Chestnut Trail

Most trails in Forest Park are named for a tree in the general sense — Douglas-fir, bigleaf maple, the whole green crowd. The Chestnut Trail is named for one specific tree, and it’s worth the walk down to meet it. At the trail’s lower end, shading a picnic table where the path meets Leif Erikson Drive, stands an American chestnut — Castanea dentata, an easterner, a species that once towered through the forests of the Appalachians until the chestnut blight arrived around 1904 and, within a few decades, killed something like four billion of them. In its home range the American chestnut is now functionally a ghost: it sprouts, the fungus finds it, it dies back before it can seed. This one, transplanted to a damp Portland hillside far from the blight’s reach, is thriving — in better shape, by all accounts, than almost any chestnut left back east.

That makes this half-mile connector a small lesson in what a forest is for. It’s a working link — it drops off the Wildwood Trail down to Leif Erikson Drive and back into the park’s loop system, and plenty of people walk it without ever clocking the tree at the bottom. But if you go down looking for it, the Chestnut Trail turns into something quieter and stranger: a place where a species erased from its own homeland is quietly, stubbornly alive.

The tree was planted in the early 1950s by Fred Cleator, one of the foresters present at the park’s creation. He set out a lot of things in these hills; this one outlived the odds.

The Walk

From the Wildwood, the trail tips downhill and follows the North Fork of Rocking Chair Creek — first one tributary, then another that splashes down bare basalt bedrock near the bottom. It’s short and it’s steep, dropping about 240 feet in half a mile, and the tread stays soft: this is a gully, and gullies hold water. The easy direction is down, which happens to be the direction that ends at the tree.

The descent is the good part. This is deep second-growth, cool and mossy, and the slope is studded with the ghosts of the forest that stood here a century ago — big cedar and fir stumps, many of them cut with springboard notches, the narrow rectangular slots the old loggers chopped to wedge in the plank they stood on to saw above the flared base of the trunk. Some of those stumps are now cradled in the roots of hemlocks that seeded on top of them and grew down around the dead wood. In spring the ground between them fills in with trillium, fringe-cup, and the odd, geometric little inside-out flower, whose white petals fold back so far the blossom looks turned inside out — which is exactly how it got the name.

Forest Skill: read a springboard notch When you pass a big weathered stump with a clean rectangular slot cut into its side a few feet off the ground, you’re looking at a hundred-year-old to-do list. Old-growth firs and cedars flare out at the base, so hand-saw loggers chopped these notches, wedged in a springboard — a stout plank — and stood on it to cut the trunk above the flare, where it was narrower. The tree is long gone; the instructions are still legible in the wood. Notice which stumps now have a young hemlock growing straight out of the notch: the cut became a planter.

Then the trail reaches Leif Erikson Drive, the creek splashing down basalt beside you, and there — right at the junction, over the picnic table — is the chestnut. Compound leaves with long saw-toothed edges (that’s the dentata, “toothed”), a broad healthy crown. If it’s fall, look for the spiny husks. It is, genuinely, one of the more improbable living things in the park.

Runners fold this into the central loops for a reason: it’s foot-only, so no bikes to track, and it makes a clean, quiet plunge off the Wildwood down to Leif Erikson’s gravel — a controlled downhill rather than a place to open up, since the gully footing and the pitch will pick your pace for you. Coming back up it is honest work.

Before you go

Mud is the seasonal headline. The gully runs wet from the first fall rains well into spring, and the lower pitch gets slick where the creek crosses the basalt — good boots, and stay in the muddy center of the tread rather than skirting the edges, which is how a narrow trail quietly widens and undercuts its own slope. That same wet is what makes it a fine rainy-day pick: the creek runs loud, the moss glows, and the whole gully smells like a forest doing its job.

Keep it a daylight outing — the gully goes dark early under the canopy, and there’s no drive-up access at either end, so this is a piece of a longer walk, not a destination you park at. Down at the bottom you’re steps from Leif Erikson Drive; the Nature Trail and its silted old Rocking Chair Dam are just up the road, and the road cuts nearby expose the park’s ribs of Columbia River basalt if you want to keep reading the ground.

Give the tree a minute before you turn back up. It shouldn’t be here, and it certainly shouldn’t be flourishing — a whole species’ hard luck, quietly reversed on one Portland hillside. Sometimes the forest’s best trick is simply keeping something alive.