When a large property recently came on the market on Wax Orchard Road, several people expressed to me the hope that the Land Trust could purchase and protect it. We love that you think of us as the solution to a challenge. We have certainly risen to that challenge many times and are prepared to again.

There is no shortage of demand for new parks, here and across the country. Especially swaths of forest with trail systems. Trail use is exploding, as is the number of people moving to this region.

Back when Seattle was a young city (1903) the Olmstead brothers designed a string of large parks and greenbelts — 19 in all, including Lincoln Park and the iconic arboretum. These visionary landscape architects seemed to know that the region would boom. It must have seemed like too much at the time, and now somehow, it seems like too little.

Fast forward to today, and Seattle residents flock to the foothills of the Cascades for year-round hiking in the woods at Mount Si, Rattlesnake Ledge and Cougar Mountain. Another visionary, writer and outdoor enthusiast, Harvey Manning, coined the name “Issaquah Alps” to encourage the protection of these foothills. This time King County took the lead, partnering with Forterra and the Mountains to Sound Greenway and did a spectacular job. Again, what must have seemed like a lot of elbow room two decades ago is now packed with hikers and runners.

We are having an Olmstead moment on Vashon. It is important that we preserve, and open to public use, the few large properties that remain in private ownership.

And it is important that we move quickly. Certain facts of life on Vashon have tended to dampen the pressure of development over the years: the lack of island-wide sewer and water; the realities of ferry travel. But these things can change. The advent of passenger-only service in the early 1990s certainly increased development on the north end. The intense migration to Seattle — currently more than 1,000 people each week — is spilling out in all directions.

Of course, our parks and preserves do much more than provide back-country trails. There’s drinking water recharge, carbon sequestration, flood prevention, climate change resilience, salmon and orca survival — all crucial parts of who we are. But sometimes all you really want is a good long walk in the woods. Right?

There is only a handful of large private ownerships left, and the listing on Wax Orchard is one. Rest assured that the Land Trust and our partners at King County have reached out to these owners — all of them. Our interests are not secret. It is the support of this community that has propelled the preservation of 2,000 acres in the past two decades. You have asked us for more, and we take that charge very seriously.

Everything we do is voluntary, of course. People are free to sell their land at whatever price they can fetch. But the Land Trust can’t purchase a property for more than it’s worth.

Why not? When we work with King County, it means working with public money. That’s money that came from you. And when we work with private donations, that’s also money that came from you. We owe the seller a fair price. But we owe it to you, the donor and taxpayer, to pay no more than a fair price.

We have been lucky so far with large ownerships. Maury Marine Park was first, before the Land Trust was founded. Then the state lands at Island Center Forest, followed by the Glacier mine site. And we have added to all of those sites to make them even more significant.

There is a handful left. And this is our Olmstead moment.

— Tom Dean is the executive director of the Vashon-Maury Island Land Trust.