Hiking the Wildwood: 3 days at 2 miles per hour

We love mile markers: a blue blaze and quarter-
mile increments were trail highlights.
The dog joined us on Day 3.

It’s the longest hiking trail within a U.S. city’s limits. Portland, Oregon’s Forest Park invites you to travel deep into its 5,000 wooded acres via a 30-mile-long wilderness trail, the Wildwood Trail. At about the 800 foot elevation line hidden in the folds of this rugged landscape, the Wildwood carries you into and out of deep ravines, through mature forests of Douglas fir, cedar and hemlock, and across countless streams. All the while, you never leave Portland city limits. At times, views of Mt. St. Helens or Mt. Rainier peak through. In places, clangs, booms and whistles of docks, tugboats and trains pierce the cathedral-like calm. Pileated woodpeckers laugh maniacally, bald eagles soar silently above the fir tops and songbirds welcome you with outbursts of joy as you pass through their world.

Eight year old Eleanor wanted to claim the Wildwood. So this spring break, with mornings in the 30s and grey skies occasionally gracing us with showers, we hiked its length, plus 6 extra miles. The route brought us off the Wildwood the first night, down a mudslide of a firelane, to a motel on the highway below the park. The second night brought us to some friends’ home in a quiet dead-end above the park, and the last day, we walked to our house just beyond the park’s north end.

Most people hike the Wildwood in segments, looping onto it from firelanes and side trails that carry you down to the trail from streets above or up from the neighborhoods or highway below.

Stumps of trees cut a century ago nurture new life.

But a one-way excursion heightens the sense of adventure, of discovery and of awe at the length and wilderness that the Wildwood traverses. It's a landscape that has been logged, yes, but is in robust recovery, as wild-seeming in places as some of the more remote areas of the Olympic peninsula.

A one-way excursion on the Wildwood like mine is possible, even if you don’t have friends living up on Skyline Boulevard.

Start at Mile 0, at the Vietnam Memorial in Washington Park. Pass through the Arboretum and below homes perched on hills; climb to the Pittock Mansion, and vow to come back another day when your feet are not caked in mud; descend trails cut by Mr. Pittock to Cornell Road and the Audubon’s sanctuaries. That’s at mile 5, and visiting the birds who live there adds a nice educational component. We ate lunch watching a spotted owl preen, crouch and swivel on the arm of a volunteer. From there, it’s down to Balch Creek, then up and out of the canyon, then traveling above the Willamette Heights neighborhood. After a bit, the neighborhood peters out and it’s just you, a few dogs and their owners and miles of trail.

Oxalis, one of countless shades of green in the park.

We stopped at Mile 11 at about 4 p.m. and hiked down the very steep Firelane 1 to its start at St. Helens Road and Yeon Avenue, where La Quinta Inn provided just the sort of oddball juxtaposition I like on a walk. A swim in the pool, pizza delivered by Bellagios, two hours of fluff tv, and snuggling in a big clean bed made for a perfect day’s end.

There are no other motels next to the trail, so the 11 mile mark is the best place to descend if you want to spend the night in a warm bed other than your own. (Camping is not allowed in the park.)


A true friend shares the last of her frozen
peaches with some tired hikers.

Day Two took us back up the firelane, about 1.8 miles of mud alternating with wash outs. Views of trains and tank farms below offer disturbing but interesting juxtapositions with the firelane’s wild, tumbling streams and beautiful stands of Oregon white oak and madrona (relatively rare in Forest Park; seen along the lower elevations above Highway 30). Once back on the Wildwood, we walked to our friends’ home for a day’s distance of 14 miles. The next day we hiked to the Wildwood’s end at Newberry Road, and three more miles to our house.

The end of the trail.

But if you care to walk faster than our two-mile-per hour pace, you could make Day 2 as long as you want, even making it to Newberry Road, at the end of the Wildwood. There, you can walk downhill on Newberry (about 1.5 miles) to Highway 30 and a TriMet bus stop where you can pick the mud out of your boots while you wait for the ride back to town. For a shorter walk, bail off the Wildwood at many places between the 20 and 28 mile marks, heading downhill on firelanes or trails. You’ll end up at or near a TriMet bus stop on the highway.

The Wildwood’s a great walk for kids: level, runnable and so, so close to Portland neighborhoods. If you go, Marcy Houle’s book One City’s Wilderness is an indispensable guide. In print since the 1980s, it’s been updated in 2010 with new maps, full color photos of the birds and plants you’ll see, and great stories that explain the landscape you’ll pass through. The Forest Park Conservancy, a nonprofit advocacy group, leads frequent walks into the park, and offers interpretation, opportunities to help remove invasives or maintain trails, and a wealth of other information about the park.

