies the coffee, and every Saturday the two south-end communities get looped together whether anyone plans it that way or not.
Where Fort Ward Already Sits on the Map
This isn't the first time Fort Ward has served as more than a standalone park. When the Sunny Hill to Nutes Pond Trail opened in June 2025, a 0.35-mile connector linking the Sunny Hill Trail to Nutes Pond, a 31-acre park on Toe Jam Hill, the Bainbridge Island Parks & Trails Foundation ran its dedication-day shuttle from the upper Fort Ward Hill parking lot, since there's no event parking at the actual trailhead. When the island needs a staging point for something bigger than one park, it already looks to Fort Ward.
That pattern is about to matter more.
The Trail That's Finally Catching Up
Twenty-five years ago, Bainbridge Island voters approved an open space bond that set aside land for a cross-island trail nobody had actually built yet. Since then, a stretch of forest between Fletcher Bay Road and the Head of the Bay has sat mostly unused, known to a handful of hikers as the Lost Valley. That's finally changing.
The Lost Valley Trail will cross 33 acres of public open space, connecting Wyatt Way on the east side to Fletcher Bay Road on the west. Its centerpiece is a boardwalk nearly 200 linear feet long, raised over the Cooper Creek wetland to protect a salmon-bearing stream that runs through it. The whole project is budgeted around $180,000, with the boardwalk itself the single biggest cost. In May 2026, the Rotary Club of Bainbridge Island pledged a $10,000 dollar-for-dollar match on any gift made through National Trails Day on June 6, specifically to help finish it. Organizers told the Bainbridge Island Review they were targeting an opening in early fall, timing that lines up with right about now.
Lost Valley is the newest entry in a short but connected lineage of trails completed under the Parks & Trails Foundation's "Trails Connect Bainbridge Island" campaign:
- The Arbor Trail, built in partnership with Bloedel Reserve
- The Sunny Hill to Nute's Pond Trail, opened June 2025
- The Vincent Road to Gazzam Lake Trail, opened earlier in 2026
- The Lost Valley Trail, targeted to open this fall
Once finished, Lost Valley marks the 50th mile of public trail on Bainbridge Island and becomes the final connective link in a walking route that starts at the Winslow ferry terminal downtown and ends, 445 acres later, at Gazzam Lake Nature Preserve.
One Loop, Not Two Stories
Here's the part that's easy to miss if you treat the parkrun and the trail news as separate items on a community calendar. They're funded by the same people. Each spring, the Trillium Trail Run raises money for the Parks & Trails Foundation's trail-building campaign, the same campaign completing Lost Valley, and Fort Ward parkrun itself is listed among the race's sponsors, alongside groups like the Bainbridge Ultra Running Team and Town & Country Markets. The runners who show up every Saturday at Fort Ward are, in a small but direct way, the same community bankrolling the trail expansion happening a few miles up the road.
That's the actual shape of the story. It isn't a park with some history and a nice beach. It's a neighborhood that has spent three and a half years building a habit precise enough to survive ice storms and windstorms, and that same habit is now tied into an island trail system about to get physically larger, with Fort Ward sitting at the south end of it the whole time.
If you're already out on that paved trail most Saturdays, or you're thinking about being, worth knowing that Lost Valley's boardwalk was still under construction as of the Rotary Club's announcement, so it's worth checking current signage before you plan a long walk north toward Gazzam Lake. But the direction is set. By the time that boardwalk is finished, the same stretch of trail that hosts a free 5K every Saturday morning will connect, on foot, all the way to the ferry that brought half the runners there in the first place.
For more on the neighborhood itself, including its parks and shoreline history, the Fort Ward guide on our site is a good place to start. And if any of this, the rhythm of the place, the trails, the Saturday mornings, ever turns into a bigger question about Fort Ward, the team at Amy McFarland Team is glad to be your Island Life Concierge whenever you're ready to talk.
