Fire Lane 12

The Walk

You don’t start on Fire Lane 12 so much as arrive at it. From the Upper BPA Road Trailhead off Skyline, follow BPA Road downhill about seven-tenths of a mile to where the fire lane peels off — and take a moment there, because this junction is the reason to know this trail at all.

Three rock monuments stand at the Fire Lane 12 / BPA Road corner. They mark the “Hole in the Park”: a 73-acre private inholding — a literal gap punched in the middle of the forest — that the city and its partners acquired in 1999 to knit the park back together. It’s easy to walk past three rocks in the woods. Slow down for them. They’re a reminder that Forest Park isn’t a wilderness that happened to survive; it’s a civic project stitched together parcel by parcel, decision by decision, by people who decided a hole in the map was worth closing.

Local Lens The far north is where you feel the park’s edges most honestly. Out here it isn’t a continuous green blanket — it’s assembled, and you can still read the seams. Those monuments mark one of them: the year a missing piece finally got bought back.

From the junction, the fire lane heads north above a tributary of Miller Creek, vine maples bending over the trail like a low green ceiling. It switchbacks down into alder and salmonberry thickets, drops more steeply to cross a culverted creek, then climbs briefly before falling again toward the bottom. Somewhere in the steep gully of the South Fork of Miller Creek, around 585 feet, it hits a four-way junction with Fire Lane 15 — your turn if you’re closing the Newton Road loop. Houle’s line for the last stretch is worth keeping: the lower segment, he writes, “narrows to a beautiful trail.” He’s right. The final mile sheds its fire-lane width and becomes something more intimate, closing at an orange gate on Creston Road near Highway 30.

Cyclist note This is one of the handful of fire lanes where riding is legal, and it makes a fine far-north exploration — but ride it knowing what it is. It’s a natural-surface descent, soft and mucky down low through the creek crossing, and the bottom mile narrows to singletrack where you’ll want to control your speed and yield to whoever’s coming up. As a loop with BPA Road and Fire Lane 15 it’s a solid quiet ride; just remember the Wildwood Trail up top is foot-only, so where it crosses your route it’s a crossing, not a turn.

Listen For In spring, look down before you look up — western trilliums bloom prolifically along these slopes, three white petals fading to pink as they age. This is one of the better trillium shows in the park, and almost nobody’s out here to see it.

Before you go

Two practical truths shape any trip here. First, you cannot start from the bottom: the Creston Road foot is an orange gate with no legal parking, so this is a descent you either turn around and climb back out of, or fold into a loop. Second, the lower section earns its “muddy” reputation from October into spring — the culvert crossing and the creek gully hold water long after the ridge dries out, so save the full descent for drier stretches or come prepared to get your shoes wet.

For the full experience, most people build it into the Newton Road–Fire Lane 12 loop or Houle’s strenuous far-north circuit linking Fire Lane 15, Fire Lane 12, BPA Road, and the Wildwood past Kielhorn Meadow — a real morning’s outing of better than six miles. Fire Lane 13 hangs off BPA Road just down the way if you want to make a day of exploring this quiet end.

Come self-sufficient. There’s no water, no restroom, no cell-tower-grade certainty out here — just a long shaded descent, a creek doing its patient work, and three rocks that mean more than they look like.