Last May I went to hike on one of my favorite trails, the Westwind Trail. It is at Cape Disappointment State Park and runs between Beard's Hollow and the parking lot next to the North Head lighthouse. When I got to the parking lot, I found that the trailhead sign was gone and the little stairway over the muddy area at the start of the trail was missing as well.
My fist thought was that it was vandalism or something. The trail took a little bit of looking to find and was apparently still in use as there were boot and dog prints on the trail. The sign to the lookout was gone as well. Aside from one tree that had fallen across the trail, it was still in good condition.
At the lighthouse parking lot I found that someone had piled a bunch of brush at the end of the trail and removed the sign at the top of the trail. New signs had been installed around the parking lot and none of them showed the Westwind Trail at all.
I talked with a ranger and he said that the trail had been removed as part of some kind of trade for the new trail that ran along side of the road that connected the North Head Lighthouse parking lot to the Discovery Trail. "You can't just keep taking wilderness away, you need to give back."
This didn't sit right with me, especially since the new trail was practically a road, in some cases they just widened the road and put up jersey barriers between the path and the car traffic lanes. Hardly the same wilderness experience at all.
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