Hardesty Trail

The Walk

Come at it from the top. Down Fire Lane 7 a short way past the Springville gate, Hardesty branches off and immediately gives up the flat — it’s a genuine descent, following little Hardesty Creek down a ridge through a deciduous tangle of bigleaf maple and red alder with the odd western red cedar mixed in. The Wildwood Trail cuts across it partway down, splitting the trail into an upper leg (the top quarter-mile or so, from the fire lane to the Wildwood) and a lower one that runs on down to Leif Erikson near its 9-mile marker. About 370 feet of drop, all told, in a trail you can walk end to end in twenty minutes — which tells you everything about the pitch.

Because the slope faces south, it wakes up before the shady ravines do. In spring the bank lights up with yellow woodland violet low in the duff, western trillium’s three white petals, and, later, the nodding orange of a wild tiger lily into early summer. It’s a small show, but an early one, and it’s the naturalist’s reason to choose this footpath over the road.

The other reason stands a couple hundred yards south of where the Wildwood crosses, on the uphill side of the trail: an old western red cedar stump the locals call the Big Stump. Look at its face and you’ll see why — two deep rectangular notches cut into the trunk at just the right height and spacing to read, unmistakably, as a pair of eyes watching the trail. They aren’t a trick of the light. They’re springboard notches, and they’re the whole story of this ridge.

Forest Skill: read a springboard notch Before chainsaws, hand-loggers felling a giant conifer didn’t want to cut through the wide, pitchy flare at its base. So they chopped a slot a few feet up the trunk, jammed in a springy plank — the springboard — climbed onto it, and sawed from up there where the wood was narrower and cleaner. When they moved on, the stump kept the slots forever. Hardesty is dotted with them; the Big Stump just happens to wear two at eye level. Every notch you spot is a person who stood on a plank, a century ago, and worked this slope by hand.

That’s the quiet history under your feet here. The trail was cut in 1944 under Fred Cleator — the same forester whose ridgeline route became the spine of the Wildwood — and named for William B. Hardesty of the Mazamas, the Portland mountaineering club. The forest has done a lot of growing back since, but the stumps remember what came before it.

Runner’s note This isn’t a rep — it’s too short and too steep to be anything but a link. What it’s good for is variety: if you run the Springville / Fire Lane 7 loops enough to know every rock, Hardesty is a stiff little foot-only alternate that swaps the wide road for a quiet, technical drop to Leif Erikson. Watch the footing on the way down; the roots don’t care about your split times.

Before you go

Steep and short cuts both ways: it’s a quick, punchy climb if you take it uphill from Leif Erikson, and a knee-tester if you take it down. Either way the tread is natural-surface dirt, so from the first real rains through spring it goes slick and mucky, and the roots become the hazard. Good boots, and stay on the center of the tread rather than skating around the wet spots — this is a narrow trail and it widens fast when people skirt the mud.

Most walkers don’t do Hardesty as an out-and-back at all; they thread it into the roughly four-mile Springville loop, dropping down the fire lane and Hardesty and climbing back via the Ridge Trail and Leif Erikson. Go in daylight, keep the dog leashed, and if you came for the wildflowers, come in spring.

And when you reach the Big Stump, stop for a second and let it look back at you. A hundred years ago someone stood on a plank wedged into those notches and took this tree down by hand. Now the stump has eyes, and the forest it once stood over has quietly grown up all around it.