We started out today with the intention of “walking” (hiking)
from Lower Macleay Park to Upper Macleay, and possibly on to Pittock
Mansion. So much for the no hills thing. The path starts out along
Balch Creek, which babbles happily alongside the trail and makes for
a pleasant walk. There's some uphilling, and it was really cold, so
we agreed to make it to Upper Macleay and reassess. Maybe finish
today's walk at a nice warm mall. Preferably one with a Cinnabon in
it. At .6 miles out (according to the book) we reached the shell of
an old stone house. At that point the trail split in two. There was
an “Upper Macleay Park” sign pointing to the right, so up we
went. A word of advice: don't follow that sign. The lefthand path
would have brought us to the park in .2 miles. After a while it
started to feel like we'd gone a LOT further than .2 miles, but I
thought that maybe I was wrong about the .6 so we kept on going.
Eventually we reached a junction with Aspen Trail (I looked it up
after we got home and found out we were .86 miles from the stone
house at that point) but decided to keep on with what we now knew
(thanks to the signs) was the Wildwood Trail. If we stuck with the
same trail, we reasoned, we couldn't possibly get lost because we
could just retrace our way back to the stone house. So we kept
going. And going. And going. At this point we'd figured out that
we were not going to reach Upper Macleay Park anytime soon but
didn't want to stop and turn around without some easily identifiable
landmark so we could say, “we made it this far”. We
finally met a very nice jogger who told us that we could continue
along Wildwood to the Wild Cherry trail and from there down to the
trailhead at Leif Erikson Road, which would put us out at Thurman
Street. God bless that nice jogger lady. Without her we'd probably
have stayed on Wildwood - so we wouldn't get lost – and would
likely still be wandering around up there. Our hope renewed by having
a clear escape plan, we kept going until we hit the Wild Cherry
trail. There was a sign for the path pointing in both directions,
but we chose down. Wild Cherry, as promised, dropped us onto Leif
Erikson, which ended at Thurman Street. This is a beautiful street
to walk down. The houses are huge and gorgeous and have really cool
garages with carriage doors. And lots of steps. Big, beautiful
houses that I would love to live in, if it weren't for the thought
of carrying all my groceries up those steps.
We'd figured that it would be fairly easy to find our way back once
we returned to civilization. Lower Macleay Park was pretty close to
the Montgomery Park building, an easily spotted landmark. Except
that the view was blocked by all those big pretty houses. With no
real plan other than “downhill”, we walked down Thurman until we
came to a bridge. Wouldn't it be cool, we said, if this was the
bridge we passed under on our way out of the park? And it was!
Hallelujah, we found the car!
I came home to see if I could figure out how far we went, and between
the map of Forest Park, which gave me the distance from the stone
house to Aspen Trail, our 'Easy Day Hikes' book, which says that it
is 2.6 miles between Aspen and Wild Cherry, another .9 to Leif
Erikson and .3 to the trailhead, and Google maps which gives me .7
from the trailhead to the top of the bridge...we walked a grand total
of 5.96 miles. Holy cow. Unfortunately, this wasn't in either of
our books so we're going to have to come back and do the Macleay to
Pittock hike another time, but now we are sure that we can do it!
After all, it's only 2.6 miles in each direction...with an 850 foot
altitude gain...well, maybe we should wait a while on that one.
Whenever we decide to do it, though, we'll be sure to go left
at the stone house.
Things to keep in mind: if it's been raining the trail will be muddy.
If it's super cold, like today, the trail will be icy; either way,
good hiking boots will be a big plus. The trail is very secluded so
bring a friend for protection – and encouragement. And to talk
with to let the bears and cougars know you're there so they have time
to run away. I'm kidding! I have no clue what lives up there; we
only saw a few birds.
For our “getting there” tip, if you're following the directions
in the “Easy Day Hikes” book, don't try to turn from Vaughn onto
28th. It doesn't go through. Turn onto 27th
(just before Montgomery Park), then onto Upshaw. The rest of the
directions are fine.
I looked up the stone house, which is called the Danforth Balch house
after the man who first put a claim on the land in that area. His is
an interesting story, as he was the first man legally executed in the
Oregon Territory after he shot his 16 year old daughter's new
husband. More things I didn't know about Portland!
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