Fire Lane 5

Here’s the thing worth knowing about Fire Lane 5: it contains Forest Park’s only narrow natural-surface singletrack segment open to bikes. Most of the route does not look like that at first. It leaves Skyline as a wide gravel old road, turns earthen near the powerline roughly halfway down, and saves the narrow singletrack for the final quarter mile below Wildwood. That lower ribbon is short, but it changes the meaning of the whole descent: a modest mile-and-change fire lane becomes the most quietly important piece of mountain-bike trail in the park.

So this is a fire lane that’s better than it looks on the map. On paper it’s just another numbered line dropping off Skyline. In practice it’s the spine of the Saltzman Road–Fire Lane 5–Leif Erikson loop — the classic introductory mixed-surface ride in Forest Park, and the answer when someone with a mountain bike asks where to start. Foot traffic is welcome too (hikers use it as the climb home on the longer Doane Creek loop), but make no mistake about who this entry is really for.

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, but don’t expect singletrack at the gate. 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 opening is a wide, graveled all-weather old road under a maple canopy, with Douglas-fir mixing in lower down. Near the powerline gap, roughly halfway through the descent, the tread turns earthen and the route begins to narrow. It crosses the Wildwood near the lower end; only below that crossing does the old road become narrow natural-surface singletrack for roughly the final quarter mile to Leif.

Cyclist note The lower singletrack is shared tread, 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. On that lower segment, the switchbacks are a forgiving introduction to dirt on the way down; uphill, the gentler grade keeps it rideable. Either way Fire Lane 5 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 lower singletrack that makes Fire Lane 5 worth the trip is also the catch: it can turn slick in wet weather, with exposed roots in spots, and riding it saturated chews up the trail and the slope both. The upper gravel old road holds up better. If the lower tread is still slick, leave it for a drier day and keep your ride to the firmer gravel on Leif Erikson and Saltzman.

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 that final ribbon below Wildwood taught a lot of Portland riders that this forest has real dirt in it — and that’s a different, more useful kind of good.