Fire Lane 5

The Ride

Start at the top, at the Upper Saltzman Road Trailhead off NW Skyline, around 1,080 feet up on the park’s west rim. Point your wheel downhill and drop in. Fire Lane 5 falls a little over 450 feet across just over a mile to reach Leif Erikson Drive, but — and this is the whole appeal — it does it on a gentler, more switchbacked grade than the steep central fire lanes that plummet straight down the ridge. The tread is narrow and earthen, threading first through a maple canopy that mixes into Douglas-fir lower down, dipping and rising, ducking briefly under a powerline gap before the trees close back in.

Cyclist note This is a shared natural-surface trail, not a bike park — control your speed and yield to climbers and hikers, because you will meet them. The intro loop is roughly three miles: descend Fire Lane 5 to Leif Erikson, then spin back up the gravel of Leif Erikson and Saltzman Road to close it. Ride it as a descent and the switchbacks are a forgiving introduction to dirt; ride it as a climb and the same gentle grade is what keeps it rideable. Either way it crosses the Wildwood Trail partway down — and the Wildwood is foot-only, so it’s a crossing, not a turn.

The bottom delivers the trail’s one genuine oddity. Where Fire Lane 5 meets Leif Erikson Drive at the south fork of Doane Creek, just past mile six-and-a-half, sit a pair of small, decommissioned water cisterns — squat old firefighting tanks, now so thoroughly upholstered in moss and ferns they look less built than grown. They’re easy to roll right past. Slow down for them; they’re the kind of strange, forgotten infrastructure that tells you this forest has been worked and tended far longer than it’s been ridden.

Before you go

The same dirt tread that makes Fire Lane 5 worth the trip is also the catch: it gets soft and muddy from October into spring, far more than the gravel routes do, and riding it slick chews up the trail and the slope both. Save it for the drier months when the dirt is tacky and fast, and if it’s been raining, take the gravel loop instead and come back when it firms up.

Come self-sufficient: arrive topped off, and don’t block the gate up here. Both ends touch private property, so stay on the roadbed and the tread.

It’s a short trail with a long reputation among people who ride here, and that’s exactly right. Fire Lane 5 won’t be the most beautiful mile you log in Forest Park. But it’s the one that taught a lot of Portland riders that this forest has real dirt in it — and that’s a different, more useful kind of good.