Mill Creek Canyon Earthworks Park — Wednesday, May. 21, 2025

This trail has a lot of potential, but it's in pretty rough shape at this point in time. 

Earthworks park itself is cool, but take note that the bathrooms have signs saying that they are temporarily closed due to vandalism. The signs themselves did not look like they were so temporary. This means there are no available bathrooms in the park/trailhead at this time. There's neat looking pedestrian bridge in the park, but it's boarded off so you can't walk on it. I did see some cute baby ducks in the pond though!

Mill Creek Canyon Trail itself is in rough shape, too. A sign at the trail entrance mentions that there are ongoing restoration efforts, but the trail is muddy, overgrown, and quite eroded in places. There's a significant washout at about 0.4 miles from the parking lot. It's passable, but challenging. 

At one point, I wasn't sure if I had left a sanctioned trail and ventured onto a user created one or not since the trail was all around in poor condition. Given the staircase I reached at 0.75 miles from the parking lot that leads up out of the canyon, I assumed I was still on the actual trail. This was my turnaround point. I'm interested in exploring further, but didn't have the patience for a rough trail this afternoon.

While this trail needs a lot of work, it does seem like the City of Kent has a really cool vision for the green space including increasing access to the park, improving/adding trails, and developing more parks along the route. From what I can tell, this vision would take up to 20 years to implement, but could be really cool as progress is made (although it's unclear to me when work would actually start). If you want to read more about the vision for the area you can read about it here.