I've discovered that climbing stairs wears me out without wearing out my knees and the last two months I've been visiting the Blaine stairs regularly. There are almost 300 steps between Lakeview and 10th East, distributed among 13 flights over a span of two blocks. If you chose to walk up from Lake Union through the Colonnade (the forest of concrete piles now turned into a mountain bike park) under I-5 and then from 10th East on up to Volunteer Park, you could get quite a bit more vertical.
The stairs provide great views of Lake Union, the Space Needle, Queen Anne Hill, and the Olympics. I can even get glimpses of the Sound. The Streissguth Garden makes the last three flights above Broadway East a little easier. And as a geologist, I can't help but think about the implications of urban landslides as I climb the stairs, noting the tilted stairs and the complexly terraced slope.
The Beyerlein's Public Stairs site
Susan Ott Ralph's Seattle Stairs site
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