Leif Erikson Drive

The Road

Milepost 0: the Thurman gate

Most people start here, at the south end, and you should too — it’s the most accessible ground in the park and the logical zero point for everything north of it. Right past the gate the surface is actually at its roughest: worn cobblestones set in packed dirt, a few patches of old asphalt, a seasonal spring seeping across the tread. Then, just past the quarter-mile marker, the road turns genuinely paved for a short stretch before settling into the hard-packed gravel it holds for the next ten miles.

Watch the east side of the road for the mileposts — white concrete bollards planted at quarter-mile intervals, each painted with its distance from this gate. So Thurman is milepost 0, Saltzman Road lands near milepost 6, and the Germantown end sits up around milepost 11. Learn that once and you never have to guess how far you’ve gone; the whole park paces itself by these numbers, counting up as you head north and down as you head back.

Runner’s note This is the long-run road, full stop. Gentle grade, all-weather footing, and a milepost every quarter mile mean you can run repeatable, measured efforts without a watch doing the math for you — pick a bollard, run to it, know exactly what you did. Nothing else in the park lets you rack up honest mileage this cleanly. Keep right on blind corners and stay alert near the Fire Lane 7 junction, where the bikes are thickest.

Wheels The south end is the most wheel-friendly stretch anywhere in Forest Park — but don’t come expecting a paved half-mile. The first quarter-mile is worn cobbles and gravel in packed dirt, with a spring crossing and a rough switchback, before a short paved stretch just past the quarter-mile marker. Beyond it the road is firm, gently graded gravel — a capable wheelchair or an all-terrain stroller can genuinely enjoy the lower section — but it’s not an ADA-graded surface, and it grows rougher and steeper the farther north you go. Treat the first few miles as the accessible outing; don’t commit to the full eleven expecting a smooth roll. For truly smooth pavement, Lower Macleay has the park’s ADA-designed segment.

A little way up, near milepost 3, the Nature Trail drops in from the slope — and just up it sits Rocking Chair Dam, a silted-in relic of the park’s early firefighting days. It’s a fine short detour, but it belongs to the Nature Trail’s story, so we’ll leave it there and keep rolling.

Shepard’s Folly: how a failed road became a park

Every guide to this road repeats the same tidy line — that it was platted around 1912 and named for Leif Erikson from the start. It’s wrong, and the true version is better.

In the early 1900s a developer named Richard Shepard looked at these forested slopes and saw subdivisions. Around 1914–1915 he graded a hillside access road — Hillside Drive — running the full length of the hills from Thurman Street to Germantown, meant to be the first of dozens of streets threading a new hillside neighborhood. It was the first and the last. The West Hills are built of thick, slide-prone silt, and the cut road began sloughing downhill its very first winter; costs ran to nearly double the estimates. Locals took to calling it “Shepard’s Folly.” Special tax assessments to pay for the roadway pushed the lots into foreclosure, the city ended up with some 1,400 acres of unsellable land nobody could build on — and that foreclosed, ruined subdivision became the core of Forest Park when it was dedicated in 1948. The road only got its current name in 1933, when the local Sons of Norway lodge petitioned the city to rename Hillside Drive for the Norse explorer.

So the road predates the park by fifteen years, and the park exists because the road failed. As the naturalist Mike Houck once put it, if Leif Erikson road hadn’t washed out and the subdivision hadn’t gone bust, “what has been described as the jewel or crown of Portland’s park system would not exist today.”

Local Lens You can put your hand on this history around milepost 1.5, at the Alder Trail junction, where a small 1980 completion plaque marks a later rebuild of the road. It’s easy to walk past. But it’s worth a pause — a bronze footnote to the accidental miracle underfoot, a subdivision street that never sold a single lot and instead became the spine of one of the largest urban forests in the country.

