Forest Park for Trail Runners

Here is the thing every Portland runner figures out eventually: Forest Park is one of the great urban running grounds in the country, and almost none of it looks like a track. It is roughly 5,200 acres of second-growth forest folded into the west hills, threaded with more than 80 miles of trail, fire lane, and old road — soft-surface, shaded, and steep enough to matter. You can run a flat, measured tempo effort or grind a thousand feet of vertical in a mile, sometimes on the same morning. The trick is knowing which piece does which job.

Because the park is honestly built for this. Two long spines run roughly parallel along the ridge — the gravel Leif Erikson Drive on the lower contour and the dirt Wildwood Trail above it — and dozens of connectors and fire lanes lace between them. That lattice is the whole gift: you can build a run of nearly any length, bail from rooty singletrack down onto smooth gravel whenever your legs or the weather turn, and never quite repeat yourself. Locals have been mapping their own loops onto it for generations, and the park quietly hosts the only 50K in the city.

What this page is: a runner’s-eye read on the whole system — where to start, which trails are the mileage, which are the climbs, and which are just the glue. Each pick links to its own full write-up; come back here for the big picture, go there for the footing and turn-by-turn.

Start here: Leif Erikson Drive

If you run one thing in Forest Park, make it Leif Erikson Drive — the default Forest Park run and the closest thing the park has to a highway. It’s a former auto road, now a wide, hard-packed gravel doubletrack that runs about eleven miles one-way from the NW Thurman Street gate up to Germantown Road, on a grade gentle enough that you can hold a pace instead of surviving one. And it comes pre-measured: white concrete posts mark every quarter mile from the Thurman gate, so you always know exactly how far out you are.

That last detail is why Leif is the backbone of most people’s training here. You don’t need a watch doing math — pick a milepost, run to it, turn around, and you know precisely what you did. Milepost 3 and back is a clean six miles; the full out-and-back to Germantown and home is a big day of roughly twenty-two. It drains and holds up in the rain better than anything else in the park, which in a Portland winter is not a small thing. The cost of all that smoothness is company: Leif is shared with mountain bikers, so keep right, hold your line on blind corners, and expect to share with bikes throughout — including around busy junctions like Fire Lane 7, a popular runner-and-bike area.

Runner’s note Leif is where you rack up honest, repeatable mileage — measured efforts, long-run base, and all-weather footing, with a quarter-mile post to split against instead of a screen. Nothing else in the park lets you run this cleanly. Save the singletrack and the fire-lane vert for when you want the workout to hurt on purpose.

The long objective above Leif is the Wildwood Trail — about thirty miles of soft, foot-only singletrack, the longest such trail inside any U.S. city, blazed with a blue diamond every quarter mile from its south terminus in Washington Park. Running the whole thing end-to-end is a genuine local rite of passage for Portland ultra runners; short of that, Wildwood is where you go for rolling, rhythmic dirt. It parallels Leif from roughly its mile 8 to mile 24.5, and the connectors crossing between them are how you build loops and bail out. Wildwood has no page of its own in this guide yet — but nearly every trail below touches it, and that’s the point.

The shortlist

A runner’s set, ordered from the spine outward: the mileage first, then the loops, then the climbs, then the far-north vert. Each links to its own full write-up; the picks below are just why each one earns a spot on a runner’s list.

1. 01

   Leif Erikson Drive

   The runner's highway — a wide, gentle gravel spine with a milepost every quarter mile, the one place in the park to rack up honest, measured mileage in any weather.

   Length

   11.23 mi

   Effort

   Easy

   Full write-up →
2. 02

   Lower Macleay Trail

   The shakeout and the on-ramp — a soft mile up Balch Creek to the Stone House, where the whole Wildwood network opens above you.

   Length

   0.87 mi

   Effort

   Moderate

   Full write-up →
3. 03

   Wild Cherry Trail

   The classic singletrack loop — fast, rooty, rhythmic tread that pairs with Wildwood for the named circuit of about 4.8 miles locals have run for years.

   Length

   0.84 mi

   Effort

   Steep

   Full write-up →
4. 04

   Maple Trail

   The long, quiet one — rolling foot-only singletrack that makes the wild half of a loop with smooth, fast Leif Erikson.

   Length

   3.42 mi

   Effort

   Moderate

   Full write-up →
5. 05

   Fire Lane 1

   The hill repeat with a payoff — hundreds of feet of honest climb, with a real viewpoint on the way up instead of a gate in the weeds.

   Length

   2.30 mi

   Effort

   Steep

   Full write-up →
6. 06

   Springville Road

   A single sustained grade with no flats to break the rhythm — repeats you can settle into, then recover on Leif Erikson right below.

   Length

   1.10 mi

   Effort

   Steep

   Full write-up →
7. 07

   Ridge Trail

   The north end's vertical — a long, sustained foot-only climb to a St. Johns Bridge overlook most quad-burners never earn.

