The Ravineous City
Seattle's Curious Topography
Many years ago when I was a punk kid, my buddies and I often played in an area we called The Ravine. Wooded with a thicket of understory shrubs, it was an untamed landscape with few trails, or at least, adult trails, the kind of trail that older people used, the kind they subserviently followed, assuming it was taking them on the proper route from point A to point B. We kids, of course, didn’t need those lame trails; we went where we wanted, following the real trails we had created. (Now that I have been one of those older people for a good while I better understand why we like adult trails.) Apparently, those older people also has another name for The Ravine; they called (and still call) it Interlaken Park. Not sure why they went with that name because The Ravine sounds way cooler; I still call it by that name.
I can’t say for sure but I am guessing that other kids in Seattle probably had their own places they called The Ravine, too. I base my hunch on this because ravines occur widely throughout the entire city. They result from a holy trinity of geology, climate, and time. Geology, in the form of a massive Ice Age glacier, gave Seattle steep-sided hills comprised of an impermeable layer of clay under a permeable layer of silt/sand. Climate gives Seattle plenty of precipitation, which percolates through the permeable material, hits the impermeable, and follows gravity to the ground surface, where it emerges as springs and seeps. Time gives us the seasons and years necessary to allow water from the seeps and springs to erode the steep slopes but not too much time to remove them all together.
In a quick, and highly unscientific survey, of the internet thing, I found at least a half dozen named Seattle locations incorporating ravine including North Beach Ravine, Maple School Ravine, Madrona Ravine, and College Street Ravine. (Let me know if you live near one.) My geology friend, Pat Pringle, sent me a list from the USGS geographic names database, which included names with ravine in them from 33 states (by far the most are in California), but not Washington. They include Crablouse Ravine, the oxymoronic Hogback Ravine, and Ravine of the Castles. Apparently though, our fair country pales to our northern neighbors, at least so wrote a reporter for the Guardian newspaper: “The thickly forested valleys of Toronto’s ravine system are peerless: no major urban centre in the world comes close to its steep, voluminous corridors of woodlands.”
But back to the PNW. Curiously, our lovely neighbor to the south, Tacoma, which shares Seattle’s geology and glacially-influenced topography, does not have ravines, or at least seems to eschew the term. A friend in Tacoma told me that people down there use the word gulch instead of ravine. “Tacoma’s got to live up to its gritty blue-collar history. I use ravine if I want to sound elegant or refined.” In contrast, a different friend told me: “I think of ravine as a red neck word.” According to A Dictionary of Americanisms: On Historical Principles (thanks Carol), gulch was a word especially prevalent in the west as “such a place where gold is prospected,” which resulted in combinations such as gulchman, gulch-gold, and gulch-mining, as well as the verb gulching, as in “gulching for gold.” Ravine, however, failed to make it in that dictionary.
Ravine is borrowed from the French for a torrent of water and refers to a narrow, steep-sided valley. As illustrated by Tacoma’s predilection for gulch, the use of the word seems based less on topography and more on culture, which leads to other names for a similar feature such as gorge, gully, and cañada, and maybe arroyo, though this seems restricted more to dry waterways, especially ones that are wide and lack steep walls.
Arguably Seattle’s most famous ravine is Ravenna, which was named in 1887 by owners George and Oltilde Dorffel after Ravenna, Italy. (The great Romantic poet Lord Byron wrote of “Ravenna’s immemorial wood.”) Curiously, and despite what appears to be a connection, people speculate, without any widely accepted evidence either for or against, that Ravenna comes from Rasenna, the name that the Etruscan people called themselves, and not from a topographic feature. Oh well, that’s language for you.
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Your boyhood romping in the ravine reminds me of my adventures in “the swamp” which is what we used to call the area of Thornton creek from where it leaves Jackson Golf course to the culvert where it goes under 10th avenue. Along with the woods north of the dead end of 130th and east of 8th, that was a great playground and I believe it still is fairly undeveloped.
I grew up in Innis Arden, famous for being a "restricted residential community" untill that part of the convenants was changed (!). We spent all day "down the ravine" back of the house, or "down the bank." A steep ravine leading down to Boeing Creek. I don't remember calling it any official name.
Never heard of a gulch until Japanese Gulch in Mukilteo