PORT ANGELES — East Beach Road runs from U.S. Highway 101 at the eastern tip of Lake Crescent, up to and along its north shore, westward past the Log Cabin Resort, then due north toward Joyce.
For the property owners past whose lakeside homes it travels, it rambles from disappointment through disenchantment to frustration.
For Clallam County and Olympic National Park, though, it is going nowhere for now.
At least not while the county and the park try to decide who should maintain the narrow lane that last was paved in the 1980s.
The county says it ought to belong to the park. The park says it ought to belong to the county. The residents side mostly with the park because they think the county is more likely to repair it.
And thereby hangs the dispute, because East Beach Road would be difficult to maintain.
A sunny spring day drive up the road reveals peek-a-boo views of the water and a few potholes, but neither so many nor so deep as some residents say. It has no centerline or shoulders — or places to put them on its narrow cut into the steep bluff that surrounds the lake.
Improving the road would first mean digging drainage ditches, County Administrator Dan Engelbertson said Wednesday, and there’s no place to dig them.
Even if there were room, the lakeside location would mean getting a passel of permits — most of them only with the park’s permission — Engelbertson said.
Currently, the county’s attorneys are talking with park officials, frankly hoping that the park will take ownership of the road. At one point, the county floated the idea of quit-claiming it to the park, with or without the park’s consent.
But that was only a talking point, Engelbertson said, a position for discussion. It certainly wasn’t a secret offer, he said, because any such move would require a public hearing at which lakeside residents would turn out in force.
