The Emerald
City Trail

Walk through history on Seattle’s signature trail — a 75-mile urban journey through popular landmarks and hidden gems, linking the parks and boulevards the Olmsted Brothers designed for the city more than a century ago.

Explore the Interactive Map Get the Book

This interactive map is built to help walkers navigate every section, return loop, and landmark along the Emerald City Trail.

A Trail Around Seattle

Blending history, nature, and culture, the Emerald City Trail offers a unique urban journey through Seattle — upthrust beaches, views of snow-capped peaks across the Salish Sea, and a chain of green places you can explore on foot.

The route is broken into twelve point-to-point sections ranging from 5.3 to 7.5 miles: Long enough to delve into neighborhoods across the city, but each section short enough for a relaxed pace and unhurried discovery. Each section also offers a loop option that returns you to where you started, plus a longer combination that stitches the main route to its loop by public transit. Junctions are designed around the “Three Ts” — transit, toilets, and treats — so a walk is as easy to plan as it is to enjoy.

From the Ballard Locks to Rainier Beach, the trail turns a familiar city into a place to explore anew.

Seattle's downtown skyline seen across Elliott Bay, with driftwood and wildflowers in the foreground — Seattle’s skyline across Elliott Bay.

The Olmsted Legacy in Seattle

Frederick Law Olmsted — the founding father of American landscape architecture and co-creator of New York City’s Central Park — believed a well-made park could bring a sense of peacefulness in nature to repair troubled souls. His firm pioneered the idea of a system of parks connected by parkways and boulevards.

As the City Beautiful movement swept the country, Seattle set out to build a park system for the many, not the few. In 1903 — the year of Frederick Law’s death — the city hired his sons’ firm and John Charles Olmsted designed a comprehensive plan of parks, parkways, and boulevards to meet that vision.

Olmsted’s principles still shape the city today: They respond to the topography, they keep the character of the land, and they take every advantage of views to water and mountains. Olmsted parks show a respect for what his biographer called the “genius of place.” More than a century on, 99 percent of Seattle residents live within a ten-minute walk of a city park.

The brick Volunteer Park Water Tower rising above evergreen trees — The Volunteer Park Water Tower, a Seattle Olmsted landmark (Section 3).

How the Trail Was Created

Nearly a decade ago, Peter Hendrickson began leading urban walks through the dark winter months to encourage after-work explorations around the city. The spark for a Seattle Olmsted legacy trail came in February 2023, over coffee on Queen Anne, when Bob Siegel of San Francisco’s Crosstown Trail suggested The Mountaineers design a long-distance urban trail anyone could walk without formal signage.

That conversation turned years of private walks into the Seattle Olmsted 50 (kilometers) by November 2023 — five sections from Golden Gardens to Rainier Beach. Inspired by kindred routes in Boston and Philadelphia, Hendrickson added seven more sections to complete the Seattle Olmsted 70 in June 2024, crossing the Boeing complex, following Longfellow Creek, and wrapping past the Discovery Park lighthouse back to the Ballard Locks.

This book combines those two routes into the 75-mile Emerald City Trail. Along the way, more than 170 volunteers test-walked the sections, refining the route to capture the Olmsted legacy and the beauty of nature within the city.

The Book

Cover of Emerald City Trail: A Walking Guide Through Seattle & Our Olmsted History by Peter Hendrickson

by Peter Hendrickson · Photography by Heidi Walker

$22.95

Paperback · Mountaineers Books · Available September 1, 2026

Each Section Features

Start and end points and alternate routes
Turn-by-turn directions
Historic and cultural sights
Detours for strollers and to avoid stairs
Public transit, toilets, and other amenities
Easy-to-follow maps

Buy at Mountaineers Books

About Peter Hendrickson

A longtime urban walk planner and leader who chairs the Seattle Urban Walk Committee for The Mountaineers.

Peter Hendrickson leads urban walks in cities worldwide where he has worked, lived, or traveled. He earned a master’s degree in educational administration from Kent State University and a PhD in curriculum and instruction from the University of Washington, where he is also a medical researcher.

His life has been vibrant and varied — from daily newspaper reporter, photographer, and television scriptwriter in Australia to teacher in Ecuador. Walking and hiking unite his interests in history, the natural world, local cultures, and wayfinding in both the mountains and the city. He has authored or edited four local history textbooks, edited a section of the tenth edition of Mountaineering: The Freedom of the Hills, and written a walking column for the Phinney Neighborhood Association.

Hendrickson holds The Mountaineers Legend Award for his service as a community leader. He and his wife, Nancy Temkin, raised seven children and now live and work on a small Redmond farm frequently visited by their twelve grandchildren, where they enjoy paddling and rowing the wooden kit boats they have built.

With Gratitude

The Emerald City Trail and this site were made possible with the work and support of these organizations.

Port of Seattle

For direct support of this project through the Tourism Marketing Support Program and for serving as good steward of the city’s waterfront.

Friends of Seattle’s Olmsted Parks

For being a champion of the Olmsted legacy in Seattle.

HistoryLink

For building a rich library of articles which provide a deeper context for our city and our state.