Sonya's Blog - Day 294 - Exploring Forest Park

Sonya’s Blog - Day 294 - April 11th - Exploring Forest Park

We felt that we had seen as much of Portland, the city, that we wanted to, so we decided to check one of it’s famous parks today. Forest Park is a massive 5000+ acre park in the city of Portland. The main trail, that traverses the whole park, is The Wildwood Trail and it is over 30 miles long. We will not be doing that whole trail today, but we will do a 5 mile loop that takes us onto the Wildwood Trail.

I looked up good hikes and decided that we should go to Macleay Park, which is part of Forest Park. It has an interesting history. This area of the park, was first settled in the 1850’s by the Balch family. Not long afterwards the Stump family settled in an adjoining land claim. The two families did not get along well. The eldest Stump boy, Mortimer, started courting the eldest Balch daughter, Anne. Danford Balch, the patriarch, was furious and forbid the courtship. The two eloped in true Romeo and Juliette fashion. Well, Danford met the ferry on their return and shot Mortimer, who died instantly. Danford was arrested, but managed to escape, but was re-arrested a short time later. He was hung for the murder. The wife remarried and the land changed hands several times until it came into the hands of the Macleay fellow. He complained about the taxes and then finally gifted the land to the city so that he could get away from all the taxes, and that was the start of Forest Park.

We finally found the trailhead we were looking for, after lots of driving around and going to the wrong spots. We did get to see some lovely homes, built into the side of the hillside though. The hike starts out by following the Balch Creek and then winds up the hillside towards Pittock Mansion, which was our turning around point. The hike was beautiful and the forest was very green and lush. There were tons of gigantic Douglas Firs and it reminded me of hiking in Victoria. We had a lovely hike and enjoyed our picnic lunch along the way. Here are some of our pictures:

At the top of the hill was Pittock Mansion. This was built by Henry Pittock, a newspaper publisher and Portland businessman, starting in 1909 and competed in 1914. He chose this spot for the view of the valley and because he loved the outdoors. He and his family spent a lot of time creating hiking trails and exploring the hillside. It was a fantastic French Renaissance style château. There were self-guided tours available, of the house itself, but since we had Kizmet we only explored the grounds (dogs were allowed on the grounds). There was a fantastic view of the valley and, on a clear day you can see all the way to Mt. St. Helens.

When we were done exploring the grounds to Pittock Mansion, we headed back down the trail to finish up our hike. It was just beautiful in those hills.

We got back to our truck at about 4 PM and I was worried about rush-hour traffic. I need not have worried, though, because it wasn’t so bad. We hit a bit of backed up traffic, but it was always moving and we were through it pretty quickly. We had supper and relaxed for a bit and then decided to check out the hot tub. Natasha wasn’t interested, so the three of us headed down there. Well, it was closed for cleaning, so we were not able to have a soak. Ah well! We just headed back to the RV and did our own thing.

Sonya