How It Was Saved

Forest Park exists because Portland decided not to cash it in — but “decided” is doing a lot of quiet work in that sentence. The decision wasn’t a show of hands on a single Tuesday. It was closer to a forty-five-year argument, carried by a handful of stubborn people, most of whom did not live long enough to walk the finished trail. The forest you move through today is the residue of that argument: a wilderness that had to be won, repeatedly, against the entirely reasonable idea that hillsides this close to downtown ought to have houses on them.

The idea came early, then waited

The vision showed up almost embarrassingly early. As far back as the 1860s, a Unitarian minister named Thomas Lamb Eliot — a man so relentlessly civic-minded that Portland took to calling him “the conscience of Portland” — was arguing that the town should set aside its wooded west hills before it was too late. At his insistence the city formed a parks commission in 1899, and in 1903 that commission hired the Olmsted Brothers, the most famous landscape firm in America, to draw up a plan. The Olmsted report did two things that still shape your day here. It sketched a chain of connected greenways looping the whole city — the ancestor of today’s 40-Mile Loop — and it told Portland, in plain municipal prose, to keep these “romantic wooded hillsides for a park or reservation of wild woodland character,” because “no use to which this tract of land could be put would begin to be as sensible or as profitable to the city as that of making it a public park or reservation.”

And then, having been told exactly what to do, Portland spent the next forty-five years not doing it. A 1907 bond meant for the park got spent on parks the city already had. In 1914 the city gave up altogether and opened a wood-cutting camp on the slopes instead. A realtor named Richard Shepard graded a scenic road across the hillside in 1915 to sell view lots; the road cost roughly double what he’d promised, the first winter’s landslides closed it, and one by one the buyers stopped paying their assessments. Their forfeited lots — some 1,400 acres of them — reverted to the city for unpaid taxes, quietly assembling the very land the park would later be built from. Shepard’s failed subdivision road is still there, and it’s one of the best easy walks in the park: you know it now as Leif Erikson Drive, renamed in 1933 from the plainer “Hillside Drive.” Every graded gravel mile of it is a monument to a real-estate scheme that didn’t work — which is a very Forest Park kind of monument.

The people who wouldn’t let it go

What finally broke the stalemate was a few people who refused to be reasonable about it. In 1943 the nationally known planner Robert Moses passed through and pronounced the wooded hillsides “as important to Portland as the Palisades of the Hudson are to the city of New York” — the kind of outside praise a city can’t easily ignore. But the real engine was a Portland insurance man named Garnett “Ding” Cannon, whom the park’s own historian later called, without much hedging, the “Father of Forest Park.” Cannon spent decades on this. He got the City Club to study it in the mid-1940s, then helped convene, in 1947, a coalition of some forty civic groups called the Forest Park Committee of Fifty — chaired for its first twelve years by the retired federal forester Thornton T. Munger. Working the same cause was Fred Cleator, another forester who gave hundreds of unpaid hours to cutting trail and leading the Mazamas, the Trails Club, and the Boy Scouts up the bare, logged-over slopes to plant them back into forest.

They got there in the end. In September 1948 the city formally dedicated roughly 4,200 acres as Forest Park. It was less a purchase than a stitching-together — gifts, tax-foreclosed parcels, and county land sewn into one green whole. Some of the oldest thread in that quilt was older than the park itself: back in 1897 the merchant Donald Macleay had given the city the deep canyon of Balch Creek, on the condition that its paths stay gentle enough for convalescing hospital patients to walk. That gift is where most visitors still start today — the shaded, near-level Lower Macleay Trail, whose mossy stone ruin sits on ground that has been public land longer than Forest Park has had a name.

The trail built by hand

The park’s spine, the Wildwood Trail, came later and mostly by hand. It was named a National Recreation Trail in 1975, when it ran only about fourteen miles, and then it grew — decade by decade, on the backs of volunteers, one of whom, Bruno Kolkowsky, worked a long northern stretch nearly to the end of his life and has a trailside bench to show for it. The Wildwood was finally pushed through to its full thirty-odd miles in 1999, timed to the park’s fiftieth birthday. The connectors that let you turn it into a loop were built the same patient way, trail crew by trail crew; when you drop onto something like the Wild Cherry Trail to link the low road to the high one, you’re walking a piece of infrastructure that somebody volunteered a weekend to dig.

A forest you have to keep choosing

Here’s the part worth carrying up the hill with you: the choosing never actually stopped. The Committee of Fifty didn’t disband — it became the Friends of Forest Park in 1989 and the Forest Park Conservancy in 2008, same mission, new letterhead: “to preserve, protect, and enhance this magnificent urban wilderness for both people and wildlife.” In the 1990s citizens raised over a million dollars to buy up private lots inside the park before anyone could build on them. In 1999, when investors announced plans for 73 acres right in the park’s core — the notorious “Hole in the Park” — Portlanders bought it and handed it to the city, and the donors’ names are cut into stone out there still. A 1995 management plan governs how the whole thing is cared for, and every year a small army of volunteers pulls English ivy out of the understory so the forest doesn’t, in Marcy Houle’s memorable warning, “one day become an ivy forest.”

This is the thing to understand before you pick a trail. An urban forest is not a leftover. It is not what’s there because no one got around to paving it. It is a decision — made, then made again, by people who kept choosing the forest over the money the forest was worth. The Upper Macleay Trail climbs through some of the older firs in the park, trees that were already standing during a few of those arguments and indifferent to every one of them. Walk up under them sometime and do the math on what it took to leave them alone. Then thank whatever stubborn Portlander you like, and keep climbing.