Wild Cherry Trail

The Walk

Walk it the way it’s built to be walked: downhill. From the NW 53rd pullout the trail loses about 460 feet over its short length — a steady descent, averaging around ten percent, with a few pitches that let you know Portland’s west hills are not merely decorative. In under a mile it drops you from the ridge at roughly 850 feet down to Leif Erikson Drive at about 390. Your knees will notice; your lungs will thank you. (Climb it in reverse, up the Dogwood side, and the arithmetic simply flips.)

The shared trailhead

The Wild Cherry and Dogwood trails leave the log-fence pullout together and run as one path for about fifty yards before splitting — Wild Cherry bearing off to descend, Dogwood peeling away to climb. At the shared trail sign stands a small memorial plaque to Larry Mauritz, one of those quiet markers Forest Park is full of: someone who loved this ground enough that others fixed his name to it. The Keil Trail also ties in up here, a short connector dropping back toward the road. Take a second to get oriented at the sign — this is the one junction where the loop decides which way you’re going.

First-timer’s note. This is a genuinely good place to learn how the park is stitched together. The loop is short, the payoff-to-effort ratio is generous, and there’s a built-in lesson in the middle (see the jog, below) about how Forest Park’s trails cross rather than merge. Do the loop clockwise — down Wild Cherry, up Dogwood — and you get the fun part, the descent, while your legs are fresh.

The Wildwood jog

About a third of the way down, at roughly 700 feet, Wild Cherry meets the Wildwood Trail — and here’s the catch that trips up first-timers: the trail does not run straight across. To stay on Wild Cherry you turn right onto the Wildwood, walk a few steps, then take an immediate left to pick the trail back up on the far side. It’s a small offset jog, easy to blow right past if you’re looking at your feet. Miss it and you’ll find yourself contentedly walking the Wildwood instead, which is a fine trail but not the one you were on.

This is the moment the park teaches you its own grammar. Forest Park’s trails are a lattice, not a set of parallel lines, and the connectors cross the big through-routes at little offsets exactly like this one. Learn the jog here and you’ll read the next dozen junctions faster.

Look down as you descend, too. The trail is named for a tree — bitter cherry, a slim pioneer that colonizes young, recovering forest — and this whole slope is a lesson in second growth reclaiming itself: sword fern and licorice fern holding the cut banks, salmonberry and red elderberry crowding the understory, and in spring a genuinely good wildflower show. Trillium, woods violet, fringecup, toothwort, and the early white sprays of Indian plum all turn up along here from late winter into spring — the forest floor doing its quiet, seasonal accounting before the canopy fills in overhead.

Down to Leif Erikson

The lower section is where the park’s honest struggle with water shows. Small brooks cross the tread here, and left alone this stretch turns to genuine muck in the wet months — which is why someone curbed it, edging the trail to hold a layer of gravel over the worst of the mud. It works, mostly. It is not magic. In a wet Portland winter this bottom stretch still remembers every storm.

The trail ends where it meets Leif Erikson Drive, about a quarter mile up from the road’s Thurman Street gate. There’s a hidden picnic table tucked just up the trail from the junction — a good, unadvertised lunch spot — and porta-potties a short way down the road, which after a couple of hours in the woods can feel like a genuine civic kindness. From here the loop-minded turn onto the Dogwood Trail and climb back to the trailhead.

Runner’s note This is beloved running ground for a reason. The Wildwood–Wild Cherry loop is a real, named runner’s circuit (about 4.8 miles of singletrack and bridges), and the low-key Portland Trail Series races stage near the Wild Cherry/Leif Erikson junction. Run it downhill and it’s a fast, rooty, rhythmic descent; just know that the gravel-curbed bottom is a mud-holder from roughly November into June, and that Leif Erikson at the bottom is shared with cyclists — Wild Cherry itself is foot-only, but the road you spill onto is not.

Before you go

Mud Truth: the gravel curbing helps, but it doesn’t win. From late fall into early summer the lower section is soft and slick; stay in the muddy center of the tread rather than skirting the puddles, which only widens the trail and chews up the roots holding the slope. If it rained yesterday, this trail remembers.

Don’t miss the Wildwood jog — right, then immediate left. It’s the single spot people lose the trail. And watch for bikes the moment you reach Leif Erikson Drive: they’re not allowed on Wild Cherry, but the road is theirs too, and riders come around the bends faster than you’d expect.

Parking is the real constraint. The NW 53rd pullout holds only a handful of cars along the log fence, and on a sunny weekend it fills early — this is a trail worth reaching before mid-morning, or reaching by climbing up from the Leif Erikson end instead.

Pause at the offset crossing on your way down, where Wild Cherry and the Wildwood briefly become the same few steps of dirt. It’s just a jog in a trail. But stand there a moment and you can feel the whole network holding hands beneath the firs — a couple of hundred acres of paths that only work because they cross.