diff --git a/CHANGES.txt b/CHANGES.txt
index 86f21a36e5c..119e77337ad 100644
--- a/CHANGES.txt
+++ b/CHANGES.txt
@@ -382,6 +382,7 @@ Release 0.21.0 - Unreleased
    HBASE-2241  Change balancer sloppyness from 0.1 to 0.3
    HBASE-2250  typo in the maven pom
    HBASE-2254  Improvements to the Maven POMs (Lars Francke via Stack)
+   HBASE-2262  ZKW.ensureExists should check for existence
 
   NEW FEATURES
    HBASE-1961  HBase EC2 scripts
diff --git a/core/src/main/java/org/apache/hadoop/hbase/zookeeper/ZooKeeperWrapper.java b/core/src/main/java/org/apache/hadoop/hbase/zookeeper/ZooKeeperWrapper.java
index 0a05dbd3e5d..88307601265 100644
--- a/core/src/main/java/org/apache/hadoop/hbase/zookeeper/ZooKeeperWrapper.java
+++ b/core/src/main/java/org/apache/hadoop/hbase/zookeeper/ZooKeeperWrapper.java
@@ -398,6 +398,10 @@ public class ZooKeeperWrapper implements HConstants {
 
   private boolean ensureExists(final String znode) {
     try {
+      Stat stat = zooKeeper.exists(znode, false);
+      if (stat != null) {
+        return true;
+      }
       zooKeeper.create(znode, new byte[0],
                        Ids.OPEN_ACL_UNSAFE, CreateMode.PERSISTENT);
       LOG.debug("Created ZNode " + znode);