The Bellevue Parks Department plans to install seven new interpretive signs at Coal Creek Park by the end of the year. A kiosk near the top of the hill will orient visitors and introduce them to the park’s history. The remaining signs will note locations easily overlooked, says Dustin Van Nieulande, a park ranger and program coordinator at Mercer Slough Environmental Education Center.

“One of the coolest things about Coal Creek Park is once you leave your car and walk down into the canyon, you’re surrounded by nature,” says Van Nieulande. “It’s so thick and lush down there that you forget you’re walking through a suburban area of the city.”

The signs, which are funded by a grant issued to the Eastside Heritage Center, will eventually go up in portions of the park, spotlighting for instance the concrete foundation of an old steam generating plant, a railroad grade and places in the stream where you can see the culvert that once carried water and allowed trains to ride on top. Coal Creek Park used to be the site of an extensive coal mining operation in the late 1800s and early 1900s.

Nothing comparable has been done at the site before, except for a few independent efforts by Boy Scout Troops and invested citizens. Steve Williams, a retired manager of Cougar Mountain Regional Park, occasionally hosts history or nature hikes through the Eastside Heritage Center.

Once construction is complete on the culvert and new trailhead at Coal Creek Boulevard, Van Nieulande says that the department also has planned an installment at the southern end of the park to discuss its natural history.

“You can kind of get lost in the nature down there,” says Van Nieulande. “It’s this hugely stark contrast to what it would have been like 100 years ago with tons of machinery loading steam engines, coal trains moving up and down that canyon and hundreds of people doing work. The amount of change that physical canyon has gone through in 60 to 10 years is enormous, and it will be a fun story to tell.”