Driving to this Pierce County cemetery, some fear they’ll have their own brush with death
Grief doesn’t wait for the right time. For some residents in the Gig Harbor area, sometimes it has to.
Barbara Rogers, age 80, believes the best time to visit Haven of Rest, a funeral home, crematory and cemetery along state Route 16, is very early on Sunday morning, when she feels highway traffic is lightest.
Without an on-ramp from the cemetery to westbound state Route 16, drivers only have seconds to hit the gas and get up to speed as they merge off of the cemetery’s short access road.
Rogers’ voice trembles when she speaks of those she visits at the cemetery. Her daughter is buried there. Next to her, a grandson. And in the baby section of the cemetery, she has an infant grandson.
Her daughter died in 2018, and 2024 was the first year Rogers missed a visit on her daughter’s birthday because of anxiety about the traffic, she said.
To visit Haven of Rest on a late Friday morning to speak with The News Tribune, Rogers accepted a ride from her friend, Maggie Garber, whom she described as “intrepid.” Garber is a business owner in Gig Harbor whose husband is also buried at Haven of Rest.
“When we feel like we can’t go because of the traffic, that seems silly, but it’s truly an agonizing decision,” Rogers said with tears in her eyes.
Garber said she also has to be selective about when she comes to the cemetery. She and Rogers agreed that having to think about the timing of one’s visits is an added burden to people who are grieving.
“Sometimes people’s grief dictates when they need to come,” Rogers said.
A beloved site for residents
A kind of stillness hangs around Haven of Rest.
In the middle of grassy fields, a fountain burbles gently in a pool. A smooth concrete path winds around the cemetery and takes visitors down a slight hill. Tall, sweeping trees shade benches where people can sit with memories of their loved ones and look out over the blue waters of Gig Harbor in the distance.
It’s a stark contrast to the trucks, cars and motorcycles roaring past the entrance.
Russ Weeks co-owns the funeral home, crematory and cemetery at 8503 State Route 16 NW with his brother, Doug. Weeks said they’re not the original founders of Haven of Rest, but took it over in 2013.
It’s part of their family-owned business, Weeks’ Funeral Homes. The funeral home website says they also have locations in Tacoma, Buckley and other cities in western Washington, and that the first burial at Haven of Rest was in 1954.
Weeks said that the number one concern from client families is the access road to the cemetery. Staff often get asked if there’s another way out, but there isn’t, he said. Some families have also chosen to go elsewhere for funeral services because they don’t feel safe entering and exiting Haven of Rest along the highway, according to Weeks.
The access also affects cemetery employees. Kyle Proctor, funeral director and embalmer at Haven of Rest, has worked there for three decades, according to the funeral website. He recalls teaching his daughter how to safely get onto state Route 16 when she worked at the cemetery. He had her practice during rush hour when she was a teenager.
The Haven of Rest property spans 29.5 acres and there are about 9,000 people buried there, according to Weeks. About 16 of those acres have been developed. As more space is needed, the cemetery will develop new sections of the property.
Weeks wasn’t able to estimate how many visitors the cemetery gets every day, but shared a traffic impact study done in 2017 which estimated that on a typical weekday evening during peak hours (4-6 p.m.), a total of 15 vehicles either entered or left the cemetery per hour. Developing the entire 29.5 acres of the cemetery would add an additional 10 vehicles per hour to that total, the study estimated.
Haven of Rest had the study done to get the city’s approval for expansion.
Besides receiving visitors for their funeral services, the cemetery tends to see an influx of visitors on holidays, particularly Memorial Day, which Weeks said tends to be one of the busiest days for cemeteries.
Gig Harbor-area resident Jackie Olivier, 75, goes to Haven of Rest frequently to visit her husband’s ashes. He died almost two years ago, the day after his 75th birthday, she told The News Tribune via phone.
The two of them agreed that they both wanted to be cremated at Haven of Rest, Olivier said. She has since been struck by the beauty of the cemetery and how well taken care of it is.
