Mountains to Sound Greenway

Seattle to the Cascades

Like many cities with beautiful surroundings and a high quality of life, Seattle is growing rapidly. Alarmed by the threat to the area's natural resources, the Mountains to Sound Greenway Trust began work in 1990 to create a conservation corridor along Interstate 90. The Mountains to Sound Greenway now stretches 100 miles from the shores of Puget Sound in Seattle to the small town of Thorp in Kittitas County along the interstate and the Snoqualmie and Yakima rivers, and includes nine sities and two counties. With planning, guidance, and the unified vision of the Mountains to Sound Greenway Trust, public agencies and conservation groups have protected much of the undeveloped land outside urban areas between Seattle and Snoqualmie Pass in the Cascades. The greenway is a mix of publicly and privately owned landscapes, including working forestlands so vital to the region's economy.

To knit together ecologically important but isolated pieces of land, the Trust has leveraged various funding sources and strategies, including broad and continuing support from multinational corporations based in the area. They have used land exchanges, land donations, acquisitions of public parks, and conservation easements to conserve priority land. Easy access to this vast protected network of lands is a huge boost to the region's quality of life and allows citizens to easily get away from it all to experience inspired local municipalities and public agencies to engage in more strategic approaches to land use planning, extending the beneficial impact of the project well beyond the greenway itself.

Download the Mountains to Sound case study (pdf).