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A calm green lake sits in the hills right above town — close enough to walk to. It looks like it’s always been there. It hasn’t: people made it, put it to work, and then handed it to the future as a park. You can read the whole story in the stumps still standing in the water.
In the logging days, a dam on Sylvia Creek backed up the water into a mill pond — around 1909 — where cut logs could float and be sorted on their way to the sawmill. When the big logging wound down about 1930, the town found a new use for the same dam: it spun turbines to make electricity for Montesano.
By then families were already coming up to swim, fish, and picnic. So in 1936 the City of Montesano gave 234 acresaround the lake to the state, and Lake Sylvia became one of Washington’s early state parks.
Gray old-growth stumps still stand in and around the lake — the remains of giant trees cut a century ago. Look for the notches: loggers wedged in springboards to stand on while they sawed above the wide base.
In the 1930s the Civilian Conservation Corps — young men put to work during the Great Depression — built the park's trails, shelters, and picnic spots in that sturdy log-and-stone style you can still walk through.
Around the old stumps, a whole new rainforest of hemlock, cedar, and fir has grown up. It's a living before-and-after of how the forest heals after it's cut.
Then and now: flip the same lake between its logging days and the park it is today.
A dam on Sylvia Creek backs the water up into a mill pond. Cut logs float on the surface waiting their turn at the sawmill, and the hills all around are being stripped of their giant old-growth trees.
Lake Sylvia State Park is minutes from downtown Montesano — trails around the lake, quiet non-motorized paddling, trout and bass fishing, and camping. It’s one of the easiest field trips there is: a whole lesson in logging, rivers, and forests you can walk in an afternoon.
Follow a salmon from a gravel nest in the Satsop or Wynoochee all the way to the ocean and back.
Every spring, hundreds of thousands of shorebirds refuel on our mudflats on their way to the Arctic.
The Chehalis is one of Washington’s biggest flood corridors — here’s why, and what we do about it.
A fault offshore, a giant wave in the year 1700, and why we practice for the next one.
The Satsop cooling towers on the skyline — a true story of energy, engineering, and economics.
How a temperate rainforest works — and how it feeds the cold, clean streams salmon need.
North America’s largest elk, in herds around our valley and the Olympic Mountains.
Satsop, Wynoochee, Chehalis — our rivers carry Indigenous names and a deep salmon culture.
Real Montesano numbers to play with — salmon returns, rainfall, elk, floods, and towers.