Portland's Riches: Its Citizen Activists

This post first appeared on Powell's Books blog in December 2010.


Ivy Pullers at Marquam Nature Park on a wet November morning

 I've been writing about Portland for years.

Without gushing, let's just say Portland is one gorgeous setting in which to wake up each morning.

While I give props to volcanic eruptions, the Missoula Floods, and damp marine air for the riches they left behind here, overlaying these natural assets is something perhaps more intriguing: individual citizens whose passions and tenacity have shaped the city — fighting back proposed freeways, mucking garbage out of urban streams, righting toppled headstones in forgotten cemeteries...


They started with no more background or skill than many of us, and simply adopted a corner of town — and over the years, incrementally, have created urban treasures. I've met many of these people in my research and they are, I think, some of our most shining urban assets.

A citizen, the American Heritage Dictionary says, is "a person owing loyalty to and entitled by birth or naturalization to the protection of a state or nation."

Robin Jensen is a Portland citizen who hasn't just enjoyed the entitlements and joys of living in this beautiful corner of the country, but who has put a citizen's loyalty into actions that have resulted in two Portland places now celebrated by guidebook writers and meetup groups.

Robin's adopted nook in the city is a steep, deeply forested gulch in the West Hills called Marquam Nature Park. She got involved 18 years ago because of a neighbor, a then-82-year-old who in the 1970s had helped prevent the canyon's hillsides from being developed into a 600-unit apartment complex. She and other citizen activists had formed a nonprofit, the Friends of Marquam Park, knocked on doors for donations, and written grants to purchase the land. They raised $1 million ($4.9 million today), purchased about 120 acres, and gave the land to the City of Portland. It's the city's third-largest park (now at 176 acres), and the only park purchased by citizens and given to the city.

"I was just really impressed this was all citizen-led," Robin says. She didn't admire from afar, however, and right away began attending meetings of the Friends of Marquam Park. She laughs, "I soon found myself on the board. You start going to meetings, you're automatically a board member." She is now the board president.

Marquam Nature Park is not just a neighborhood greenspace but a regional treasure. Click here for a map. While it's a forest oasis in itself, its trails connect to Council Crest, the highest point in town, link to other trails ending at Willamette River beaches, and to the Wildwood Trail on which you can hike 30 miles into the hinterlands of Multnomah County.

The land's wild yet proximate beauty is part of what motivates Robin. "I love the park, because it's so close to downtown; to be able to get out into a secluded forest, safe, beautiful, home to a lot of wildlife... People's mental and physical health benefits from being in nature, and because the park is so close to the city, it provides these benefits for a lot of people."

Acquisition of land is the first but not last task of stewardship. And that's where citizens like you and I can contribute. At first, the Friends focused on trail maintenance, but in the last decade, the need for removal of invasive species like English ivy has brought in work crews from Hands-On Portland, AmeriCorps, and informal groups such as Trail Mix, a group of hiking friends started by Portlander Debbie Asakawa.

Debbie has recruited her group four times in the last several months to pull ivy. As a regular ivy puller on my own land, and one of Debbie's crewmembers, I recommend regular ivy pulling as satisfying on many levels:

• Physical: computer-puny arms get a workout
• Social: you get to laugh and chat with friends without consuming calories
• Spiritual: helping a forest fend back an invasive species feels so tangibly right... so much of our work is, how shall I say, not driven by need but by desires. Yet our forests are beautiful places that truly need help from people; it feels good to give them a hand, lifting off a burden they are not meant to be carrying
• Civic: if you're like me, you probably love your city, and it just feels good to give something back

In every city, some people see problems and shrug them away. Others see them and do something. Cities aren't inanimate collections of static places. They do change for the better with our attention; and for the worse with our apathy. It's not enough to be a resident of a city. We must be its citizens.

So bring a plastic bag and pick up trash each time you take a walk, sign up for some mornings of community service in your favorite park, join the board of a group whose work you care about, and revel in being a good citizen.

Poetry on the Block: Literary Posts Abound in Portland

This blog post and others I wrote in December 2010 first appeared on the Powell's Books Blog



Mike Ryerson, not letting a bit of rain get between himself and some poetry

 When stressed by money, people or deadlines, I take my feet into a Portland neighborhood and start walking. Soren Kierkegaard wrote, “Every day I walk myself into a state of well-being and walk away from every illness.” So true. I have Portlanders to thank for my relatively good mental health. I live in the forest just beyond the city’s limits, and many afternoons I leave my computer and kitchen to climb around in our woods, pruning saw in hand, cutting back dead limbs and toppling small trees shaded into death by our growing firs. I come back tired and peaceful. But walking in the city’s neighborhoods makes me laugh and come home optimistic and enthusiastic. At an observer’s pace, the small displays of human creativity seen on an urban walk stand up to make you smile: a chimney turned into a climbing wall, a tile lizard inviting you to sit and rest in a homeowner’s parking strip, and the poetry posts that are proliferating in yards around town—

A poem about rain, on rain-soaked paper

A few weeks ago Portland author Gabriel Boehmer emailed me about Portland’s poetry posts. Gabe wrote a book called City of Readers: The Book Lover's Guide to Portland and is tuned into Oregon poets and writers the same way I tune in to manhole covers and urban staircases.

