Lithia Park

Ashland Creek flows right through downtown Ashland and the town has done a nice job of orienting walkways and restaurants along its edge. The best of these public spaces, and certainly the largest, is Lithia Park which extends a mile or two up from town. The lower part has playgrounds and artificial ponds and manicured gardens, but as you head upstream, the trails thin out and you are walking in the woods.

The geologist in me can't help but see a stream like this as a hazard. One really big rain storm sitting over the upper watershed for a few hours, after an already wet week, on top of a lot of wet snow, could probably do a lot of damage, both in the Park and in town. There have been some pretty big floods (1997, for example) and there are an awful lot of warning signs pointing uphill away from the creek bottom.