“It’s still a sad place, but I (tried) to get a place where his ashes would have some good views,” she said.
While the traffic situation hasn’t stopped her from visiting, Olivier told The News Tribune via email that it’s terrifying to exit safely. Highway drivers seem to be aware of the cars trying to merge in, but she feels it’s “just a matter of time before something dreadful will occur,” she wrote.
Renee Barnes, another resident who has lived in Gig Harbor since 1994, told The News Tribune via phone that her brother-in-law is buried at the cemetery. Her mother-in-law, who is around 70 years old, hasn’t visited his grave for the last three to four years because getting in and out of the area is so stressful for her.
Crash data shows few wrecks related to the entrance and exit
The spot has seen a few wrecks over the years, but it isn’t an obvious crash site.
Proctor, the funeral director, remembers a fatal wreck on Aug. 14, 1989. That was the day an 86-year-old woman died in a crash near the entrance to Haven of Rest, he told The News Tribune. Her daughter worked as the secretary and receptionist at the funeral home.
Reports of the crash in The Peninsula Gateway and The News Tribune said the woman was traveling westbound on state Route 16 in a rainstorm when she pulled her car off the right-hand shoulder into the path of oncoming traffic. She was thrown from her car when a pickup truck and another car crashed into it.
She later died of internal injuries. The truck driver had minor injuries, and the third driver and his passenger weren’t hurt.
Proctor said the woman was trying to turn into the cemetery, but misjudged where the entrance was and tried to back up, pulling into traffic when she did so.
More recent crash data from the Washington State Department of Transportation indicates that few accidents near Haven of Rest have been serious in the last five years. Based on WSDOT data available on Aug. 13, there were 11 accidents documented between mileposts 13 and 13.1 on westbound state Route 16, which is the stretch of highway that includes the entrance to Haven of Rest, from Aug. 1, 2019 to Aug. 1, 2024. Of those 11, seven resulted in no injuries. None of the 11 accidents were marked as being related to a nearby intersection or driveway.
A small business park has a similar entrance and exit off the highway less than half a mile from Haven of Rest. The stretch of highway surrounding that business area, from milepost 13.2 to 13.3, saw no officer-reported crashes from Aug. 1, 2019 to Aug. 1, 2024, according to the WSDOT data.
That business area is where Mick Churchman, manager at Highway 16 Mini Storage, goes to work at 8809 State Route 16. He’s gotten used to getting on and off of the highway, but he worries about his customers. Many store their studded tires, skis or other winter gear in the storage units at the business, and come to Highway 16 Mini Storage to retrieve them after the first good snow, he told The News Tribune via email. The road to the business area — a private road, not a city road, according to Gig Harbor Public Works Director Jeff Langhelm — can get icy.
“During the snow storm a couple years ago, there were dangerous driving conditions with snow and ice getting on and off the freeway here,” Churchman wrote. “It is very difficult for me to reach out to our hundreds of customers and warn them about driving conditions . . . This was a nightmare for me.”
He worries about the weather forecast for January.
The freeway access also seems to impact his business. Churchman wrote that some customers have called to ask about rates but lost interest once they learned where the business is located and how to get there. The business also used to rent out moving trucks via a partnership with Budget Truck Rental, and “customers were very intimidated by the idea of getting behind the wheel of a large truck for the first time and then needing to immediately get onto the freeway,” he wrote.
Local street access to the business area could eliminate the need to enter the business area from the freeway. He’s heard people pitch this solution before, though he hasn’t been directly involved in discussions with any elected representatives or decision makers.
He wrote that it: “does seem like there is interest in people building a back road out to town from around here. It’s just that no one wants to pay for it.”
A promise deferred
An agreement with property owners from 1958 allegedly holds the Washington State Department of Transportation responsible to build a frontage road that would eliminate the need to exit directly off the highway.
In 2011-2013, a property investment group sued WSDOT in Pierce County Superior Court for their failure to fulfill that obligation, though the lawsuit was later dropped.
