Eagle Creek is a flood-control reservoir first and a park second, and it never pretends otherwise. That's the thing I keep coming back to. Nine miles of shoreline, and the design doesn't try to dress the water up as something more natural or more wild than a managed reservoir actually is.
The trails stay a consistent distance back from the water's edge almost everywhere, which reads at first like a missed opportunity — wouldn't you want more direct access? But it's a maintenance decision as much as a design one: water levels here move several feet across a season, and a trail built too close would be underwater half the year. Setting the path back is the honest response to that, not a compromise.
The planting along the water is almost entirely native prairie and wetland species, and it's allowed to look a little unkempt in a way a lot of managed shorelines aren't. Tall grasses lean into the water. Nothing is trimmed to a hard edge. It matches the pragmatic character of the whole park: this is infrastructure that happens to be beautiful, not scenery built to hide infrastructure.
It doesn't dress up as wilderness. It just does its job well.
The one place this restraint works against the park is at the main swim beach, where the transition from parking lot to sand is abrupt and a little charmless. A few more years of planting buffer there would go a long way.