Forest Park Offers Refuge Within the City

At 7:45 on a cold winter morning, the entrance to Forest Park in this city of almost half a million people is already crowded with marathon runners, mountain bikers and warmly dressed walkers.

Behind them the city is a wretched assembly of traffic jams, crowded sidewalks, urban stress and noise.

Ahead of them are 5,000 acres of quiet forest, crisscrossed with 75 miles of trails, fire lanes and closed gravel roads.

Forest Park is the largest forested city park in the country. It drapes over a ridge of hills between the densely populated neighborhoods of northwest Portland and the city’s western suburbs. It’s a full day’s walk from one end of the park to the other.

Unlike most city parks that provide picnic areas, playing fields and even theaters, Forest Park is essentially a wild forest enclosed in a city. At its southern end, the park adjoins a complex of conventional parks with tennis courts, an outdoor concert amphitheater and an enormous rose garden. But Forest Park differs from these parks by offering visitors the chance to escape the city without actually leaving it.

The park’s natural state makes it a haven for nature lovers of all kinds and a symbol for a city that prides itself on a healthy, outdoor image.

“You’re half a mile from a fresh coffee latte and a scone and you’ve got remnant old growth, cutthroat trout and big fir trees,” said John Sherman, president of the Friends of Forest Park, a volunteer group that tries to protect and expand the park.

The park houses a large range of vegetation and wildlife. Visitors to the park can see plants from fragile wildflowers to the hardiest blackberry bramble. Animal inhabitants include tiny tree squirrels, deer, raccoons, black bears and an occasional bull elk.

The park was formed in 1948 when the city and Multnomah County merged a patchwork of existing parks with 2,000 acres of land the county had acquired through forfeitures for unpaid taxes. Since then, the park has grown slowly and more and more people have discovered it. Sometimes thousands of people use the park on weekend days.

One runner loping through the park called it “the best runners’ park in the world.”

Mountain bicyclists love the park for its combination of gently rolling gravel roads and challenging steep climbs. So many riders crowd the park that local bike shops direct riders to other areas on weekends. Park users occasionally clash.

“Hiking trails are open only to pedestrians and there are some cyclists that will veer off onto the hiking trails,” said Theo Patterson, director of Portland United Mountain Pedalers, a mountain bicycling advocacy group. Park officials say bicycles will damage the trails.

“In fact, the trails are sturdy enough,” Patterson said. “That’s not the real problem. The problem is safety. People aren’t ready for bicycles to come at them around blind corners.”

Although Patterson and Sherman say the park is big enough for everyone, popular roads and trails can be crowded. Leif Ericson Drive, the park’s main drag, can be especially congested on weekends, when mountain bikers compete with packs of runners and families of hikers for road space.

“There are some near-misses with bicycles that are going too fast. And some runners don’t care about anything but their time, and they’ll run you over,” said Fred Nilsen, arboriculturist for the park.

Patterson’s group has formed a volunteer bike patrol that tries to persuade riders to slow down in heavily traveled areas.

The park faces other problems.

Some who own land within the park and adjacent to it want to develop residential housing, a move that park advocates are trying to block.

“We’ve been very active out there to work within the framework of Oregon’s land-use laws to protect that area,” Sherman said.

An essential part of the park’s character, Sherman said, is a narrow strip of undeveloped farm and forest land that links the northwestern tip of the park to the Oregon Coast Range. The corridor through which wildlife migrate into the park is privately owned. Park advocates fear that the owners will clear-cut the timber and subdivide the land.

“Massive clear-cuts in an area that important would be just devastating,” Sherman said.

For the moment, developers are blocked from subdividing the land by local zoning rulings but Sherman said zoning laws can be changed and are at the mercy of the state’s Legislature.

As insurance, the Friends of Forest Park is slowly acquiring land through donations from individuals and businesses.

But the riders, runners and walkers entering the park aren’t thinking about land-use issues or trail access. They’re hurrying into the forest in front of them for a little time away from the city behind them.