Springville Road

The Climb

Take it the way the training crowd does — from the bottom up, where the grade is the whole point. From NW Bridge Avenue the road starts as pavement, quickly turns to packed gravel, and points uphill, and then it simply stays pointed uphill: no rollers, no plateau, just a wide, workmanlike gravel road tilting through mixed second-growth forest of Douglas-fir, bigleaf maple, and red alder. The map reads about a mile, GIS a touch more; the number you’ll actually feel is the one under your lungs.

Partway up, the road meets Leif Erikson Drive at a spot locals call Scout’s Corner, named for a neighborhood Golden Labrador who evidently held court at the junction. About a hundred feet along Leif from there sits one of the forest’s quieter oddities: a lone concrete stoop with nothing attached to it — the Invisible House, the ghost of a home long since gone, a set of steps that now climb to nothing but trees. It’s the kind of small human ruin the forest is slowly reclaiming, and it’s worth the ten-second detour.

Keep climbing and, about a third of a mile below the top, the Wildwood Trail cuts across — your natural bail-out onto a level contour if the legs are finished, and the seam that makes loops possible. From there the last pitch delivers you to the Springville Road Trailhead, around 1,075 feet, where Fire Lane 7 shares the gate and the Hardesty, Ridge, and Trillium trails wait just beyond.

Cyclist note This is gravel-bike country — a CX or gravel rig handles it happily, and the steady surface is why it rides well in both directions. It’s legal to bikes and, like Leif Erikson, shared with runners, walkers, and horses, so climb it as a rep and keep any descent controlled; the sightlines are open but the traffic is real.

Runner’s note For hill repeats, this is one of the park’s cleaner efforts — a single sustained grade with no flat sections to break the rhythm, so you can settle into a pace and hold it. Pair a climb up Springville with a recovery lap on Leif Erikson and you’ve got a tidy loop that never touches pavement until the very bottom.

The naturalist reward here is mostly in the trails Springville hands you off to rather than the roadbed itself — Hardesty’s south-facing spring wildflowers and old springboard-notch stumps especially. But the steady grade is its own small gift to anyone who likes to look while they move: because you’re never scrambling for footing, you can actually watch the canopy work overhead instead of your shoes.

Before you go

If you want the effort without a car shuttle, the standard is a loop — down Fire Lane 7 to Hardesty, over the Ridge Trail to Leif Erikson, then back up Springville, about four miles all told. Or just run the road as a there-and-back rep from Scout’s Corner, which is how most of the regulars use it.

The gravel is a virtue in the wet season: it holds up firmer and drains faster than the park’s natural-surface trails, so this stays rideable and runnable when the dirt goes to soup. Two honest cautions. First, the bottom empties onto a road and a bus stop, not a trailhead — if you start up top, don’t plan to be met at the bottom unless it’s by the 16. Second, the upper lot has a real break-in reputation; take your valuables with you.

Then, if you’re grinding up on a quiet morning, ease off at Scout’s Corner and walk the few steps to the Invisible House. Stand at the foot of a staircase that no longer goes anywhere and let the forest have the last word — it’s already halfway to taking the steps back.