Forest Park: Five Thousand Two Hundred Acres of Accidental Wilderness

Forest Park exists because of a sequence of failures. The terrain in Northwest Portland's West Hills was too steep for profitable residential development. The timber had been cut, which stripped the original old-growth Douglas fir forest. The cutover land lost its value and, across the early decades of the twentieth century, owners stopped paying property taxes. The city of Portland acquired it, parcel by parcel, because no one else wanted it.

What grew back in the decades between the initial logging and the park's formal establishment in nineteen forty-eight was second-growth forest. Not the original firs, but alder, maple, sword fern, and the beginning of a new Douglas fir canopy. The Wildwood Trail, which runs for thirty miles through the park without crossing a paved road, passes through that secondary growth. Hikers in Forest Park are walking through a recovering wound.

At five thousand two hundred acres, Forest Park is one of the largest urban forests in the United States, roughly six times the size of Central Park in Manhattan. It exists within city limits, bordered on multiple sides by dense residential neighborhoods, and accessible from dozens of street-level trailheads.

The park is also part of the Lower Chinook homeland. Before the clearcut, before the stumps, before the tax defaults, this forest was part of the territory the Multnomah and other Lower Chinook bands had used for thousands of years. The trees that were logged were the descendants of that original forest. The trees coming back are the descendants of the logging.

The park closes at ten o'clock at night. The trail map is at the Thurman Street gate.