If you caught the headline that Anacortes City Council adopted an updated Community Forest Lands plan back in May, you might expect the trails to feel different this summer. They don't, mostly. What actually changed is smaller, stranger, and more useful to know if you spend any time on the 50 miles of trail winding through the 2,950 acres the city has owned since local residents started fighting to protect it in the late 1980s.
The plan itself, adopted by unanimous council vote on May 4, is the kind of document that reads as bureaucratic housekeeping. It's a five-year update, the first in this cycle, with the next one due by May 2031. City staff have said publicly that it doesn't carry major policy shifts. What it does carry, according to the Anacortes City Council's own account, is new language on wildfire protection, e-bike use, and regulatory coordination across federal, state, and local levels, plus a new section recognizing Transition Fidalgo's volunteer forest-monitoring work. Councilmember Christine Cleland-McGrath put the bigger picture well when she noted during the vote that most cities don't own forest land at all, and that Anacortes only does because a small group of residents in the 1980s figured out how to make it happen.
That's the plan. The part that will actually touch your next walk out there happened a week later, and it happened quietly.
The Fine Print That Actually Bites
On May 11, one week after adopting the plan, the council passed a set of code updates that Parks and Recreation Director Jonn Lunsford walked them through directly. Buried in those updates is the first real enforcement mechanism the forest lands have had: traveling off a designated trail, or violating a posted trail restriction, is now a class 3 civil infraction carrying a $50 fine, unless the parks director has issued written permission. A second offense within a year escalates to a class 2 infraction with a maximum penalty of $125.
For a forest that's operated for decades on trail etiquette and an honor system, that's a real shift. It's the difference between a sign asking you not to cut the switchback and a sign that can now cost you money if you do.
Councilmember T.J. Fantini's comment during the discussion is worth sitting with:
"Regardless of how good our plan is, there's always going to be somebody in the forest that is doing something that they shouldn't, and it's up to us to nicely tell them to stop and move along."
That's the honest version of what a fine schedule buys a city. Not compliance. A tool.
Who's Actually Out There to Use It
Here's the piece that makes this more interesting than a routine code update. The new infraction will be enforced by Anacortes police across the entire forest system, with the exception of a couple of parcels that aren't yet inside city limits. But the plan itself acknowledges the city doesn't currently staff the forest with any dedicated law enforcement. The only regular presence right now is the school resource officer, and only during summer months. The plan raises the possibility of hiring a full-time forest ranger, at an estimated annual cost of $250,000, but that's a line item under discussion, not a budgeted hire.
So the practical reality for anyone hiking Whistle Lake, Heart Lake, or the Little Cranberry Lake loops this year: there's now a price tag attached to going off-trail, and almost no one positioned to write the citation except whoever happens to be nearby with a badge. If you've always treated the posted trail signs as suggestions, that's still mostly true in practice. If you're the type who reports it when you see someone doing donuts through a wetland meadow, you now have a code section to point to.
The Fenced Mound Finally Has an Answer
While the plan and code updates were working through council, a different and older question about the forest got a real answer. Anyone who's walked the trails near A Avenue has probably noticed the fenced-off, grassy mound tucked into the trees and wondered what it was. According to the Friends of the Anacortes Community Forest Lands, that "no trespassing" area is the former A Avenue Landfill, a long-closed city dump that happens to sit inside the ACFL boundary. As of this summer, it's the subject of a new round of environmental testing and planning led by the City of Anacortes together with the Washington State Department of Ecology.
It's a small detail in the context of a 2,950-acre forest, but it's exactly the kind of thing that's easy to walk past for years without ever getting a straight answer. Now there is one, and it's worth knowing if that stretch near A Avenue is part of your regular loop.
What Held the Forest Together Before Any of This
The enforcement gap and the landfill mystery both point to the same underlying fact about the ACFL: this has always been a forest run more on community effort than city budget. Skagit Land Trust has held conservation easements over 1,680 of the forest's acres since 2011, permanently protecting that land from commercial development, tree cutting, and mining regardless of what any future council decides. The nonprofit Friends of the Anacortes Community Forest Lands traces back to 1987, when it formed specifically to preserve, protect, and enjoy the forest at a time when the city hadn't yet built out the management structure it has today.
That volunteer backbone is still doing a lot of the daily work. The Forest Discovery Center, the Friends group's storefront classroom and exhibit space at 404 Commercial Avenue downtown, reopened for regular hours this spring under Executive Director Josie Henderson, with Tuesday through Thursday exhibit hours drawing in anyone curious about what's changing in the forest. The Friends group also partners with the Anacortes Public Library on quarterly guided hikes, held the first Saturday of January, April, July, and October, plus a running calendar of family nature programs, a Naturalist Club, and summer forest camps for kids. Their biggest fundraiser of the year, the Annual Benefit, lands September 26 at Wisteria Gardens on Fidalgo Island, with food from Gere-A-Deli and the usual mix of yard games and live auction items.
None of that shows up in a city code section. All of it is arguably doing more to keep the forest usable and cared for than a $50 fine ever will.
What This Actually Means If You Use the Forest
If you're out there regularly, the takeaway isn't alarming. Nobody is patrolling Sugarloaf with a ticket book. But the forest you've been walking through casually now has a documented legal framework behind it that didn't exist a year ago, a decades-old dump site finally getting real attention instead of just a fence, and a nonprofit community doing the unglamorous work of keeping trail maps stocked and kids curious about salamanders in February. The plan itself may not have been dramatic. What it exposed, and what it's building toward, is worth paying attention to the next time you're out past Heart Lake wondering who exactly is responsible for any of this.
If you're curious how proximity to ACFL trailheads or forest-adjacent zoning factors into a specific Anacortes property, that's the kind of local detail Anacortes Real Estate Expert tracks closely. Reach out to Rob Skelton for a conversation about what's actually happening on the ground in this market, forest lands included.
