Wiregate Trail

Some trails announce themselves; the Wiregate just gets you from one to another, quietly, through one of the calmer corners of central Forest Park. It’s a third of a mile of dirt that climbs the Doane Creek drainage from Leif Erikson Drive up to the Wildwood Trail, gaining a little over 200 feet on the way and crossing branches of the creek in deep, fern-draped gullies. Come here to stitch a Doane Creek loop between Leif and the Wildwood; don’t come for its own sake.

The name is a small mystery with a tidy answer: a park employee once found an old wire gate sitting mid-trail, and the gate got to stay on in the name long after whatever it was fencing was forgotten. That’s the whole story — a connector carrying the memory of a piece of hardware nobody can quite explain.

It runs beneath the powerlines and tops out on the Wildwood just below milepost 18, a stone’s throw from the Trillium Trail junction. The reward here isn’t a view; it’s the quiet — comparatively little foot traffic, low invasive pressure, and the cool, wet smell of a slope busy turning last year’s leaves into soil.

Listen For With so few boots on this tread, the drainage stays birdy — Pacific wren threading its long, tumbling song through the understory, and the creek itself as a low constant under everything.

One honest caution the sidebar can’t stress enough: this is stinging-nettle and poison-oak country, both crowding the creek crossings and the pipeline cut. Long pants aren’t optional here. Foot-only, brief, and better than its map billing — a runner folding a Doane Creek loop will be glad it exists, and glad it’s short.