Basalt in the road cuts

North of the Nature Trail, near Fire Lane 2, the road slices deep into the slope, and the cuts lay the park’s geology bare: dark, blocky ledges of Columbia River Basalt, the same immense lava flows that poured across the region millions of years ago and built the bedrock the whole forest is standing on. Most of the park keeps its geology politely hidden under duff and fern; here the road did the excavating for you. Slow down and read the rock — you don’t get many chances in Forest Park to see what’s actually holding it all up.

From here on, the road reveals its real character as the park’s connective tissue. Dozens of signed junctions arrive one after another — fire lanes climbing from Highway 30, foot trails switchbacking up toward the Wildwood, each with its own map board. This lattice is the point: Leif and the Wildwood run roughly parallel, and the fire lanes and connectors are the rungs lacing them together into the park’s 80-plus-mile network. Leif is simply the beam every rung hangs from.

The mountain windows

For most of its length Leif stays wrapped in trees, which is why its two real views are worth flagging. Where the Fire Lane 4 powerline corridor crosses, near milepost 5, the canopy breaks and a clean line opens east to Mount Adams — the best mountain window on the whole road (Fire Lane 4’s own page lingers on it). Farther north, up around Fire Lane 7A, gaps in the trees offer glimpses of Cascade peaks — but only in winter, when the leaves are down and the deciduous screen drops away. Time it for a cold, clear day; in summer the forest simply closes the curtain.

Saltzman Road: the crossroads

Around milepost 6 the road arrives at its social hub: the wide, open junction with Saltzman Road, complete with a picnic table and a trail map, where riders regroup and a great many walkers sensibly turn around. This is also the pivot of the park’s most popular gravel outing, the Leif Erikson–Saltzman–Skyline loop — but that loop is Saltzman’s story to tell, so head there for the full route.

Saltzman is also the natural way to break the traverse in half. Marcy Houle’s guide splits the road into two hikes at exactly this point: about six miles from Thurman up to Saltzman, then five more from Saltzman on to Germantown. If eleven miles is more than you’re after, this is where you halve it.

Cyclist note This is the gravel road in Forest Park — the one long, legal, all-weather line for a bike, and the reason gravel riders come here at all. It’s firm enough to ride when every dirt trail in the park has turned to soup, which makes it a genuine wet-season ride. But it’s a shared road, one of the rare few open to horses as well as bikes and boots, and it’s laced with blind corners. Keep your speed sane, keep right, and call your pass early — a runner or a horse could be just around the nose of the next ridge.

The north end: Germantown

The last stretch to Germantown Road is the road’s steepest and least forgiving. The grade, gentle for ten miles, briefly pitches to something like 10–12% right at the Germantown gate, and the tread up here is the most erosion-prone on the route — there’s an active slump near milepost 10.5 that the city keeps under watch, black plastic and monitoring instruments and all. It’s still an easy road by any honest measure; it just saves its one real effort for the very end.

Before you go

The full eleven-mile traverse is a commitment: it’s one-way, there’s little water and no real facilities between the two ends beyond porta-potties near each trailhead, and the north and south gates are on opposite sides of the park with no bus connecting them. Plan for it — an out-and-back to a junction that suits your legs, or a genuine point-to-point with a car staged at each end (or a bike shuttle). Don’t discover at milepost 8 that your ride is eleven miles behind you.

The upside of gravel is that it shrugs off weather the dirt trails can’t. When an atmospheric river has turned the singletrack to slop, Leif is very likely still firm and rideable — the most dependable surface in the park in the wet months. Just give the north end extra respect after storms, where the gravel ruts and washes.

And a shared-road courtesy that keeps this place pleasant: bikes, horses, walkers, and runners all use the same tread, so listen for what’s coming, hold your line, and pass with a heads-up. The blind corners are real.

Stand at milepost 0 sometime, at the Thurman gate, and consider what you’re standing on: a road that failed so completely it accidentally saved a forest. Then start walking north. The city drops away behind you almost immediately, and the trees take over, and eleven quiet miles unspool ahead — the backbone of the whole park, doing the same patient work it’s done for a hundred years.