Lake Padden a beacon for people who love fun, nature

If you ask someone in Bellingham to join you for a 2.6-mile walk, the odds are good they’ll know what location you’re talking about.

The trail that loops around Lake Padden is a popular place to walk, jog or run anytime of the year. And that just begins to tap the activities that attract people to Bellingham’s Lake Padden Park.

Each Jan. 1, hundreds of hardy people go there to welcome the new year by jumping into the Padden’s chilly winter waters. Other times, people come to the lake to walk their dog, bicycle, play baseball, swim, picnic, fish, kayak, bird-watch, compete in events, including the Junior Ski to Sea Race, or play nine to 18 holes at nearby Lake Padden Golf Course.

The lake’s history goes back thousands of years. About 17,000 years ago, glaciers from Canada marched south, scouring the local landscape down to bedrock and leaving a hole that eventually filled to form Lake Padden.

“Bellingham was under several thousand feet of ice,” explains Doug Clark, an associate professor of geology at Western Washington University who is studying the lake’s origins.

As the ice age waned, the glacier retreated north of the border, but returned again about 14,500 years ago. That time, the ice covered the northwest part of Whatcom County and reached just beyond Bellingham Bay, leaving behind a telltale ridge of boulders, small rocks and sand near the west end of the lake, where water from the lake now flows into Padden Creek.

“The glacier acted like a bulldozer, piling up sediment against the outlet end of the lake,” says Clark, who describes the ridge as an important marker of the latter glacial push that reshaped the western part of the county. “Lake Padden marks the outermost limit of this important event and provides a crucial record of its timing.”

Moving ahead to recorded history, the lake at 4882 Samish Way is named for Michael Padden, an Irish immigrant who became a coal mine worker and Happy Valley homesteader. Padden’s heirs donated his water rights from the lake to the city after Padden was killed in 1880 when a neighbor shot him over a property dispute.

The lake supplied water to south Bellingham from 1900 until 1968, when Lake Whatcom became the main water source for the city. The 160-acre lake proved a tempting site for residential developers, but Bellingham voters in 1968 approved a parks bond that included money to create a Lake Padden park and an adjacent city golf course.

The golf course, initially nine holes, was dedicated in July 1971. The park was dedicated in August 1972.

This story was originally published November 9, 2015 at 3:02 AM with the headline "Lake Padden a beacon for people who love fun, nature."