Monday, Jan 22nd - Murase Plaza to Wilsonville Memorial Park

Super duper über majorly cold this morning. For us wimpy Oregonians, anyway – I'm sure snowier states would laugh mockingly but we're used to more temperate weather here. And if it's going to be in the 20's it should be snowing instead of the freezing fog. Snow is fun, freezing fog is just nasty. Fortunately Katje is a braver soul than I am (and a much better driver) so off we went down the frozen highway to Wilsonville. Interestingly, I-5 was mostly clear and not bad until right around Elligsen Road, where the landscape turned completely white and traffic had to slow down because of the tiny ice particles falling out of the sky and blowing all over the icy highway, then about a mile later everything got better again. Even Oregon weather has no clue what to do when it's this cold!

We started out at Murase Plaza, as per the instructions in our “Walk There” book, which involved parking in the lot, walking to the Plaza then back past the parking lot to the start of the path.  This parallels a little creek gully and comes out on the road circling the playing fields. We turned left down the road and fortunately spotted the smallish sign pointing the way to the dog park shown on our map. Past the dog park the trail splits. To the left is a nice wooden bridge that looks like it should be the main path. It's not. Upon discovering that this path ended at a residential area we returned to the real main path and continued until we hit a three-way fork.

I'm beginning to suspect that we're a bit deficient in the map-reading department, because looking at the City of Wilsonville's park map upon coming home, we should have gone left. Looking at the map in our book, we decided instead to take the middle fork, which looked more well travelled than the left and didn't lead toward the playing fields like the right. Our chosen path wandered around in the woods and did connect with the other after a bit, but I think we missed a viewpoint along the way. Probably it had a sign saying something significant about the area, but we likely wouldn't have stopped anyway because we were letting Katje's labradoodle set the pace and he was going at excited dog speed.

A hard turn to the right at the “private property” fence and we were back on the field-circling road, not quite believing that we'd reached the end of the trail (we even doubled back a bit to make sure). Back up the gully path to the main park, where we did stop to admire the antique barn and read the plaques about it. My favorite bit of info was that it was built by Gustave Stein and his son Kenny. Not Karl or Heinrich or some other good German name. Kenny. There was some other info about founding Wilsonville and about other barns in the area, but I was distracted by Kenny and missed most of it.

Because of our wrong turn we probably didn't go the whole 3.2 miles the book calls it, but our “shortcut” really didn't cut much off so we're marking this one as done. Otherwise Katje would probably drag me out again this week to check another one off, and it's supposed to start raining tomorrow. The overnight temperature the next couple of nights is still supposed to be below freezing, though, so we're keeping our fingers crossed for snow!