SEQUIM — The Olympic Discovery Trail someday may take a dip and detour on its way from Sequim to Blyn, thanks to self-described “ornery” Melvin Baker.
Baker — who Japanese artillery couldn’t kill in World War II — isn’t about to surrender to Clallam County’s intent to run the trail across his land.
The county wants to continue the trail along the abandoned grade of the Milwaukee, St. Paul & Pacific Railway, as it does through much of its run eastward from Port Angeles.
Trouble is, the grade runs smack through Baker’s 40 acres north of U.S. Highway 101.
“It splits my property,” Baker said Wednesday.
“It would make the piece between the railroad grade and the highway valueless.”
Baker has offered to give the county a 16-foot-wide passage along the highway. The price — free — compares favorably with the $33,000 the county has offered for the railway route.
But like many “free” offers, this one has hitches.
One is that the path along the highway is a high way — 60 feet higher than the railroad grade.
That means the trail must climb six stories on one side of Baker’s property and drop six stories on the other.
Because federal rules set a maximum 5 percent grade to make the trail accessible to disabled people, the hilly-gully route presents engineering problems, said Rick James, the county transportation planner who godfathers the trail.
“The railroad grade is like a 2 or 3 percent slope,” James said, “so it would avoid all of that. Building on the railroad is as cheap as you can do.
“Building on topographically challenging domain, the cost can double or triple.
“We’re spending public money. We have to look at how much it would cost to do it on the railroad grade versus how much it would cost to go where the Bakers want us to do it.”
Baker, however, uses the railroad grade to haul the trees he still fells at the age of 83.
“I’ve got a little sawmill up here, and I use this for yarding logs,” he said Wednesday, standing on the lane that once carried trains, now bare save for buttercups and daisies.
Baker has logged the land, plus 36 acres south of Highway 101, off and on since he bought the property in 1941.
Except for Army service during World War II in the Philippines — where he received the Purple Heart for wounds he suffered when a Japanese shell hit his foxhole — he’s done so ever since.
The sawmill provided the wood for his house on East Sequim Bay Road.
“I also cut the lumber for a lot of places in town and in the county,” he said, including Port Angeles’ Lincoln Park longhouse.
The county has offered to let Baker transport logs and machinery — even the beef cattle he raises closer to Sequim Bay — across the trail.
But Baker was nettled by the county’s literally staking out the railroad route without his permission.
When he and his daughter Jackie discovered the survey stakes, they pulled them all up.
“It made me ornery as hell,” Baker said. “We didn’t like being treated like that.”
