Good Water

Directly across Highway 410 from mile marker 34, a few miles short of Greenwater, a small gravel pull-off opens on the shoulder. The spring runs there beside the road, set a little below the pavement, and drivers who do not know to look for it tend to pass it. Headed toward Greenwater from Enumclaw, it is on the left. One visitor’s advice in 2014 was to go past the marker, turn around, and come back so as to park on the spring side. Commenters have counted room for a few cars, or, in a 2025 account, “only really two spaces,” with traffic running close by toward Crystal Mountain, Chinook Pass, and Mount Rainier National Park. The water is free.

People come with containers. The platform at the spring is the work of Al Parker. In 2016 Greenwater local Stacie Steele gave skiers a tip in an Outside magazine roundup: “Longtime Greenwater resident Al Parker built a platform and some other infrastructure to make it easy to fill water containers with fresh springwater.”

The record those fillers left online begins in March 2014. That month Eileen Gale, who had lived in Buckley and in Enumclaw, wrote that she had never heard of the place. Bill Otto filled a five-gallon jug on April 11, 2014, and said he would test it. Later commenters asked twice for his results. A visitor named Michael drank a five-gallon load unpurified in 2015 and reported “no ill effects at all.” By 2016 Jon Leale was asking whether it was a spring at all, or a stream.

A test came on July 6, 2017. The volunteer, RJ, reported 3 total coliforms per 100 milliliters, arsenic at 0.001 mg/L, and nitrate-N at 1 to 2 mg/L. A later commenter noted that U.S. health standards call for zero coliforms. Wildfires burned near Crystal Mountain that fall. In 2018 a commenter named Tru wrote that firefighters had sprayed flame retardant from the air, that the spring had likely been affected, and that it should be tested again.

Visitors in 2025 called the setup clean and well taken care of, and the water, in Katelyn’s words, “THE MOST DELICIOUS.” That same summer Tahra priced a new test at $300 and asked who would split the cost. On June 24, 2026, Sarah Cooke answered that she might, “especially if more people would join in.”