Fire Lane 15

Fire Lane 15 runs about as far northwest as Forest Park goes before the trail map thins out and the city lets go of you entirely. From an unmarked gate on Skyline it drops roughly a mile and a third down through the Miller Creek gully to the far bottom of the park, a steep, quiet descent under second-growth Douglas-fir that almost nobody bothers to find. Come by the wrong instinct — chasing a headline view or an easy stroll — and you’ll wonder why you drove all this way. Come for what it actually offers, and it’s one of the more rewarding corners of the whole forest.

What it offers is solitude, mostly, plus a workout you earn on the way back. One veteran Forest Park blogger who has walked essentially all of it calls this her favorite stroll in the entire park — high praise for a route with no famous name and no obvious payoff, and a fair tell of what you’re really coming for out here. This is a trail for the curious: the naturalist who wants to know where the big animals actually are, the rider or runner willing to trade a long approach for an empty tread, anyone who wants to understand the park’s wild far north rather than just its greatest hits.

Two things lift it above the ordinary secondary forest it mostly travels through. The first is Kielhorn Meadow — a genuine rarity up here, a far-north clearing in the Miller Creek watershed that the park’s larger wildlife treats as home. The second arrives without warning: short open gaps where the powerline corridor crosses the lane and hands you, for a few strides, the whole northeast horizon.

The Walk

From the Skyline gate the lane starts unpromisingly, pushing through tall grass between high walls of Himalayan blackberry — the kind of overgrown top section that makes you briefly doubt the whole enterprise. Stick with it. Within a few minutes the blackberry gives way and the trail settles into a steady descent through second-growth Douglas-fir, the tread narrowing and the traffic noise falling behind until there’s very little left but your own footsteps and, if you’re lucky, a Pileated Woodpecker hammering somewhere off in the timber.

Like the other numbered fire lanes, this one began life as a firebreak and utility road rather than a scenic path, and the powerlines are the tell — but here they’re also the gift. Where the corridor crosses the lane, the canopy opens and the view leaps out to the northeast: Mt. St. Helens and Mt. Rainier stacked on the horizon, the Columbia River, Sauvie Island flat and green below, all of it on a clear day. It’s a fleeting reward in a forest that mostly trades views for cover, and worth pausing for before the trees close back in.

About a mile down, near mile 28¼ on the Wildwood, the great foot trail of the park crosses your route. The Wildwood is foot-only, so where it meets the fire lane it’s a crossing, not a turn — keep dropping. Roughly a third of a mile past it, the Kielhorn Meadow Trail branches off to the left. It’s a short spur and a dead end — no Skyline outlet, just the meadow — but it’s the reason a lot of people in the know come out here at all.

Listen For Kielhorn Meadow is a rare open patch this far north, and open ground in a closed forest is where the big wildlife concentrates. This corner of the Miller Creek watershed is prime range for deer and elk, coyote and bobcat, and the Pileated Woodpecker — the crow-sized one with the flaming-red crest and a call like a maniacal laugh echoing through the trees. Move slowly and quietly on the spur, especially at the edges where meadow meets forest, and give the dawn and dusk hours the best odds. You are far more likely to see something large here than almost anywhere else in the park.

Below the meadow junction the lane keeps dropping, steepening as it bends down into the South Fork Miller Creek gully, until it hits a four-way junction with Fire Lane 12 at the bottom, around 585 feet. That’s the turn if you’re closing a loop with Fire Lane 12 and BPA Road — and it’s your signal to start the climb back, because there’s no way out at the bottom.

Cyclist note Fire Lane 15 is one of the handful of fire lanes legal for bikes and horses as well as boots, which makes this quiet corner a real find on wheels. Ride it knowing the terrain, though: it’s a steep natural-surface descent, soft and mucky down in the creek gully, and the connection over to Fire Lane 12 has a reputation for being rough and overgrown — pack the patience for a slow, technical bottom rather than a flowing one. And remember the Wildwood crossing up top is foot-only; where it meets your route, it’s a crossing to yield at, not a line to ride.

Before you go

The honest catch here is geometry: you start high and finish low, so every foot you enjoyed on the way down is a foot you climb on the way back — a steady four-hundred-plus-foot pull, steepest through the gully. There’s no trailhead at the bottom, so this is either a there-and-back you turn around on or a loop you commit to. Most people build it into the far-north circuit with Fire Lane 12 and BPA Road, or Houle’s longer Kielhorn Meadow loop — a real morning’s outing of better than six miles.

Save it for drier stretches if you can. The creek-gully section holds mud long after the ridge dries out, and the bottom connector to Fire Lane 12 gets slick and grabby enough that reviewers report falls — worth a careful step in the wet months. And time it for a clear day: the powerline windows are the trail’s one big view, and a socked-in sky simply erases them.

Mostly, though, come out here for the quiet. This is a corner of Forest Park where you can go an hour without meeting anyone, where the loudest thing is a woodpecker and the forest still keeps a meadow for the animals that need one. Stand a moment at the edge of Kielhorn Meadow before you turn for the climb. You’ve come to the far edge of the park’s map — the least you can do is listen to it.