BY MATT KITE for WEEKLY VOLCANO | 8/7/2026
On a sunny Friday afternoon on the last day of July, several dozen community members gathered near the pagoda at Point Defiance Park to celebrate the official opening of the finished Loop Trail.
The mood was ebullient.
“I’m a lifer, first and foremost,” a visibly excited Mayor Anders Ibsen said during a brief interview before addressing the crowd. “I mean, I was here almost forty years ago in a stroller going to the zoo, right? Never Never Land, when that was still a thing. As an aging millennial, I’m here as a runner also, besides just being the mayor. I frequently go to the park with Tacoma Runners and friends.”
He added, “It’s so meaningful to people to not just have restored access that they used to have but even greater, safer, more friendly access for people of all modes of transportation. It’s just one of many really cool ways that we’re giving back to our community and making things even better.”
Mayor Ibsen occasionally brought Henrik, his beloved dog, to the park for Saturday morning fun runs with Tacoma Runners. Henrik passed away in January, but that hasn’t dampened the mayor’s love of Tacoma’s world-class park.
Along with Ibsen, two officials from Parks Tacoma addressed the crowd: Park Board President Matt Mauer and Capital Improvement Program Manager Terry Jungman. Then Mauer, with the help of a young assistant, oversaw the ribbon-cutting ceremony.
With the official business over, the large group ventured forth on the new trail. Some dawdled. Others pushed ahead. Most were on foot, but a few pedaled bicycles. The destination was Owen Beach.
During the descent to the beach, Henry Smith, the team’s project manager, offered insights into the scope of the project. After construction began in late May 2025, Smith and his team faced several unique challenges. To begin with, they had to make the new trail ABA-accessible, which meant bringing it into compliance with the Architectural Barriers Act. That required trucking in plenty of fill dirt to grade the steep slopes.
“That was a big challenge,” he said. “Another big one: We had our RCO grant funding, which was pretty old, from 2014. We were trying to get that spent on a timeline that was acceptable for them.”
When it came to using the $3.2-million grant from the Washington State Recreation and Conservation Office (RCO), Smith’s team was facing a classic use-it-or-lose-it situation. Fortunately, the construction was finished on time, and the grant money was still available in full. The rest of the project’s funding came from voter-approved bonds.
Parks Tacoma tackled the 1.6-mile Loop Trail in two phases. The first, finished in 2023, included several sidewalks and a safer road crossing near the Japanese Garden. The second involved closing a stretch of road for more than a year, resulting in 1.1 miles of new paved and protected paved trail from the pagoda to Owen Beach. On a map, the Loop Trail looks more like a lollipop that circumnavigates the zoo and gardens before sending a spur along Five Mile Drive’s inner loop to Owen Beach.
An estimated three million people visit the park every year. Many future users will benefit from more than the new trail.
“Not only is it the trail above ground,” Smith said. “We also got a new water main trenched in from the aquarium out to Owen Beach.”
Not surprisingly, given the 138-year-old park’s aging infrastructure, the work didn’t stop there.
“We also replaced electrical infrastructure,” Smith added. “All new storm infrastructure. All new fire hydrants. We redid a segment of Five Mile Drive, between the aquarium and up to the intersection of the outer loop and Five Mile Drive. So about a thousand feet of Five Mile Drive was redone: all new pavement, painting.”
At Owen Beach, a duo from Dreamsicle, a family-run business from Seattle, served frozen treats from their fire-engine red ice cream truck. A line soon formed, as each person who had completed the short trek from the ribbon-cutting ceremony at the pagoda traded a Parks Tacoma–supplied token for an ice cream bar.
On hand was Larry Leveen, the executive director at ForeverGreen Trails, a nonprofit organization that lobbies for creating and linking trails in Pierce County.
“Point Defiance Park is the signature park of our whole parks system,” he said. “It’s enjoyed by so many for a whole bunch of different uses. The route previously wasn’t always exactly a comfortable place for walkers and bikers of all ages and abilities, so I definitely appreciate that buffer and separation from car traffic. Narrowing down the road also visually makes car drivers go slower, which is nice. So I was just really psyched to see the project, and since I work in trails, I was especially excited. I just love the work that I’ve seen Parks Tacoma do.”
A Tacoma resident, Leveen rides his mountain bike and goes bird watching at Swan Creek, among other nearby parks.
“It takes many hands to make projects like this happen,” he said. “We work with our local jurisdictions, including park districts, to help them get state and federal grants to make projects happen.”
Leveen described how many different agencies and programs, some of them overlapping, are required to see a project from conception to completion.
“During the legislative session,” he said, “we help ensure good policy and funding for active recreation and active mobility. And then outside of the session, we’re working with communities to acquire the grants. Another way I put it is that we help grow the pie for trail funding, and we help our locals get a piece of that pie. This is a very specific end result of the piece of pie. It was a long time coming.”
Indeed, the Loop Trail was first imagined in 2005 during a community planning process. A 2014 voter initiative provided a big portion of the funding, and the RCO grant helped too.
Leveen, who had traveled the trail on bicycle, nodded to families gathering near the ice cream truck. “These kids and their parents will be more comfortable to go to the park,” he said, “and maybe when they’re a little bit older, they can go do this themselves.”
For more information on the Loop Trail, visit Parks Tacoma online: parkstacoma.gov/project/point-defiance-loop-trail/
