Dennis,

Thank you for your perceptive thoughts and ideas about how to manage
Montlake Fill. Our restoration group (actually a class) were out in a
driving snowstorm last year putting in the alders, bulrushes, etc.

We envisioned the Fill to ultimately be mixed prairie, permanent ponds,
and some Garry oak groves to be the ideal representation of the type of
habitat that is rare and getting rarer in W. Washington. People control
is the biggest challenge. There are just too many people who enjoy
Montlake Fill for many or any of them/us to wonder freely over the
landscape. Getting folks to stick to the trails seems almost a lost cause.

Maintaining the Fill with open prairie was a very important goal to our
group, but the downside is that people want to encroach and sprawl on the
open space and nobody had any real strategies to counteract that
tendency. The UW campus lawns are so close and available for sprawling,
but folks want to be "out in the country" which the Fill does approximate.

Maybe our signs should have been more blunt and truthful (such as
encouraging people to be more reproductively responsible,i.e., have no or
fewer children) rather than struggling to educate people about lessening
impact around the fragile pond shores. And so it goes.......

Maureen Ellis
Dept Environmental Health
Toxicology Group at Roos 1
U of WA
mellis at dehpost.sphcm.washington.edu