Lower Macleay Trail

If Forest Park has a front door, this is it: a wide, easy path up the Balch Creek canyon that ends at a moss-furred stone ruin half the city has photographed. The Lower Macleay Trail is one of the park’s most popular introductions, and it earns the traffic. The creek runs beside you the whole way, the grade asks almost nothing for the first stretch, and the payoff — a roofless stone shell everyone calls the Witch’s Castle — is the kind of destination a four-year-old and a grandparent can agree on.

This is a Classic for a Reason: popular, dependable, and genuinely good. It’s the trail to send first-time visitors and out-of-town relatives to — the one that works with a stroller for the first fifth of a mile and with curious kids the rest of the way. It won’t be the quietest walk you take here; on a warm Saturday you’ll share it. But quiet isn’t what it’s for. It’s for showing someone, in about an hour round trip, why this forest is worth loving. Houle calls it “the most scenic introductory trail” in the park, and that’s about right.

What makes it more than a pleasant stroll is the creek. Balch Creek is one of the park’s few year-round streams, and the canyon it cut holds some of Forest Park’s oldest, biggest trees — including, near the top, the tallest tree in Forest Park.

Start at Lower Macleay Park, the only sensible trailhead — the trail begins where the road ends at the creek, and you’re only a few blocks from Northwest Portland’s cafés if the morning needs caffeine first. Walk in upstream; the whole trail goes one direction.

The Walk

The paved overlook

The first fifth of a mile is paved, nearly level, and genuinely accessible — a smooth path following the creek past a picnic pavilion, a pollinator garden, and a row of interpretive signs, ending at a low semicircular stone wall that bumps out over the water. That overlook is a real destination in its own right: if you’ve brought a wheelchair, a stroller, or someone whose hiking days are mostly behind them, this is a satisfying out-and-back that still feels like the forest, not a parking lot with a view.

Up the canyon under the big firs

Past the stone wall the pavement quits and the trail becomes what most of the park is made of: packed dirt, exposed roots, cobbles, the occasional culvert. The grade tips up gently — you’ll gain a little over 200 feet by the top, almost none of it the unpleasant kind. You cross a wooden footbridge and climb alongside the creek through bigleaf maple and Douglas-fir, the air cooling as you drop toward the water.

Keep half your attention on the creek. Balch Creek is alive in a way most urban streams are not: it runs cold and clear enough to hold native coastal cutthroat trout, and it’s home to one of the strangest birds you can watch in Portland.

Listen for — and watch — the American dipper It’s a round, slate-gray songbird about the size of your fist, and it does something no other songbird does: it walks straight into the creek and forages underwater, bobbing on a midstream rock between dives like it’s working up the nerve. If you spot a gray bird doing deep-knee-bends on a boulder in the current, you’ve found it. On spring mornings it sings over the water — a long, bright, tumbling song that somehow carries above the noise of the creek.

As you near the top, the trees get serious. The Balch Creek canyon shelters some of the oldest Douglas-firs in the park, a few of them measuring around six feet thick. And just off the trail near the Stone House stands the tallest tree in Forest Park — a Douglas-fir reaching about 240 feet. You will not be able to take a photo that does it justice. Try anyway, then put the phone away and look up until your neck complains.

Kid Quest Three jobs for the walk up. Spot a gray bird standing in the creek (that’s the dipper). Find the biggest tree you can wrap your arms around — then find one you can’t. And reach the Witch’s Castle without being carried. The low stone walls were practically built for sitting on, and snacks are the reward.

The Stone House

The trail ends at the Stone House — the roofless stone shell everyone calls the Witch’s Castle. It looks medieval and abandoned, which is most of its charm, but it started as something far more ordinary: a stone comfort station — shelter and public restroom for park visitors — designed by architect Ernest F. Tucker in 1929, back when the city still expected this canyon to be tidy. A 1962 windstorm and decades of weather did the rest. It’s also a junction — the Lower Macleay Trail ends here, and the Wildwood Trail takes over. Turn onto the Wildwood and you can keep climbing toward the Bird Alliance of Oregon Wildlife Sanctuary and, eventually, Pittock Mansion; most walkers make the Stone House their turnaround and head back down the way they came.

Before you go

The paved overlook is the accessibility line: before it, smooth and nearly level; after it, roots, cobbles, and abrupt edges that aren’t friendly to wheels. Plan your turnaround accordingly.

Mud is the wet-season tax — the dirt section holds water from October into spring, and after a serious storm the canyon can flood, drop trees across the tread, and close outright (storm damage has closed this corridor before). If the weather’s been violent, check Portland Parks for closures before you drive over.

Go in daylight. The Stone House keeps a nightlife of its own — graffiti, the occasional party — and it’s simply a better place by morning light anyway.

One last, true thing: past the pavement this is foot traffic only — no bikes, no horses. Keep dogs leashed. The creek, its trout, and that absurd underwater bird are the reason the walk is worth taking, and they don’t need the company.

Stand on the wooden footbridge for a minute before you start back. Don’t look for the dipper, or the big tree, or the ruin. Just listen to the creek doing the patient work it’s been doing here since long before the city showed up to admire it.