Fire Lane 1

The Climb

Local Lens: what a fire lane actually is Forest Park is stitched with numbered “fire lanes,” and this is the one to understand them by. They aren’t scenic trails that happen to be wide — they’re firebreaks and access roads, cut so crews and engines can reach a wildfire deep in a forest that sits, uncomfortably, right against a city. Many of them double as utility corridors, carrying powerlines and buried pipelines up and over the ridge. That workaday origin is also a gift: because they’re roads, the fire lanes are the park’s runnable, rideable, ride-a-horse-able network — the wide-tread counterpoint to the foot-only singletrack. Fire Lane 1 is the archetype, powerlines and all.

The climb is roughly 2.3 miles one-way, and Houle splits it neatly in two at the Leif Erikson Drive crossing — a 1.4-mile lower half up the powerline corridor, then a 0.9-mile upper half to the ridge crest. It rises from about 40 feet at the river to nearly 1,000 on top: over 900 feet of gain, the biggest of any fire lane in the park, and front-loaded onto the exposed lower stretch. Rate it moderate-to-strenuous and believe it.

The powerline grunt

You start by going straight up. The trail opens with a steep set of about 51 steps beside a track of permeable grass pavers, then switchbacks up under the powerlines through a tangle of blackberry. Be honest with yourself about this section: it’s hot, it’s fully exposed, and it’s loud, with the industrial hum of Highway 30 and the tank farm rising off the flats behind you. This is the part the map was warning you about. It’s also mercifully short, and it’s doing real work — hauling you out of the lowlands fast.

Forest Skill: read the corridor That ugly powerline swath is one of the park’s major mammal highways. A cleared, brushy strip running from the lower forest clear up to the ridge is exactly the kind of edge that deer, coyote, and other animals use to move between elevations — cover along the sides, an open lane to travel. Houle flags Lower Fire Lane 1 as one of the important wildlife-movement routes in the park. The thing that looks like an eyesore to us reads as a road to them.

The view

Then the trees start to break, and the reason you came arrives in installments. Gaps in the young maples open across the refinery tanks to Swan Island and Mocks Crest, and above them the volcanoes stack up: Rainier, St. Helens, Adams, Hood — a four-mountain lineup you will not get anywhere else in Forest Park, which is otherwise a place that trades views for canopy. The lane finally veers away from the powerlines at a clean look back to Mount Hood. This is the summit of the experience even though it isn’t the summit of the trail. Plenty of people make this their turnaround and go home satisfied. That’s a completely reasonable plan.

The maple lane to the ridge

If you keep going, the trail becomes a different, gentler animal. It swings off the wires onto an undulating lane shaded by young bigleaf maples, passes a split-rail enclosure protecting a pollinator garden, and climbs a ridge through a carpet of waterleaf past groves of madrone — that smooth, copper-barked tree that always looks like it’s peeling out of its own skin. It touches Leif Erikson Drive (twice, actually, about fifty yards apart), then climbs more steeply through sword fern and thimbleberry to the Nature Trail and the crossing with the Wildwood, before topping out at the gated Forest Lane Trailhead on the Skyline ridge.

Runner’s note This is a proper hill-repeat of a trail — over 900 feet of climb packed into a couple of miles, with a genuine view at the top instead of a gate in the weeds. Run it as an up-and-back for the honest vertical, or fold it into the longer loops below. The lower half’s grass pavers and steps break your rhythm; the upper maple lane is where the running gets good.

Cyclist & equestrian note You’re both welcome here, which is unusual — Fire Lane 1 is one of the few routes open to bikes and horses alongside foot traffic (Saltzman Road is the other of note). That also makes it a shared-use descent, so control your speed coming down: the lower switchbacks are steep, and you will meet climbers, walkers, and the occasional horse on a blind bend. Ride and ride it accordingly.

Before you go

Two honest cautions. First, stay on the fire lane and ignore the informal side paths that spur off the lower powerline corridor — some lead to encampments, and none lead anywhere you want to go. Second, respect the grade: the bottom is a real grunt, exposed to sun and noise, and it’s front-loaded, so the hardest part comes when you’re freshest — pace it.

Want more than an out-and-back? Fire Lane 1 is the launch point for two of the park’s better big loops: the Fire Lane 1–Nature Trail loop runs about 6.6 miles, and the Fire Lane 1 to Skyline loop stretches to roughly 9.1 miles up and over the ridge. Both turn the climb into a full outing rather than a there-and-back.

Time it for a clear, crisp day — the whole point is the mountains, and a socked-in sky erases them. Keep it a daylight trip, since the new trailhead lot locks its gate nightly at 6 p.m. and opens at 6 a.m. And save the summer noon for something shadier; the lower corridor holds heat like a griddle.

Then, up top where the trees finally give way, do the thing the map never told you was possible here: stop, turn around, and count the volcanoes. Four of them, over an oil-tank farm, from a powerline road. Forest Park has stranger gifts than you’d think.