Ridge Trail

The Climb

It starts, honestly, like a dare: a staircase of about four dozen steps leaving the hairpin on Bridge Avenue, right off the deck-level bustle near the west end of the St. Johns Bridge. You are starting low — near 160 feet, one of the lowest trailheads in the park — which is another way of saying you are about to climb the entire ridge, and you begin doing it immediately.

The lowest stretch runs up an old ivy-covered roadbed through the Pull Out Creek canyon, a creek murmuring somewhere below on your left, the tread soft and a little brushy. Then it shakes off the ivy zone and settles into what it’s here to be: a steady climb through mixed conifer — Douglas-fir and western hemlock overhead, western red cedar and grand fir mixed in, red alder leaning toward the light along the wetter edges, sword fern and Oregon grape holding the slope. A few short pitches stiffen the grade, but mostly it’s the honest, sustained kind of up that a north-facing ridge does well.

About two-thirds of a mile in, the trail crosses Leif Erikson Drive, the wide carriage road that contours this whole hillside; a bit under a mile it crosses the Wildwood Trail, the park’s 30-mile spine; and it finally tops out on the crest at Fire Lane 7, about a mile and a half from the staircase. Three crossings, three different kinds of Forest Park trail, all threaded on one climb — which is what makes the Ridge Trail such a tidy way to understand how the north end is stitched together.

Listen for the woodpeckers This ridge is working woodpecker forest — the standing dead trees, or snags, are the whole reason. Listen for the slow, heavy, echoing hammer of a pileated woodpecker, the crow-sized one with the flaming-red crest that excavates rectangular holes the size of a mail slot. If a knock sounds less like a drumroll and more like someone splitting kindling with real intent, look for a big black bird working a dead trunk. The snags most walkers read as “dead” are the busiest real estate on the hill.

Runner’s note This is the north end’s hill rep. About 850 feet of sustained climb in a mile and a half, foot-only tread the whole way, and a view at the turnaround that most quad-burners never get. Run it up from Bridge Avenue and you’ve earned the St. Johns overlook; descend it and mind the roots and the wet ivy roadbed near the bottom, which do not care about your pace. Best paired into the Tolinda–Ridge loop so you’re not just running back down what you climbed.

The St. Johns Bridge view

Somewhere on the lower half of the climb, once you’ve gained enough height to see back over the canyon, the forest opens just enough and there it is: the St. Johns Bridge, framed in the trees. It is, by broad Portland consensus, the most beautiful bridge in the city — a 1931 suspension span whose slender towers rise into pointed Gothic arches, painted a green (officially “verde green”) that reads as almost part of the forest. From up here you get it whole, hung between its towers over the Willamette.

And on a clear day the frame keeps going. Behind the bridge, to the north and northeast, Mt. St. Helens and Mt. Rainier stack up on the horizon — one volcano, then the farther, taller one behind it, both of them floating above the far bank like the view was arranged for maximum effect. It won’t be there in the fog, and Forest Park deals in a lot of fog, which is exactly why best here says clear days. But catch it right and this is the payoff that reframes the whole trail: not a connector at all, but the way you get to the one view in the park that’s actually worth pointing a hill at.

Before you go

This is foot-only tread — no bikes, no horses — and it climbs the entire time, so plan for it as a real ascent, not a walk. Going up from Bridge Avenue is the honest way to meet it (and the way to face the view); most people don’t reverse the climb at all, instead folding it into the Tolinda–Ridge loop, which comes back down the neighboring Tolinda Trail with a short stretch of Germantown Road to close the circle. At the top, Fire Lane 7 also opens the door to the Hardesty Trail and the rest of the upper-park network if you’d rather keep going than head down.

Mud Truth: the tread is natural-surface dirt the whole way, and that ivy-choked lower roadbed holds water — from the first real rains through spring it runs slick, and the roots become the hazard on the way down. Good boots, stay on the center of the tread through the wet spots, and go in daylight; a strenuous north-facing climb loses its light early.

One more grounded note, because honesty is the point: the lowest stretch near the bridge is an out-of-the-way pocket of the city, and it has at times drawn informal camps in the woods above the ramp. It’s not a reason to skip the trail — just to treat the trailhead like the city that it is, park clean, and take your valuables with you.

Then climb. The map undersold it, the staircase oversold the misery, and somewhere in the middle the trees open on a green bridge and two volcanoes, and you remember why you came up here instead of past.