Keyser Trail

Somewhere on Fire Lane 10’s long descent through the far north, an unsigned track peels off to the left, drops through the trees on an old roadbed, and rejoins the fire lane a few minutes later — lower down, below the steep pitch, not back where it started. That’s the Keyser Trail. It looks more like a fire lane than a trail, and you could walk the main lane for years without ever noticing it’s there — which is roughly what most people do.

Take it for the one reason it’s good for: it sidesteps Fire Lane 10’s single genuinely steep pitch. If your knees on the way down — or your brakes, or a loaded pack — would rather not meet that drop, Keyser rolls you around it on a gentler line — an old quarter-mile roadbed that trends downhill overall, taking the same drop at an easier grade. It’s foot-only, quiet to the point of lonely, and now and then blocked by an impressive blowdown. Runners ticking off every line on the map will come looking for it on purpose; almost nobody else will.

Local Lens What earns this modest cut-through a second glance is the name. It honors C. Paul Keyser, who ran Portland’s parks from 1917 to 1949 — thirty-two years on the job, spanning the decades when Forest Park was slowly being assembled from the city’s logged-over west hills. There’s something fitting in the arrangement: the grand civic project remembered by a small, unsigned bypass that most people walk right past.

The upper end lands back on Fire Lane 10 near a small forested pond, but that quiet water is the fire lane’s payoff to tell, not this one’s. Come to Keyser for what it actually is — a gentler way past a steep spot, carrying a name worth knowing — and let the fire lane keep its rewards.