On a trip the family stopped at a county park in Frederickson, WA called Cross Park. Finished in 2021, the park is unlike any I have seen in its details. It is a wood and steel construction built on an artificial turf surface. Everything feels extremely smooth and durable, leaving a very premium impression. Unfortunately, I couldn’t find any indicator at all of a manufacturer or builder, and a video about it only mentions custom components and built by the county, but I doubt it’s all first party construction.
Cross Park playground has four all metal sides including straight, humped, spiral and covered. I reflexively want to say that all of these metal slides move fast, because in my experience that it’s always on these metal slides that I go shooting off the end and hitting my butt on the ground. But here at Cross Park it was only the two straight slides that got any real speed. The spiral and tube slides maybe didn’t have enough of a pitch to get that speed. We ended up having to scoot ourselves down the slide to get to the bottom. Perhaps this is a function of the clothes we were wearing, or the particular weather of that day, but it just goes to show that slide speed is never guaranteed.
The climbers are really what got my attention when we first pulled up. Our 1.5 year old is in this stage where she wants to climb everything, and she wants to do it herself. I don’t really stop her from climbing too many things, and she can handle a tall set of vertical rungs without much intervention, but this park had a climber I haven’t seen in a long time, not since the last wood playgrounds from my childhood were torn out:
The thick wood posts all bunched up together are easy to climb but have a lot of variation. The wood itself is well sanded and very smooth, and just felt good to climb around on. Unfortunately I didn’t get a picture with a wider angle of it, but there were a few of these climbers around the playground.
The playground improves accessibility with a gentle ramp from the perimeter sidewalk into the heart of the play structure, though it falls short in extending to every part of the structure. The artificial turf does slope up at one end of the play area to curb height. This playground does not really have any of the typical “ground height” interactive pieces that you find at other new playgrounds, reachable from the ground without going up into the playset. Notably, it doesn’t really have that equipment like play panels, steering wheels, musical instruments anywhere.
The playground is also part of a larger county park, with a nature walk trail and a building that offers outside-access bathrooms and an indoor event space for weddings and community events.
When I was looking for the manufacturer or installer of this playground on the Pierce County website I did see in a video filmed at the opening of the park that the original construction featured a smaller tot area. That area had a sandpit, ground level items, and even a streaming water table or trough. Now, though, all of that has been removed and replaced by a shaded picnic area. I reached out via email to the parks department to ask about that. Their response was that they were having big problems with sand being brought over in buckets to the slides in the turf area, and having it accumulate at the bottom of the slide and eventually clogging the drainage system under the turf (along with the usual concerns about sand play areas).
I’m still awaiting a response back on the manufacturer of the equipment and will update this if/when I get that info.
Overall, a great little playground, unlike anything I’ve seen recently. It really feels like county, not the city, is pulling together these parks. While there are fewer playgrounds than Minneapolis (a lot fewer), the ones they do have are pretty good quality.