Okay, this was a tough one for someone really out of shape (that would be me). We started at Marquam Hill Park, which is basically just a small parking lot and an information shelter down below OHSU. The first third of a mile is almost straight uphill (I may be exaggerating a bit here) and it was a tossup as to whether my legs were going to give up first, or my heart. Or maybe my lungs, as I was sucking in cold air and I think I'm coming down with a cold to begin with. I'm going to tell myself that, anyway. After we reached the first marker at .3 miles out I was about ready to quit, but Katje said that we should walk another 15 minutes or so before we turned back. Being a lemming, I agreed. The uphill was still bad at that point, but not as bad as in the beginning. The trail gets pretty muddy at points so hiking boots would have been helpful. We just hopped from relatively dry spot to root to rock to relatively dry spot – whatever it took – and still got somewhat muddy.
The next trail marker put us at about .6 miles and an option to take another trail and loop back to our car – a little over a mile walk and the equivalent of about 10 when you factor in the hill, in my opinion. Katje was firm that we hadn't reached our time limit, though, and we decided that we could probably go a little further. Every trail marker after that put us a little closer to Council Crest until we just decided that if we'd made it that far we should just just go all the way, if only for Facebook bragging rights. And we made it! 1.7 miles almost continuously uphill. Yay! Near the top we saw a red crested woodpecker pecking at a dead tree, which we'd have missed if we hadn't continued, so there was a wildlife payoff. Most everything else must have been curled up out of the cold, though (it was 34 degrees at the house when we left).
We stayed in Council Crest park for maybe a minute, just long enough to say we were there, and then headed back down. Downhill would be a piece of cake, we figured, completely disregarding the fact that mud downhill is a lot harder to navigate than mud uphill. So it took us a bit longer than we thought, but we were on such a high from having climbed the whole trail that it was just a fun adventure. At the splitting point we decided to explore the other half of the loop, since it was .6 miles either way we went. I'd probably recommend it in the summer, but the trail turned out to be a lot muddier than the other way and the adventurous aspect lost its appeal about the third time we had to grab a fern (Katje kept apologizing to the ferns, which was pretty funny) to avoid slogging through deep, nasty, slippery mud spots. Still better than going uphill, though! The very bottom of the second trail was a little icy, but we could see the shelter by then and were back to the car in no time.
According to the Marquam Park trail map*, the Marquam shelter is at 300 feet and Council Crest is at 1,040 (HUGE Facebook bragging rights!). It's probably best we didn't know that beforehand, though, since it makes the walk sound more than a little intimidating. If a person as completely out of shape as I am can make it, though, I'm pretty sure that anyone could – a stubborn and motivated friend who refuses to quit early is a big help, of course, or I'd probably have circled back at the .6 mile marker. But it was l.7 miles each way, so 3.4 miles out and back. We should probably be planning these out better and building up to bigger walks instead of randomly throwing them in amongst our shorter neighborhood walks, but what's the fun in that?
*the trail map can be found here: http://www.fmnp.org/images/MNPtrailmapforwebsite.pdf
I am so proud of both of you. Next we will hear how you ran 5 plus miles. That will be fun to read about.
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