Fire Lane 9

The Walk

Start at the top, at the gate across from the Leif Erikson lot, and point yourself downhill. The upper reaches are almost civilized — a normal-feeling forest lane under a maple-and-fir canopy. Don’t be fooled. The lane tips over and starts falling in earnest, and the tread turns to the kind of greasy, rutted dirt that has given Fire Lane 9 its reputation. Somewhere in the middle the Willamette begins showing itself through gaps in the trees, a flat gray ribbon of working river far below, and you get the strange doubled feeling this whole north end of the park specializes in: deep woods above you, industry and water and Highway 30 laid out below.

Near the bottom the trail throws its one real trick at you — a sharp hairpin — and just off the descent, the ruins. What’s left of an old reservoir sits half-consumed by moss and fern, one of those pieces of forgotten infrastructure that tells you this slope has been worked and watched over far longer than any of us have been walking it. Then the trees thin, a rock monument marks the Clark and Wilson gift, and the forest simply hands you off to MacKay Avenue and the neighborhood. One minute you’re in the woods; the next you’re standing on someone’s street.

Listen For This is why the birders come. In spring the alders and bigleaf maples along Fire Lane 9 fill with returning migrants, and Houle singles out this exact stretch for close-up watching — Western Tanager, Warbling Vireo, Orange-crowned and Black-throated Gray Warblers, even Evening Grosbeak, often feeding together in the same canopy. Come early on a May morning, stop moving, and let the descent slow you down enough to actually look up.

Runner’s note This is a downhill specialist’s trail, and a punishing one — steep, soft, and slick, with a hairpin you do not want to meet at speed after rain. Run it as a one-way descent (ride the 16 back, or loop home the long way up the Linnton Trail and Fire Lane 10) rather than an out-and-back; grinding back up nearly 400 feet of this mud is a different and much less charming workout.

Before you go

Take the mud seriously. Fire Lane 9 is genuinely among the sloppiest tread in the park from the first fall rains until things dry out in late spring, and steep mud is where ankles go wrong. Save it for the drier months, wear real shoes, and when it is soft, stay in the muddy center of the tread rather than skirting the edges — widening this pitch only speeds the erosion already working on it.

And plan the ending before you start, because this trail doesn’t give you your car back. It’s a one-way descent to a street: either you’ve arranged a pickup, you’re catching the bus down on Highway 30, or you’re turning around and climbing every foot you just dropped. Do the honest math on that before you drop in.

Stand a moment at the bottom, where the last of the firs give way to the first of the houses. That line — forest one step, neighborhood the next — is the whole point of coming down here.