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Two In Tow & On The Go | Traipsing and trespassing (accidentally) at Bremerton’s N.A.D Marine Park

Posted on November 6th, 2026 By: Tonya Strickland

Do you like adventures where you kinda-sorta feel like you stumbled onto a place you shouldn’t be? Well then I have the location for you!

In July, the kids and I — along with Mr. Greg Spadoni, our big-kid friend and Gig Harbor Now history writer extraordinaire — visited N.A.D Marine Park, a shuttered U.S. Navy ammunition depot that’s now a city park on Bremerton’s west side.

We braved the 30-minute or so drive from Artondale for the park’s rocky shoreline access. It was the time of year when I hunt for a round rock to enter into the Harbor History Museum’s annual contest of the same name.

Finding out the site was also home to abandoned ammo bunkers was a bonus.

Online, pictures of the shallow cave-looking things covered in graffiti held the promise of edgy/arty/foresty photos of the kids. Plus, Clara and Wyatt absolutely loved going to Manchester State Park the summer before last. They liked exploring its former military structures.

So I figured N.A.D Marine Park would be a win-win.

The Reality

Did you hear that? I think it was … Yep. It was the sound of the universe laughing at me. Because, as it turns out …

The place was hard to get to.
The kids got bored.
There are no restrooms.
At least one questionable character shared the trail with us. It wasn’t even Greg this time. (Ha). This other individual was angrily shouting expletives to someone who may or may not have existed.
We missed seeing the coolest bunker on site.
We found an empty beer bottle in the bushes. But the brand had Clara’s name on it so that was fun in a weird way.
We started the day as upright citizens and ended it as military housing trespassers.

Learn from my mistakes

Friends: Learn from my mistakes. Take your kids to Manchester instead. The Google Reviews for N.A.D Marine Park are also generally unfavorable, with at least one reviewer saying she felt unsafe. She suggested staying away from the wooded area and avoiding the park at night. Eeek.

That said, we’re all different people. Perhaps you’d have a delightful experience in contrast to my weird one. The odds are in your favor, especially now with me in your corner providing the following background and tips.

The history

Google Maps

N.A.D Marine Park began as the Puget Sound Naval Ammunition Depot. It opened in 1904 on the shores of Ostrich Bay in Bremerton, according to the 2014 HistoryLink.org essay “Washington Naval Depots (World War II)” by Duane Colt Denfeld.

One of several depots around the Puget Sound, this site stored ammunition to supply (and resupply) “battleships and other combat vessels” en route to and from the nearby Puget Sound Naval Shipyard in Bremerton. Denfeld wrote that the ammunition depot had 40 buildings by World War II, “and more would be built during the war.” The depot operated for 55 years before it closed in 1959, Denfeld wrote. The city of Bremerton later acquired the property when it became military surplus.

Two parks in one

The city made two parks from the property: “N.A.D Marine Park” and the end of Shorewood Drive and “N.A.D Park” at 6002 Kitsap Way. Yes, those are two separate places with near-same names. They’re also inconveniently divided by Highway 3. There is not a practical way to walk between the parks.

N.A.D Marine Park, the subject of today’s column, is the property along the water with the bunkers. N.A.D Park, meanwhile, is the former “office” side of the depot with an administrative log cabin or two remaining today. It’s on the west side of Highway 3, away from the water.

That park also has a popular disc golf course, restrooms and a retired F-8 Crusader aircraft on display. We actually visited the aircraft separately in 2025, not knowing there was a Part II of the park across the highway.

Clara and Wyatt in 2025 at “N.A.D Park” and the retired F-8 Crusader aircraft on display there.

Getting to the N.A.D Marine Park side

The city’s Forested Trails Guide says to use Shorewood Drive to access the park. It’s a regular paved street in a residential neighborhood. I worried we’d have to double park in someone’s driveway. Having been there now, I know that driving through the neighborhood isn’t as weird as it looked. More on that later in this story.

Google Maps image of Shoreline Drive.