WSDOT signed an agreement with private property owners Carl and Ruth Bartlett on Jan. 22, 1958 to take about 1.8 acres from them for the improvement of what is now state Route 16, according to a deed included in court documents. In exchange, the lawsuit alleged WSDOT promised to build a frontage road on the northeastern side of the highway to provide access to the rest of the Bartlett property. The deed did not list a date that WSDOT was required to build the frontage road.
The plaintiffs in the lawsuit were members of Gig Harbor Property Investment, LLC, a group interested in building homes on land north of Haven of Rest. The home development was going to be called “Harbor Winds,” documents from the city’s public permit portal indicate. Because a new frontage road would provide access to the proposed housing development, the investment group requested in 2007 that WSDOT build the road in keeping with the 1958 agreement.
WSDOT obtained funding for the 2010-2011 biennium and started working on a design for the frontage road, spending over $400,000 on site analysis and investigation, according to a motion Gig Harbor Property Investment filed in the court case.
The department then told the investment group it didn’t have any current plans to build the road nor a future date for construction, Gig Harbor Property Investment alleged in the motion.
WSDOT argued in its own motion to dismiss the lawsuit that it wasn’t obligated to build the road until the owners were cut off from accessing the property.
“The deed merely serves to mitigate damages to the Bartlett remainder property should direct access onto SR 16 be eliminated in the future; access would then be perpetuated by a frontage road with access to SR 16 . . . Plaintiff does not allege a denial of access to the highway and, therefore, has failed to allege any breach of the deed,” WSDOT’s motion said.
The lawsuit was then dropped.
WSDOT spokesperson Cara Mitchell told The News Tribune via email Dec. 19 that WSDOT maintains the stance they took during the lawsuit.
She also wrote that “WSDOT does not have plans or a design that would identify where a frontage road would start and end.”
The total cost to build the frontage road in 2008 was pegged at $4.5 million to $5 million, according to Gig Harbor Property Investment’s legal complaint. WSDOT does not have an updated cost estimate, according to Mitchell.
The News Tribune spoke to Gig Harbor Property Investment managing partner Alan Axelrod to learn more about the lawsuit and why it didn’t proceed.
Axelrod told The News Tribune that the group’s lawyers believed pursuing the lawsuit further would be expensive and have an uncertain outcome, given WSDOT’s arguments, so the group voluntarily withdrew their complaint. The group began looking into paying for the frontage road privately because it was essential to their proposed housing development, he said.
He said he can’t remember the exact figure for the cost to build the road, but the group ultimately decided it was above their pay grade. They weren’t willing to pay more than about $2 million, he guessed.
‘Harbor Winds’: the development that might have solved it all
After withdrawing the lawsuit, Gig Harbor Property Investment forged ahead with their plan to build Harbor Winds: a neighborhood of 124 single-family homes north of Haven of Rest. The 39.4-acre plat would also include three lots zoned for duplexes and two lots zoned for commercial/industrial development, according to the hearing examiner’s report and decision on the proposal in 2012.
The company considered letting go of the frontage road idea and making 93rd Street, an existing private road that connects to Burnham Drive, the main entrance to the Harbor Winds neighborhood. They abandoned that idea in part because of issues obtaining the rights to connect to that street and others to the north, and concluded that a frontage road was the only feasible way to provide access to the property, according to Axelrod and findings from the Gig Harbor Hearing Examiner.
Axelrod told The News Tribune a full design for the frontage road was completed, paid for by the company and the $400,000-plus that WSDOT put toward the design.
The proposed road would be called 51st Avenue Northwest and run along westbound state Route 16 in WSDOT’s right-of-way. Its endpoints would be Rosedale Street Northwest and the business area north of Haven of Rest. Residents could enter the neighborhood through the business area, according to city documents.
“The intent of this frontage road improvement design would be to eliminate access points along SR 16, primarily at the cemetery location and the (business area) location, where this frontage road would terminate,” a 2010 project proposal read, which Axelrod shared with The News Tribune.
Problems quickly became apparent.
