Upper Macleay Trail

The Walk

Off Cornell, into the older forest

Start at the Macleay Park trailhead on NW Cornell Road, where the Wildwood crosses the road near the old stone monument to Donald Macleay — the Scottish-born merchant who gave the city the Balch Creek canyon below in 1897, on the condition its paths stay gentle enough for hospital patients to enjoy the forest. Rather than following the crowd onto the Wildwood, step onto Upper Macleay. It runs the same north slope, in the same direction, toward the same summit — but where the Wildwood is one of the most-walked trails in Oregon, this one is often empty. Same forest, a fraction of the people. That contrast is the whole point.

Is this the Pittock hike? Sort of — and here’s the orientation you’ll want, because “Macleay” is attached to three different trails and they’re easy to muddle. There’s Lower Macleay, the paved-then-dirt canyon walk up Balch Creek to the Stone House; there’s this one, Upper Macleay, climbing Pittock Hill off Cornell Rd; and there’s a short, separate Macleay Trail that simply drops from NW Macleay Boulevard down to the Wildwood. The classic Pittock day hike is the Lower Macleay–to–Wildwood route from NW Upshur Street. Upper Macleay is the quieter parallel near the top — the piece you’d swap in to dodge the busiest stretch of Wildwood, not a start-to-Pittock trail on its own.

The old firs

This is the reason to choose it. Where much of Forest Park is second-growth — vigorous, beautiful, but young — the slope Upper Macleay crosses holds a stand of much older forest: Douglas-firs that Marcy Houle, the park’s definitive chronicler, dates at two to four hundred years old, standing among big bigleaf maples whose limbs are upholstered in licorice fern. It doesn’t look like a museum piece. It looks, and feels, like woods that have been left alone a long time — taller overhead, dimmer underfoot, hushed in a way the sunnier connectors nearby are not. This is the “old-growth feel” that makes a connector walk like a destination.

Forest Skill: read the licorice fern Those bright ferns sprouting sideways out of the mossy maple trunks aren’t parasites and aren’t stealing anything from the tree — they’re epiphytes, rooted in the moss mat rather than the bark, just borrowing a perch up in better light. Their trick is backwards from most ferns: they green up and unfurl with the fall rains and stay lush through the wet Portland winter, then wither and vanish in the dry heat of summer. If you’re walking here in January and the maple limbs look freshly planted with green, that’s licorice fern doing its best work in the season everything else has quit. (The name is literal — a nibble of the root tastes faintly of licorice. Look, don’t harvest.)

Two crossings, then Pittock

Upper Macleay crosses the Wildwood not once but twice as the two trails braid up the slope, which is half the fun of it — you keep catching glimpses of the busy trail and then peeling back into your own quiet. Follow it to its official end and you’ll fetch up at an unceremonious dead-end between two houses on NW Macleay Boulevard in the Kings Heights neighborhood, which is a fine piece of trivia and a poor destination. Most walkers never go that far. At the upper junction they step back onto the Wildwood and turn uphill for the last push to Pittock Mansion — from the Cornell Rd trailhead it’s roughly a mile and a half more, and something over 450 additional feet of climb, to the mansion grounds. The house tour is ticketed, but the lawn and the viewpoint are free, and on a clear day they hand you the whole postcard: downtown at your feet and as many as five Cascade volcanoes on the skyline, Mount Hood the obvious one.

Kid Quest Two jobs on the way up. Count the times you cross that other, wider trail — there are two, and spotting the second one is the win. And find the fattest tree you can’t reach around; the oldest firs on this slope have been standing since before Oregon was a state, and no set of arms is long enough.

Before you go

This is a wet-season mud trail with no paved escape hatch — the tread holds water from October into spring, and after big storms expect blowdown across the path like everywhere else in the park. The short steep pitches get slick; stay in the center of the tread rather than skating the edges, which only widens the trail and tears at the roots holding the slope together.

Go in daylight. The Cornell Rd trailhead posts “dawn to dusk,” stricter than the park’s general hours, and it’s the right call anyway — this is a slope trail through deep forest, not a place you want to be sorting out a junction by phone light. Dogs are welcome on leash, but keep them off the Bird Alliance of Oregon (Audubon) sanctuary trails just downhill, which are no-dogs; the sanctuary is worth its own visit for the pond, the nature store, and the wildlife hospital, but that’s a separate errand.

Stop somewhere on the quiet middle stretch, between the two Wildwood crossings, and just stand for a moment. The trail beside you is one of the most popular in the state. Here, forty feet over, you can usually hear nothing but the slope — which is the trick this modest little connector pulls off, and the reason it’s worth choosing on purpose.