Forest Park: 5,200 Acres of Wild Inside the City Limit

Most American cities have a large park. Portland has a forest — 5,200 acres of it, climbing the Tualatin Mountains' eastern slope from the Willamette's edge to Skyline Boulevard, protected since 1903 and grown by a century of acquisitions into one of the largest urban forests in the United States. Forest Park is not landscaping. It is Douglas-fir, bigleaf maple, and red alder running wild inside a city boundary, with the rules to match.

The park's spine is the Wildwood Trail, some 30 miles from the zoo to Newberry Road, the single thread on which the park's 80-plus miles of trails and fire lanes are strung. Runners have adopted it wholesale — the Wildwood end-to-end is a local rite — while its lower reaches serve the daily traffic of dog walkers and lunch-hour hikers from the westside trailheads at Thurman Street and Macleay Park.

The ecology is the point of the place. The park protects the Balch Creek and Rocking Chair Creek watersheds, shelters more than a hundred bird species and dozens of mammals, and functions as the city's great air filter and heat shield — a working forest whose services show up in water quality and summer temperatures downhill. Its managers wage the quiet wars of urban ecology: ivy removal by the acre, trail drainage, the patient restoration of native understory.

November is the forest's most honest month. The maples have turned and dropped, the creeks rise with the rains, banana slugs patrol the trail edges, and the canopy drips the way it was designed to. The light under firs at 3 p.m. has already gone amber. It feels, as it is meant to, much farther from downtown than the fifteen minutes it is.

The park's founding bargain still frames its care: Portland's voters chose a forest over development when the land was cheap and the city young. Every generation since has been asked, in budget lines and bond measures, to renew the subscription. So far, every generation has.