The hillside where the development would go is very steep, according to Public Works Director Langhelm. It also has no existing city water or sewer access. Getting city water to the site would involve boring underneath the highway from the other side, he said.
The site also contains seven wetlands and a stream in a deep ravine, according to the hearing examiner’s report. These features required additional planning for the development to proceed.
The project review dragged on for about a decade from 2009 to 2019, the city’s public permit records indicate.
Axelrod said there was a point when it all fell apart.
He met informally with Gig Harbor Council member Jeni Woock to discuss the proposal in early 2019, Axelrod recalled. To his surprise, she discouraged him from bringing the plan to the City Council. One of her objections: the frontage road would add to the traffic going to and from Gig Harbor High School on Rosedale Street.
“I was told to redesign the plat that we had been working on for the prior eight years and which had full city departmental approvals and try again,” Axelrod wrote in an email.
That’s what the group did, for a time. They revisited the idea of making the neighborhood accessible through the private roads north of the property, but Axelrod said they never found a way to make that work.
Asked if she recalls this meeting, Woock told The News Tribune via email Nov. 13 that she doesn’t remember the particulars of a conversation with Axelrod. She guesses she suggested he build the development according to the city’s code, because council members cannot stop developments when they are according to code, she wrote.
Axelrod eventually believed the housing project would never succeed, which meant no frontage road.
If a frontage road was approved to keep going all the way to 93rd Street and connect to Burnham Drive, it could have helped divert some of the downtown traffic and alleviate congestion, Axelrod said.
“They missed a huge opportunity here,” Axelrod said.
The investment group has been in talks with Haven of Rest to sell them part of their property for the cemetery’s expansion. Other than that, he’s not sure what the future of the land will be.
Weeks confirmed that Haven of Rest is in the process of purchasing that land. The city of Gig Harbor approved a conditional permit allowing the property to be used as a cemetery, he told The News Tribune via email Dec. 17.
Axelrod still has various documents and records from the planned development, sitting in storage, and let a News Tribune reporter see some of them during an interview Oct. 4.
Asked why Gig Harbor Property Investment took an interest in the property in the first place, he said the answer is simple.
“It’s beautiful,” he said.
Elected representatives had plans
Former state Rep. Jesse Young, who represented the 26th Legislative District, including Gig Harbor, was among those who pushed for a frontage road near Haven of Rest.
Young told The News Tribune in an interview Sept. 4 that he received calls from multiple constituents concerned about the traffic situation around the cemetery. Similar to Axelrod, he believed that a frontage road connecting Burnham Drive to Rosedale Street could help alleviate some of the city’s downtown traffic congestion.
His goal was to gather stakeholders in the project — including Haven of Rest staff, local business owners and property owners and other elected officials — and push the project through. He said he was willing to work with WSDOT representatives to fulfill their alleged obligation to build the frontage road.
The three solutions he came up with included:
- Add a lane to state Route 16, allowing drivers to both slow down while entering the cemetery, and get up to speed when leaving the cemetery to merge with highway traffic.
- Build a frontage road starting at Rosedale Street and ending at or near Haven of Rest.
- Build a frontage road that both provides entry to Haven of Rest and continues north up to Burnham Drive, thus serving as a “downtown bypass” to alleviate traffic in Gig Harbor’s downtown area.
The News Tribune reached out to WSDOT and the city of Gig Harbor to ask about the feasibility of these solutions.
WSDOT spokesperson Mitchell told The News Tribune via email Aug. 6 that the department “responded to a legislative inquiry about the possibility of a westbound right turn lane onto the Haven of Rest property or an acceleration lane out of the property” in 2021. This project “would require an investment that does not prioritize for funding,” she wrote.
Former Gig Harbor Mayor Tracie Markley and City Administrator Katrina Knutson told The News Tribune in separate emails that it’s an issue for the state to address.
“The city has no jurisdiction over” state Route 16, Markley wrote in an email Aug. 7. “As much as we desire a solution there does not appear to be funding or political will in Olympia to get this accomplished at this time.”