A poetry post (or poetry pole or poetry box) is a wooden pole, usually, mounted on private property, so that it faces pedestrians. On top of the pole is a box, with a glass or clear face and a lid. Inside the box is a sheet of paper containing a poem (or, sometimes, prose or a photograph). Sometimes the pole is absent, the box mounted to a tree. That’s it.

Gabe and I went on a poetry post tour of his Grant Park neighborhood and passed a poem on NE 36th Avenue. “My daughter and I pass this post every day on our way to Grant Park. She wants to stop and read the poem so we always do.” She’s four; she’s reading poetry in a stranger’s yard with her dad. A magical memory, one she can pull from the depths when, at 49 or 54, she’s unable to sleep one night, wondering how to pay the college tuition bill and pondering other exigencies that cause a middle-aged person to reflect on life and choices. A memory to smooth the coming bumps.

After hearing about that post, Gabe’s wife Jennifer had a poetry post built in their yard as a birthday gift for him.

As we walked back to Gabe’s house, his neighbor Frank raked sodden leaves away from the curb. “I’m enjoying your poetry,” he told Gabe as his puppy attacked the rake. “Are you typing them on a typewriter?”

Gabe admitted he was, and then Frank revealed he and his wife had put the very first poem in, while Gabe was away on a trip. They had seen the new poetry post, still empty, and typed up the poem, “A Man is a Success,” that had been on the back of Frank’s dad’s funeral card. Someone had swiped the poem out of the box soon after, and both Gabe and Frank agreed that taking a poem from a poetry box was a fine thing.


Gabriel Boehmer placing a new poem in his poetry post


That’s the civilizing effect of poetry posts that Portlander Tony Pfannenstiel appreciates. His poetry box is located in Southwest Portland, atop a steep hill. I called Tony to ask why he installed a poetry box after reading his comments on the Google Group, “Portland Poetry Box.” 

I caught him while he was out walking his pug dog in the South Park Blocks. Tony was happy to talk, and I was delighted to hear his poetry box had a connection to my book Portland Hill Walks, which features a 152-step staircase next to his home. The success of that book has brought a lot of people, Tony says, up those stairs, where he installed the poetry box at the top to “offer people a chance to catch their breath and read something beautiful.” He talks of small gestures by citizens as a way for any of us to offer strangers a moment’s respite, free of charge, as a way to soften our rather harsh world. “It’s gratifying when I see seven or eight people holding your book, huddled around the tree, reading the poem aloud. It warms my heart!”

Tony changes the poems every few weeks and, like Gabe, focuses on Portland and Oregon poets with his own poems added to the mix at times.



Tony Pfannenstiel’s poetry box offers climbers of one of Portland’s most grueling staircases a reward for their exertions

The posts have a couple of nuclei: one in Northeast Portland, around Grant Park, and another in Southeast, on Mount Tabor. Matt Blair, a Portland programmer, is close to finishing an iPhone app that reveals the location of many Portland poetry posts.  The app is being developed in response to the City of Portland’s Civic Apps for Greater Portland contest to use public data to create user-friendly content. Matt’s Heritage Tree app won a Civic Apps award; it’s available free in the iTunes store.
The poetry post app will be interactive, so walkers encountering an unmapped post can photograph it and add its image and address to the universe of posts. Matt was approached by fellow Portlander Sue Gemmell, whose interest in mobile technology, communities and culture inspired her to start the Portland Poetry Box Google Group as a virtual gathering place for people to share ideas about poetry posts. Before Sue talked to Matt about her idea for a poetry post app, he says, "I hadn't even seen one; I didn’t even know it was a phenomenon that existed in Portland.” But he must have been the right man for the job, because even while talking on the phone about what he loves about the posts, Matt crafts little nuggets of distilled imagery.

“Poetry posts,” he says, “take poetry out of rarified places and into the places where people walk their dogs.” At a post he passes often, just east of NW 23rd Avenue on Kearney Street, Matt says, “I stop, then someone sees me reading it and stops. I leave and turn back and someone else has stopped. The posts create whirlpools of attention.”

Some posts are built by the homeowners but two Portlanders will build them to suit: Doug Trotter and John Milliken. Click here for a gallery of his posts.



A note left in a NE Portland poetry post