Forest Park Wildwood Trail
— — the city muffled under a hundred years of fir.
Not only on a wall.
“A footpath that holds the ridge above the Willamette for thirty miles, entirely inside Portland city limits. Forest Park covers more than five thousand acres of second-growth Douglas-fir and western hemlock; the Wildwood threads the whole length from Hoyt Arboretum to Newberry Road. Sword fern, salmonberry, the occasional pileated woodpecker. The traffic on Highway 30 fades within the first quarter mile.
Forest Park Wildwood Trail, on ceramic.
Each tile is finished by hand in our Knoxville studio. Artwork is slowly infused into the ceramic surface under high heat and pressure, and rests beneath a thin glossy finish. The colour lives in the surface, not on top of it.
Pick any four 4-inch tiles — National Parks you've been to, a Smokies set, the four seasons of one place. $ for a set of , cork-backed, ready to live on the table.
The place, in three passes.
Forest Park covers 5,200 acres on the steep east face of the Tualatin Mountains in northwest Portland, the largest urban forested park in the United States. The Wildwood Trail runs about thirty miles through it, from Hoyt Arboretum in the south near Pittock Mansion to Newberry Road at the park's north end. The ridge holds second-growth Douglas-fir, western hemlock, bigleaf maple, and red alder, regrown after logging that ended in the early twentieth century. Portland Parks and Recreation manages the park; the Forest Park Conservancy stewards the trails.
The forest sits on the western edge of Portland, catching the marine layer that pushes up the Columbia River from the Pacific. Mornings hold a damp coolness even in August, and rain falls on more than 150 days a year. The canopy keeps the understory ten degrees cooler than the city below in summer. Bigleaf maple turns yellow in October; vine maple goes red in patches along the switchbacks. Most of the year the ground is soft underfoot, layered with needles and fern.
The Wildwood crosses several roads (Cornell, Saltzman, Germantown, Newberry) but stretches in between can run a mile without seeing another walker. Birdsong does most of the talking: pileated woodpeckers, Pacific wrens, varied thrushes. The Forest Park Conservancy and Portland Parks and Recreation run the trail, with volunteer crews maintaining it through the wet months. Coyote, black-tailed deer, and the occasional black bear move through the park. The lower switchbacks above Macleay Park stay busy; the middle miles near Mile 17 rarely do.