“The city does not have any current or future plans to construct a frontage road from Rosedale to Haven of Rest,” Knutson wrote Nov. 18. “As we understand, this is a state issue and one for WSDOT to analyze and see where it fits within their priorities.”
Langhelm, the city public works director, said that it’s possible the frontage road could help divert some of the downtown traffic. In order to provide a definite answer, he said he would need to look at past traffic models, which evaluate how cars move through the city’s road network. The frontage road, if built, would eventually become the responsibility of the city.
Young said he was hoping other elected representatives included in those early meetings with stakeholders would pick up the project after he lost his bid for a state Senate seat in 2022, but isn’t aware of any progress. He recently ran for his previous state House seat in November and lost to Adison Richards.
Asked if residents have mentioned issues accessing the Haven of Rest cemetery, incoming state Rep. Adison Richards told The News Tribune that he’s heard more traffic concerns about the Wollochet Drive interchange with state Route 16. The cemetery issue didn’t come up often on the campaign trail, but he’s “all about trying to identify new things to work on,” he said via phone Dec. 18.
The state’s transportation budget deficit is a challenge he’ll have to face. The Urbanist reported that lower-than-expected revenue from the state’s gas tax — which Richards said is partly because of the increase in electric vehicle use — and Climate Commitment Act, combined with soaring costs for highway expansion projects, are among the reasons for the deficit.
Washington’s 26th Legislative District was largely left out of the 2015 Connecting Washington transportation package, which Richards said he believes set the district “back at least a decade” in terms of the transportation projects they need funded.
“I just joined the transportation committee and will have discussions with Chair (Jake) Fey and the committee to seek a creative solution here despite the budget constraints,” he wrote in an email to The News Tribune.
The state granted Gig Harbor $1.7 million in 2023 to add two turn lanes at the Wollochet Drive interchange with state Route 16, The News Tribune reported. The city’s capital improvement projects website indicates both projects are still in the design and approval phase.
Improvements to the Wollochet interchange were among the recommendations included in a WSDOT study of congestion on state Route 16 between the Tacoma Narrows Bridge and state Route 3. That study, completed in 2018, was prompted by “high levels of vehicle traffic congestion at peak travel times throughout the corridor that create spillover traffic on local streets,” the report said. The congestion is expected to increase as the population in the region grows. The report’s list of recommendations didn’t include improving highway access to the cemetery or business park.
‘Something needs to be done.’
It’s been about two and a half years since Barbara Rogers, who told The News Tribune about her concerns driving to the cemetery, began trying to get something done.
She started by reaching out to Russ Weeks, the cemetery owner. Then she shared her concerns with former Gig Harbor Mayor Tracie Markley and the City Council, state elected officials who represent the area in Olympia, and WSDOT representatives.
Some responded to Rogers’ messages and promised to look into the issue. Others never responded, or contacted her and then didn’t follow up.
She kept all her notes and printed out emails from each person she contacted and got responses from. Over time, she’s let the issue drop, she said.
Rogers’ friend, Maggie Garber, said she thinks the state should put flashing yellow caution signs by state Route 16, in addition to the sign that exists, and place them farther down the highway to warn drivers that the cemetery entrance is coming up. That’s a measure she thinks could be taken immediately, she said.
What Rogers has emphasized again and again is that those who visit Haven of Rest aren’t just your “average” visitor. Those who come to the cemetery, whether they’re coming to make arrangements, visit loved ones or attend a service, are all in an emotional state, she said.
Though there haven’t been many accidents near the cemetery recently, Rogers said she believes “it’s just an accident waiting to happen,” especially as the population — and traffic — continues to grow in the Gig Harbor area.
Even if it starts with flashing signs, she hopes to see actions taken to make getting on and off state Route 16 there safer.
“Something immediate, not 10 years down the road,” Rogers said. “. . . something immediate, because it feels like something needs to be done, now.”
News Tribune archives contributed to this report.
This story was originally published January 6, 2025 at 5:00 AM.
