Saltese Flats actually was a lake that several thousand years ago after the great Missoula floods came through.

It's a lot like Liberty Lake or Newman Lake the Morrisons acquired the land in the late 1800s.

Morrison Ranch began in 1892.

My granddad, Peter Morrison, started acquiring property.

He put together over 2000 acres here in the early 1900s.

He drained the meadow using horses and fresno's to build the ditches.

Once that was done he planted Timothy Hay and became the largest Timothy grower in the state of Washington.

And we've kind of just started to revert that back to the wetland process just by using the natural runoff of Mica Peak and the surrounding mountains.

The property that I sold to the county was part of the Miller Morrison family after they acquired our property, they went ahead and acquired all the neighbors property as well.

So consequently they have probably a little less than 700 acres in the meadow now.

In 2010 we bought the property from Bud Morrison and a stipulation in that purchase and sale agreement was that we would build some sort of learning center and dedication to his mother, Doris.

We really wanted to kind of connect Spokane Valley and other Spokane County students with, you know, wetland science, environmental science and the outdoors.

And this this building will really kind of provide that area for field trips.

We knew we needed some shelter space, a place to have lunch, but really the focus of education itself is that it will be outside as much as possible.

The Saltese Flats Wetland Restoration Project was a product of the county purchasing this land as a place to potentially put reclaimed water from our brand new water reclamation facility in the valley.

We weren't initially able to discharge our reclaimed water into the river, so we needed kind of a backup plan or a plan B, and that's what saltese Flats really was in the beginning.

We ended up getting our permit and being able to discharge into the river, but we kept saltese flats around in case someday that might be a place for the water to go.

I have been involved with it since in the beginning and that was one of the conditions of the sale that if Morrison family member would remain involved in the construction and of the wetland project and everything else.

We bought the land in 2010 and several years of of studying the soils and making sure that it would be able to hold the reclaimed water that we were hoping to bring here before we really got to construction in 2018.

And that's when we built control structures.

This over the last couple of years that we've been able to bring the water back.

It's amazing the kind of plants and animals that really return to the area too.

My favorite part of this whole project is there are many, many native wetland plant seeds that have just lay dormant in the soil since it was drained a hundred years ago.

And now that we've added the water back, they've sprouted up through the seed bank even after, you know, just being dormant for over a hundred years.

And with those natural plants coming back, the wildlife come back to and some some years the waterfowl migrate through here and the tens of thousands and it's kind of a really incredible thing to see.

But I go down and ride my horse down there and talk to people on the trails and people come from all over the country to come out here.

I've talked to people that came from Seattle to take part and see this operation that the county has done.

It's fantastic.

We have about a mile and a half stretch of elevated trail that we built as part of the construction where we're building our control structures.

It's kind of the deepest area of our wetland.

It has the most water for the longest period of time.

And so we knew we needed to really have a trail system that would be above where the water was going to be held.

And that's our most popular trail to be used by recreational folks.

We have a series of about five miles of trails throughout the whole property, but none are quite as epic as the the gravel trail.

So we're keeping it as kind of a natural wetland area.

There's all kinds of recreation you can do hiking, biking, equestrian, horse riding.

But we discourage anything with a motor, no hunting, although we do allow fishing on our pond as well.

So I feel that the family have been totally involved.

The county has done a fantastic job on the development of the wetlands and the center, and I couldn't be happier.