Sometime in the next few weeks, a stretch of Fairweather Nature Preserve will disappear behind a temporary electric fence, and for the better part of two weeks, the loudest sound in the woods will be chewing. Medina has called in its goats again.
If you walk the Points Loop Trail regularly, you already know the drill. A portable fence line goes up around a section of blackberry and ivy, a small crew from a ranching outfit called Healing Hooves sets up camp, and a herd gets to work eating its way through vegetation that has outpaced the city's ability to manage it by hand. It is, without much competition, the most public thing that happens in a town built almost entirely on private waterfront lots.
A Problem No Amount of Private Land Solves
Fairweather Nature Preserve sits on 12.9 acres in Medina's Northpoint area, and for years the wooded section behind its small field and two tennis courts has been quietly losing ground to non-native blackberry and English ivy. This is not a story about neglect. It is a story about scale. Manual clearing is slow and expensive to repeat every season, and chemical treatment carries its own tradeoffs in a preserve that borders residential lots and drains toward Lake Washington. The city needed a method that could keep pace with how fast blackberry actually grows, without turning a nature preserve into a spray zone.
Goats solved the math. A herd can strip a hillside of invasive brush in the time it would take a two-person crew to clear a fraction of the same ground, and they leave behind cleared soil instead of chemical residue. It is not a novel idea in land management circles, but it is a fairly novel one for a city government to adopt at neighborhood scale.
The Idea Came From Next Door, Not City Hall
Here is the part of the story that says more about Medina than the goats themselves. The city didn't come up with this. Overlake Golf and Country Club did, using goat grazing for its own landscape management and fire mitigation work before Medina ever got involved. When Public Works Director Ryan Osada started looking for a way to deal with Fairweather's overgrowth, he consulted with the club directly and liked what he saw enough to pursue it for city land.
That led to Healing Hooves, a goat-grazing outfit operating under Cloverdale Ranch Inc. that has spent more than a decade working municipal and private contracts across the region, from golf courses to business parks to conservation districts. Medina wasn't first in line. The company was fully booked when the city first inquired, and Osada and council member Randy Reeve had to put Medina on a waitlist before the herd finally arrived. What started as a golf club's fire-mitigation tactic became a public park's answer to invasive species, filtered through a private institution that tested it first.
It's a small case study in how ideas move through a place like this. The country club, not the city council, ran the pilot.
Twelve Acres Is the Whole Commons
Medina and Hunts Point are not neighborhoods where most of the land invites you in. The lots are large, the shorelines are private, and the defining feature of the area, for anyone who has walked or driven through it, is how little of it you actually get to stand on unless you live there. Fairweather Nature Preserve is one of the exceptions. So is Medina Park a few blocks away, with its ponds and open lawns. Between them and the connective tissue of city streets, there is a genuinely small footprint of land in Medina that belongs to everyone rather than to a single household.
That is what makes the goats worth paying attention to beyond their obvious charm. The city is spending real effort and a multi-year relationship with an outside contractor to protect a wooded patch that most residents could drive past without noticing, because it is one of the only pieces of Medina that isn't spoken for. If you have ever wondered what daily life looks like in a town this private, one answer is: the fights over how to care for the twelve acres that aren't.
How to Catch Them This Week
The visit is short by design and worth timing if you want to see it in person.
- Walk the Points Loop Trail. This 5.4-mile route connects Medina, Hunts Point, Clyde Hill, and Yarrow Point, and it runs close enough to Fairweather Nature Preserve that you'll pass the grazing area on a normal loop. The trail is mostly marked with small posts and a few kiosk maps, so bring a general sense of the route even if you know these streets well.
- Look for the portable fencing, not the herd from the road. Healing Hooves contains its animals with electric fencing rather than permanent enclosures, so the grazing area shifts as they clear one section and move to the next.
- Expect a handler on site. Healing Hooves keeps someone with the herd throughout a project, both to manage the animals and to answer questions from people who stop to watch, which residents tend to do.
- Don't expect them to linger. When the herd first came to Fairweather, it was 125 goats, four sheep, and one sheepdog, and they cleared the assigned overgrowth in about nineteen days across late August and early September. The city's site confirms the herd is back this year, though it hasn't published a fresh headcount, so the window is likely similarly tight.
- Leash your dog if you bring one. Fairweather's posted park rules require it, goats or no goats.
Why This Is the Story Worth Knowing
None of this changes anything about property values or market timing, and that is precisely the point. If you already live in Medina or Hunts Point, you don't need another explanation of why the area is desirable. What you might not have known is that the town's response to an overgrown hillside says something honest about how it operates: pragmatic, willing to borrow a good idea from wherever it works, and protective of the small amount of land that belongs to the whole community rather than one address.
The goats will be gone again in a couple of weeks. The trail, the preserve, and the habit of walking past both will still be there in September, which is really the only tradition this town needs to keep.
For more on daily life across Medina and Hunts Point, including what waterfront living actually looks like day to day, our piece on waterfront estate living in Medina and Hunts Point covers more of the texture that doesn't show up on a listing sheet.
If you're weighing a move to this stretch of the Eastside and want a local's read on what a property, a street, or a season actually feels like, Melissa Boucher is always glad to talk it through. Let's Connect.