What This Place Is

Most great forests are somewhere you drive to. Forest Park is somewhere you can walk to from a downtown Portland coffee shop, disappear into for three hours, and come back out a more reasonable human being — with the low hum of Highway 30 never quite gone from the edge of your hearing the whole time.

That last part is not a flaw. It’s the entire point, and the sooner you make peace with it, the more you’ll love this place. Forest Park is not untouched wilderness, and anyone who tells you otherwise is selling something. It’s a working, recovering, second-growth forest draped over the hills on the northwest edge of a city of people — a place that was logged, burned, quarried, nearly subdivided, and then, in one of Portland’s better decisions, deliberately left alone and allowed to grow wild again. What makes it remarkable isn’t that the city never touched it. It’s that the city chose to stop.

The honest superlative is a careful one: this is one of the largest urban forest reserves in the United States — you’ll hear bolder claims, and they don’t all hold up, so we won’t make them. The writer Marcy Houle, who has studied this forest more closely than anyone, puts the real distinction not in acres but in character: Portland, she writes, “reigns as the only metropolitan area in the nation that offers its citizens a wilderness… in the heart of its city.” That’s the thing to hold onto. Not the biggest. The wildest, this close in.

The shape of it

Picture a long green ribbon laid along a hillside. Forest Park runs more than eight miles end to end but stays narrow the whole way — about a mile wide near the downtown end, widening to roughly two miles at its far northwest tip. It rides the eastern slope of the Tualatin Mountains, the forested ridge Portlanders just call the West Hills, with the Willamette River and the industrial flats below on one side and the crest of Skyline Boulevard above on the other. From the bottom edge near St. Helens Road to the ridgeline, the ground climbs from around 50 feet of elevation to about 1,100 — which is why so many of these trails are, in a word, up.

Here’s the part worth knowing before you go, because it explains everything else: this forest survives largely because the ground underneath it is treacherous. The West Hills are built of hard basalt capped by a deep layer of wind-blown silt, and when Portland’s forty inches of annual rain soak into that silt, the slopes slide. The terrain that made developers give up — too steep, too slippery, too expensive to build on — is exactly the terrain that kept the forest standing. Some 5,200 acres of it, give or take, all told. You are, in a real sense, walking through a happy accident of geology.

Practical translation: the rains run October into spring, and the natural-surface trails hold every storm they get. Late spring through early fall is the firm, dry, generous window. The rest of the year, the forest is moodier, greener, and muddier — which some of us prefer, and all of us should respect (stay in the muddy center of the tread; walking around puddles is how one puddle becomes a swamp).

How to read the map

The first time you look at a Forest Park trail map, it can read like a plate of spaghetti — more than 80 miles of trails, fire lanes, and old forest roads, reached from more than 40 different ways in. It is far simpler than it looks, and once you see the structure you’ll never un-see it.

Think of a ladder lying on the hillside. It has two long rails and a set of rungs, and nearly everything you’ll walk is one of those three things.

The high rail is the Wildwood Trail — the spine of the whole park. It’s a natural-surface footpath, no bikes and no horses, that runs about 30 miles along the upper slope from Washington Park at the south end all the way to the park’s far northwest corner. It is the backbone every other trail hangs off of, it’s a designated National Recreation Trail, and it’s marked with blue diamonds nailed to the trees every quarter mile — so if you’re ever unsure where you are, find a blue diamond and you’re on the Wildwood. Most great Forest Park outings use a stretch of it.

The low rail is Leif Erikson Drive — a wide gravel road, closed to cars, that runs about 11 miles along the lower slope, roughly parallel to the Wildwood below it. This is the park’s easy artery: graded, drains well even in the wet, and the one long route where bikes are welcome (the Wildwood is not). White bollards mark the quarter miles. If you want a smooth, unhurried, no-navigation walk, run, or ride, Leif is it.

The rungs are the fire lanes and connector trails — the shorter, often steeper paths that climb across the slope to link the low rail to the high one. This is what makes Forest Park a network rather than two long lines: you go up a rung, along a rail, and down another rung to build a loop instead of a there-and-back. A quiet warning that will save you a wrong turn — these connectors often cross the big through-trails at a small offset rather than meeting them head-on: you turn onto the Wildwood, walk a few steps, and pick your trail back up on the far side. Learning that little jog is how you learn to read the whole park; the Wild Cherry Trail is the best place to feel it happen under your feet.

Where to start

You don’t need to conquer the ladder on day one. You need one good first trail, and the right one depends on who you are that morning.

If it’s your first time here, or you’ve got visiting relatives in the car, start at the front door: the Lower Macleay Trail. It follows a real year-round creek up a shady canyon to a moss-covered stone ruin that half the city has photographed, the grade asks almost nothing, and the first stretch is paved and genuinely accessible. It is the single best hour for understanding why this forest is worth loving.

If you want the one big view — actual mountains on the horizon — go to the Overlook Trail in Hoyt Arboretum. Forest Park mostly keeps its rewards close to the ground, but this paved, gently switchbacked half-mile is the exception: a genuine Cascade view that a wheelchair, a stroller, and a jet-lagged grandparent can all reach.

If you came for big trees, the Redwood Trail climbs a third of a mile to a grove of coast redwoods, giant sequoias, and a dawn redwood — three trees that would never meet in the wild — and delivers the tallest-things-you’ve-stood-under feeling with barely any effort. Come in fall and pair it with the Maple Trail through Hoyt Arboretum, which turns the whole slope gold.

If you’d rather have the forest to yourself, climb away from the popular corners. The Upper Macleay Trail carries you up through genuinely old firs toward Pittock Mansion with a fraction of the crowd, and the Maple Trail — the long, rolling mid-park one, not the arboretum path — is a quiet runner’s and walker’s classic that most of the map-glancing crowd never finds.

And once one of those trails has taught you the shape of this place, come back in another season. The trails don’t move. But the forest in November is a different animal from the forest in May, and after a few visits you’ll notice the change is partly in the forest and partly in you. That’s the reward here. It accumulates.