   Length

   1.46 mi

   Effort

   Strenuous

   Full write-up →

Building blocks, by effort: For a shakeout or a first run here, the Lower Macleay Trail up to the Stone House is a soft, creekside out-and-back of about 1.7 miles that doubles as the door into the whole Wildwood network. For rhythmic singletrack, the Wild Cherry–Wildwood loop is the classic, and the low-key Portland Trail Series races stage right near its junction with Leif. For a long, quiet effort on real trail, the Maple Trail run — foot-only, rootier and slower than Leif — pairs beautifully with a fast gravel cruise back. And when you want the day to be about vertical, the fire lanes are the gym: Fire Lane 1 and Springville Road in the center, Ridge Trail up north, each a sustained grade you can rep.

The honest realities

Mud is a season, not an accident. From the first fall rains into early summer — roughly November through May, sometimes June — the natural-surface trails hold water and go slick. The singletrack (Wildwood, Wild Cherry, Maple) and the steeper dirt fire lanes are where you’ll feel it; the gravel of Leif Erikson and the graded fire roads drain and run far better in the wet. When you hit the soft patches, the counterintuitive-but-kind move is to run straight through the middle. Skirting the mud is how a trail slowly doubles in width and chews up the roots holding the slope together — it’s an erosion problem and an etiquette rule here. In summer the same trails go dry, firm, and dusty; that dry window, late spring through early fall, is the fastest, best running of the year.

You share the road, and there’s a pecking order. Bikes are legal on Leif Erikson and a handful of the wide routes — Saltzman, Springville, Newton, BPA, Holman Lane (uphill only), and Fire Lanes 1, 3, 5, 10, 12, and 15 — so on those you’ll meet faster wheeled traffic; stay alert and hold your line. The good news for singletrack purists: Wildwood and most of the connectors are foot-only, no bikes at all. The yield order, posted by the Conservancy, is simple — bikes yield to feet, and everybody yields to horses. A called-out “on your left” and a step to the side keeps the whole system friendly.

Carry your own water — all of it. There is no drinking water on the trails, full stop. A few trailheads have fountains (Lower Macleay and the Thurman gate among them), but you cannot count on a refill mid-run, and the creeks are not potable. Plan for the whole distance before you start. Bathrooms are just as sparse: the entire eleven-mile length of Leif Erikson has exactly two year-round porta-potties — one near the Wild Cherry junction at the south end, one up at Germantown — so the polite phrasing is that the next rest stop is often a long way off.

Know where you are before you need to. Forest Park is a lattice of crossing trails and fire lanes at dense, mostly-signed junctions — easy to run and, on an unfamiliar connector, easy to take the wrong one. The two marker systems are your friend: Wildwood’s blue diamonds count quarter-miles from the south terminus, and Leif’s white posts count quarter-miles from the Thurman gate. Note your last marker as you go. Cell service drops in the ravines, so download your route offline before you leave the trailhead — and if you ever have to call for help, the nearest blue-diamond mileage or white milepost is the single most useful thing you can tell a dispatcher.

Cautions before you go

• Start early, and don’t leave anything in the car. The popular south-end trailheads — Lower Macleay, the Leif Erikson/Thurman gate — fill early on weekends and spill into the neighborhood streets, so arrive early or park well down the hill and respect the driveways. Vehicle break-ins are the park’s most common real crime, worst at the remote Highway 30 and Skyline trailheads; leave nothing visible in your car, especially at Germantown, Upper Springville, and Lower Saltzman.
• Leash your dog if you bring one, everywhere, and pack out the waste. It’s the rule across all of Forest Park — there’s no off-leash area — and no one collects the bags you leave trailside.
• Dress for the forest, not the parking lot. It runs cooler and damper under the canopy than it feels at the trailhead, and rain arrives on its own schedule. In the wet months, footing is the whole game on the steeper dirt — the fire-lane descents and the slick connectors are where ankles turn. Grippy shoes, and on the sloppiest days, respect the pitches that don’t care about your split times.
• Mind the daylight and tell someone your plan. The park closes at 10 p.m., but winter dark comes early; carry a headlamp on anything long, and share your route and return time. On a point-to-point like a sectioned Wildwood run, sort your shuttle or transit pickup before you start.
• The races, if you want a goal. The one 50K in Portland is the Stumptown Trail Runs — a 50K and a half marathon put on by Go Beyond Racing, benefiting the Forest Park Conservancy, starting a quarter mile up Leif Erikson from the Thurman gate. The same outfit runs the low-key Portland Trail Series through the warm months near the Wild Cherry and Leif junction. Those are the sanctioned races in the park; everything else you run out here is your own.

Then, some morning when the rain has finally quit and the gravel is firm, run out to a milepost you’ve never reached before and stand there a second before you turn around. The city hum drops away behind the ridge, a Pacific wren throws its whole tiny body into song somewhere in the salal, and you remember that this is the rare training ground you’d want to be in even if you weren’t training.