Trillium Trail

The Trillium Trail is one of the shortest, steepest efforts in Forest Park — a quarter mile that climbs just over 200 feet with no warm-up flat and no crest to coast over. It’s the closest thing the park has to a StairMaster: a lung-buster that hangs off the upper-slope cluster near Springville Road and drops, hard, to the middle of the Wildwood Trail near milepost 18½.

Which is the gentle joke of the name. Western trilliums — the three-petaled white spring wildflowers that fade to pink as they age — do bloom on these slopes, and they lend the trail a soft, botanical sweetness that the grade does not remotely earn. It’s a delicate name for a brute of a climb. Trilliums show up across the park in early spring, on plenty of shadier trails; this one just happens to wear them on the sign.

So take it for what it honestly is: a fast, steep shortcut between the Springville side trails and the Wildwood, and a tidy hill effort for anyone training legs. It won’t reorganize your sense of the forest. It will reorganize your breathing.

Runner’s note For a short, honest rep this is hard to beat — a single sustained pitch with nothing flat to break the effort, steep enough to matter and over quickly enough to run again. Come up it from the Wildwood side if you want the full grade; just don’t expect grip in the wet season, when a slope this steep turns treacherous.

Listen For In early spring, look low along the tread for western trilliums pushing up through the duff — one flower on three broad leaves, white going to pink. They’re a park-wide spring event, not this trail’s alone, but they’re the reason it has the prettiest name of any climb this punishing.

Before you go

Save it for drier stretches. Like all the park’s dirt trails it goes greasy in the wet season, and a grade this sharp is no place to test your footing in mud. It’s a foot-only trail, and daylight only — there’s nothing to see up here after dark but your own effort.

For the full picture of the corridor it feeds off, see Springville Road and the neighboring side trails; from the bottom, the Wildwood carries you on a level contour in either direction, which is what turns this steep little rung into part of a real loop.