Instead, I let Google Maps show us the way. And that little stinker of an app took us straight into Jackson Park, a military housing neighborhood located at the opposite end of N.A.D. Marine Park. The U.S. Navy built 100 homes in 1965, according to Denfeld’s HistoryLink essay, and named it Jackson Park after Washington’s U.S. Sen. Henry M. Jackson. Jackson served in the Senate from 1953 until his death in 1983, according to his congressional biography.

Jackson Park military housing

Trespassing in the military neighborhood wouldn’t have been so bad if it wasn’t for the warning signs posted for civilians to leave. Heh. I would have turned around, but we were battling the confusion over the potentially awkward Shorewood Drive entrance; plus a rising tide chart alert on my phone and two antsy kids who just wanted to get there … blah blah blah, excuses excuses. I know, I’m terrible, but I still parked the car there and headed over to the direction of the trail, still using Google Maps.

Shorewood Drive is legit

Shorewood Drive becomes the paved walking trail.

Luckily, the chain link gate between the park and the military housing was unlocked, so we were able to access the trail from that side of the park. We walked the full length to the “beginning” and back.

And now that I’ve walked it, I can confirm that Shorewood Drive does, in fact, lead motorists politely past the neighborhood houses, away from their driveways, beneath a large canopy of trees and ultimately to a yellow metal gate. If the gate is open, you can drive through to a small parking area on the water side of the road, with room for maybe three or four cars. The lot was empty when we visited, as you can see in the above photo.

From there, Shorewood Drive becomes the walking trail itself, a quarter-mile stretch of pavement blocked from traffic with yellow barrier bars.

Shorewood Drive ends at the military housing site behind this chain link fence.

The water

We hunted for rocks on the water side first. The shoreline is down below a cliff, so reaching the water requires some scouting. We found rustic wooden steps leading down to a short cliff with a green metal picnic table. From there, we switched from walking to butt-scooting down a steep set of rocks to the shore.

I didn’t find my round rock, sadly. But it was fun looking. And Greg wowed the kids with his rock-skipping skills on top of the bay, which is always a good time.

Ammo bunkers

After exploring the waterfront, we crawled up the rocks to the picnic table cliff, dusted ourselves off and took the wooden steps back up to the paved path in search of the bunker trails. We found various dirt trails branching from the paved path up the hill, away from the water, deep in the forest.

Some are more established than others; some are insanely steep and there was no way we were going up them; and some are just right. According to Bremerton’s Forested Trail Guide, the park has about 20 bunkers. I don’t recall whether there are informational signs posted about the bunkers exact locations. But we’d already seen them online so we knew what to look for.

And even then, we somehow missed the largest of the bunkers people had filmed themselves walking into. The bunkers we saw were lined up in rows. But we found that the trails between the bunkers become increasingly less obvious due to the overgrowth. My bare ankles weren’t equipped for dodging spikey brambles, and I kept losing sight of the kids through all that overgrowth. Losing sight of them is a sure-fire way to ensure I won’t return to a place and is an experience I don’t care for when it comes to hiking especially.

So … that’s that. I don’t know if we’d go back. But the pictures did turn out cool, though!

What do you think? Will you still go and check it out, too?

See ya out there! (Or maybe not).

If you go

N.A.D Marine Park

Run by: Bremerton Parks and Recreation

Address: Entrance gate on Shorewood Drive.

Hours: 8 a.m. to dusk daily, unless posted otherwise

More info: City of Bremerton Forested Trails Guide

Mom and two kids standing with water and boats in the background.

@two.n.tow

Tonya Strickland is a Gig Harbor mom-of-two and longtime journalist. Now in the travel and family niche, her blog, Two in Tow & On the Go, was named among the 10 Seattle-Area Instagram Accounts to Follow by ParentMap magazine. Tonya and her husband Bowen moved to Gig Harbor from California with their two kids, Clara (12) and Wyatt (10) in 2021. Follow along for all the kid-friendly places in and around town.