Northwest Trek: 537 acres that changed countless lives

Connie Hellyer sat smiling in her wheelchair, gazing at the bison grazing in the meadow across Horseshoe Lake.

Inside the house she helped build, and where she once lived, 35 dear friends waited to thank her for the gift that is now Northwest Trek.

First, they wanted her to have time alone with the land that she and her late husband, Dr. David Hellyer, bought as a ruin in 1937 after it had been logged and burned. The Hellyers waited, and often helped, as nature restored it. They built a cabin, then added to it and filled it with art, children, books, fun and lively discussion.

Forty years ago this year, the Hellyer family gave it all to us.

“The point was, it needed to be shared,” Hellyer said Friday at the gathering honoring that gift of those 537 acres. “It deserved to be shared.”

Since Trek opened in 1979, it has indeed been shared. More than 5.8 million people have come there to ride the trams through the free-roaming area that’s home to bison, elk, deer and caribou, to view bears and beavers and big cats in their habitats, to come to terms with snakes in the Cheney Family Discovery Center.

Voters have approved bonds to build a visitor center, expand the exhibits, buy and refurbish the trams. Metro Parks Tacoma, which accepted the gift after others turned it down, has acquired land that brings Trek’s acreage to 725, enough to start conservation projects for endangered pygmy rabbits and spotted frogs.

Connie Hellyer, 96, has been engaged in that work from the first. She and her husband worked with park staff on the idea, then on the plans. When Trek opened, Hellyer was in the first round of volunteers to be trained.

“For years, Connie volunteered in the Cheney Discovery Center,” Trek site manager Dave Ellis said. “She particularly enjoyed showing snakes to children.”

Mere minutes before the first time she showed her first garter snake, she had never touched one before, and was afraid of them, said Gary Geddes, director of Zoological & Environmental Education for Metro Parks.

It wasn’t exactly fear, Hellyer said later.

“I didn’t know snakes,” she clarified.

“One day, the volunteer who showed them to the children had to go out and asked me to do it,” she said. “I was too embarrassed to say I’d never touched a snake.”

She did, it turned out, have the magic touch, explaining all the grass-roots work snakes do with, among other things, rodent control.

Marsha Erickson, 66, of Eatonville, and Lois Lindt, 73, of Roy, worked and volunteered with Hellyer, and marvelled at the way she could entrance a rowdy crowd of children.

“She’d get these wild kids to listen,” Erickson said.

“She did it by talking very quietly,” Lindt said. “She would have the children touch the snakes, and tell them how wonderful they are, and how important they are.”

She told volunteers and staff the same things about themselves, and proved it by working with them.

“She is much loved here by the staff,” Ellis said. “They love her like a mother, a grandmother, a great-grandmother.”

There are still volunteers who love her like a sister.

Ruth Thompson, 87, retired from McChord and fell in with Hellyer at the Cheney center. Carl Schuler, 88, of Graham came to Trek to walk toward recovery after heart surgery. He ended up developing trails, and clearing them. His wife, Gloria, 87, came along too, to volunteer.

“My life was a lot better because I came out here,” said Shirley Daniel of Eatonville. “I would have been a recluse and stayed home.”

They all became treasured friends of the Hellyers.

After listening to speeches, and taking the chance to hold a gopher snake and feed a porcupine, Hellyer sat in her old living room, holding hands and talking with Daniel.

“This is one of the greatest friendships ever,” Hellyer’s daughter Doro Oliver said, looking at them.

Hellyer lives with the Olivers on the South Hill.

“They started out at the very beginning,” Oliver said of her mother and Daniel. “When the kids would come, they were the docents.”

The Hellyers bought gas at the station Daniel owned. She started coming down to pick berries with Hellyer and later to volunteer at Trek, and it changed her life.

That’s one of the gifts, from a rescued red tail hawk to a revived frog population to a child inspired to study nature, that have come with those 537 acres, and the Hellyer family’s dedication to making them matter.

Kathleen Merryman: 253-597-8677 kathleen.merryman@thenewstribune.com blog.thenewstribune.com/street