Heybrook Ridge Saved “Alignment of the Stars”

If there is any place close to the stars, it’s Heybrook Ridge. It’s the stars that its Patron Saint studied all his life. It’s the stars that aligned to allow a band of neighbors to raise $1.2 million to save it from logging. And it’s the stars that can be seen so brilliantly from the ridge on any given clear night.

A notice tacked to the bulletin board of the Index general store warned of a clearcutting operation on 95 acres of Heybrook Ridge. The town of Index was formed by loggers, and the Index Museum is full of memorabilia and photography of logging operations that felled entire forests. But the community that lives there today has a very different relationship with the land. There is a love for the forests and the granite walls. And they come together to protect it.

So in 2006 they formed Friends of Heybrook Ridge, with Louise Lindgren, a powerhouse of a woman packed into a small frame, at its head. Today, at the age of 78, she’s power walking with her husband, 81-year-old David Cameron, three miles through town, and regularly four miles into Monte Cristo. She could still climb the Index Town Wall, she said, if she had someone to go with her.

“There’s no reason why I can’t put one foot in front of the other,” Louise insisted. When she sets her mind to something, it gets done.

“Louise was the bomb that made it explode,” said Susan Chatlos-Susor, of the preservation of the forested ridge. “She was the force behind it.”

Louise credits the community, and the man whose family generously donated $500,000 of inheritance, Conway Leovy, the Patron Saint of Friends of Heybrook Ridge. Conway was dying of cancer when he hiked to the top of the ridge with his family and Ann Darlington, another force to be reckoned with. Ann acquired pro bono legal help to write up covenants that declared Heybrook Ridge as public in perpetuity, and required the county to engage the Friends of the Ridge in decisions about it. Ann later served for eight years as president of the Friends.

“Our excellent working relationship with the county has held true ever since,” she said.

Louise kept Conway’s donation anonymous at his request. The family just recently revealed Conway as the donor that tipped the scale, allowing the Friends to purchase the land from the Buse Timber Company. Conway, also a founding member of the Friends, was a researcher for NASA missions to Mars, an award-winning researcher in planetary atmospheres, and a University of Washington professor in atmospheric sciences.

By an accident of luck, as Louise describes it, the Friends also received a donation from Alexandria, Egypt. A group of professional manuscript indexers came across the name of the town and the community’s fight to save their land.

“Conway Leovy donated $500,000 that we were able to match with Conservation Futures funds.That made all the difference,” Louise said. “I think we were blessed in many, many different ways. It seemed like the stars were in alignment for that.” replete with flora and fauna that botany students come to study with Friends of Heybrook Ridge member naturalists.

During Ann’s tenure as president, she and the Friends worked to secure additional parcels of land to provide for parking and access, and also to give more hiking space and trails to the crush of people who have discovered Heybrook Ridge as a beloved place of their own.

The popularity of Heybrook Ridge isn’t lost on the Friends supporters as a potentially damaging end result of their work. They’re hopeful that the people who arrive to enjoy the Ridge develop a deep reverence for the land, as they have, and tread on it respectfully.

Today, new trails are being built, refined, and lengthened. One trail is named for Conway, and another, Erinswood – named for Erin Sample, a young woman confined to a wheelchair by cerebral palsy. The trail will be fully ADA compliant.

In 2013 the Friends purchased 10 acres and donated it to the county for construction of a “Memory Shelter” and a stunning view of Canyon Falls. The shelter will be made from the trees felled to create a sightline to the falls, its foundation roughed in from local boulders. The trails and the property purchases — the park is now 143 acres in size — have all been the combined efforts of members of the Friends of Heybrook Ridge, the Washington Trails Association volunteers, and the staff at Snohomish County, who’ve helped rally state, federal and local grant funds.

How the community embraces public access while simultaneously protecting the land from being loved too much, by so many, remains to be seen. Louise says that’s a question for the next generation.

But if there’s anything Index does, it’s coming together in both times of trial and in times of celebration.

Susan, the current president of Friends of Heybrook Ridge, says her favorite quote from Margaret Mead — “Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has.” — epitomizes all of Index.

“They take some kind of an issue, or an event to heart, and they truly own it,” she said. “Whether it’s saving land or supporting someone in a time of grief or happiness. The world would be such an amazing place if Index was the world.”

Ann said her drive, as the longest running president of the organization, was to acknowledge that the Ridge belonged to the people. It was a county park, now, and the Friends needed to work to get trails built.

“It’s an amazing place and it should be shared,” she said. Heybrook Ridge boasts some of the best views of the Wild Sky Wilderness Area and is a mixed forest,