Lincoln Park is West Seattle's big forest park: 135 acres on the peninsula's southwest shore, on a bluff that drops about a hundred feet to the Sound. Trails wind through the trees on top, and a path runs along the beach below. It's quieter than Alki in every season, and lovely even in the gray ones.
The tree on your magnet is a madrona, a broadleaf evergreen native to this coast. It keeps its leaves all year and sheds its bark instead, in thin red curls that show smooth new bark underneath. Madronas like dry, sunny bluffs near salt water, and Lincoln Park has madrona groves of its own.
The Olmsted Brothers, who planned much of Seattle's park system, recommended the point as a park in 1908. The city called it Fauntleroy Park at first, then bought the land in the 1920s and named it for Abraham Lincoln.
Down at the water sits Colman Pool, a heated saltwater pool that's open in summer. The Colman family gave it to the city in 1941, in memory of Laurence Colman, on the spot where swimmers once used a tide-fed swimming hole.