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Dedication Ceremony for Feliz Paseos Accessible Park is Saturday
10.05.2006
A unique park carefully designed to be accessible to people with limited mobility and other physical impediments will be dedicated at a ceremony this Saturday, Oct. 7. The event begins at 10 a.m. in the 50-acre park off the east side of Camino de Oeste a bit north of Gates Pass Road.
Board of Supervisors Chairman Elías will kick off the ceremony and introduce others who were key to getting the park developed: U.S. Congressman Raúl Grijalva; Pima County Natural Resources, Parks and Recreation Department Director Rafael Payan; and dedication plaque presenters Bob Mora and Elezabeth Cameron, who are members of the park’s Citizens Advisory Committee.
Laural Park, a neighbor of the park site, first proposed that the county undertake its development on that site. She and others on the advisory committee, such as Mora and Cameron, worked for many years to gain county funding approval and to work on park-design details as they relate to accessibility. The park’s ramadas and facilities architecture is modeled after similar facilities at nearby Gates Pass Overlook, which were projects of the Civilian Conservation Corps in the 1930s.
The park has a quarter-mile asphalt trail and more than a mile of additional dirt trails that also are accessible to most people with mobility restraints. Information about the trails’ grades, cross slopes, surface conditions, and impediments are posted on signs, with audio, after Mora, Park and Pima County’s Robie Pardee gathered the information with use of a Universal Trail Assessment process. This is the first park of this kind in Arizona and one of very few in the United States. The trail conditions information will enable people with varying degrees of mobility limits to decide how much of the trails they can, or want to, traverse.
The parkland is beautiful undisturbed Sonoran Desert overlooking Camino de Oeste Wash and just minutes by car from downtown Tucson. The trails include wildlife viewing areas and interpretive signs describing the vegetation and wildlife of the area.
For more information, visit our archived page " Unique Accessible Park Opens Soon »