President’s Message: December 2025

By Dan Bucci, President, Foothills Coalition

Hello fellow Coalition Members! I hope the fall season has been treating you all well, and as always, I hope you have all had some time to get outside and enjoy this cool and colorful season on our local trails. As always, we have been busy on our end, and I have a few updates to share. 

First, we were thrilled to celebrate the completion and grand opening of the new and improved Spiketon Ditch Bridge back in September. The loss of this bridge in late 2023 left a gap in a critical segment of the trail connecting Buckley and South Prairie with no available detour. We are extremely grateful for the outside the box thinking of Pierce County Parks to come up with an innovative solution to get the bridge replaced in a reasonable timeline and are happy to have our trail fully connected once again. It has been great to hear from trail users how happy they are to be able to yet again ride the full length of the trail.

Also back in September, the majority of our board attended the annual Pierce County Trails Conference hosted by ForeverGreen Trails. This event was a great networking opportunity where trail organizations, local governments, parks departments and community leaders gathered to discuss the state of trails in Pierce County and share information on how to best continue to grow and support our trail networks in Pierce County (and beyond). 

ForeverGreen Trails continues to do outstanding work advocating for trail development and construction in Pierce County. I encourage you to check out their fund drive to complete the “Puyallup Missing Link” that will complete a connection of two segments of the Puyallup River Walk Trail. This missing link is part of a broader 18-mile loop trail that will eventually connect the communities of Fife, Milton, Pacific, Sumner, and Puyallup and branch off the Foothills Trail. I strongly encourage all to donate to their fund drive here: https://www.forevergreentrails.org/riverwalk-fund

In October, we hosted our semi-annual board retreat where the Foothills Coalition Board got together and completed a refresh of our Strategic Plan that we developed back in 2022. During the retreat, our board did some teambuilding work and then dove into the strategic plan refresh and development of our 2026 work plan. It was great to get together and tweak our strategic plan to ensure it aligned with our current work activities and priorities and develop that into strategies and tactics to drive our work for the next few years. Needless to say, our top goals continue to be advocating and partnering to complete more miles of trail along and adjacent to the Foothills Trail.

Finally, it is with great sadness that I write that we recently lost a long-time board member and fierce supporter of the Foothills Trail. Pat Johnson passed away in early September. Pat was involved with the Foothills Trail and the Coalition from the early days and was a board member for nearly three decades. Additionally, she served on the Buckley City Council for fourteen years and then as Mayor of Buckley for 16 years from 2005 – 2021. Pat’s leadership during her tenure as mayor was instrumental in getting the White River Bridge project on the Foothills Trail connecting Buckley and Enumclaw completed. She served as a strong voice for trail and parks development at the local, county and state levels. 

Pat was also a frequent trail user, walking along the Foothills Trail or other local trails almost daily. It was always great to work with her, and anyone who spent time talking with her could see her deep passion and deep love for the Foothills Trail and how much it meant to her, and her community in Buckley. As our longest serving board member, she was also our de-facto historian and had deep knowledge of the history of the development of the Foothills Trail, as well as all those individuals that helped to make it a reality over the last forty years. To say that I, and this organization will deeply miss Pat is a gross understatement. The Coalition will be taking steps to place some type of memorial along the trail to honor Pat’s decades of love and stewardship of the Foothills Trail.

I wish you all the best through the holiday season, and as always am filled with thanks and gratitude for all your support.

-Dan