Wednesday, May 15th - Washington Park to Arlington Heights

Bonus walk! We have two more books by our favorite Portland walking author, Laura Foster, so today we decided to take a walk from our new 'Portland Hill Walks' book (obviously we're gluttons for punishment). Washington Park to us means starting up near the zoo, but the takeoff point for this one is 24^th & W Burnside so we headed off downtown. If you decide to take this walk, be warned that parking in the area is pretty scarce and many of the spaces have time limits. We finally found a space on 20^th and Katje parallel parked like a pro (only two attempts!). Now, you're thinking that we parked on 20^th, the park entrance is on 24^th...only four blocks, right? No, for some reason the numbered streets have both an Avenue and a Place, so each number you go up is actually two blocks. I went home and Googled it, and it was .6 miles from where we parked to the entrance at 24^th.

We slogged – uphill, of course - to the park entrance, and following Laura's excellent directions we bypassed the stairs and headed up into Washington Park on the paved walkway. The 'Hill Walks' book is filled with all sorts of information, from tree identification to information on landmarks to the history of the area. I'm not going to repeat it all, but if you decide to take this walk I highly recommend buying the book – and then highlighting the directions, which are sprinkled throughout the narrative and might be easy to miss. I can't say enough good things about these directions, though. Instead of “take this (unmarked) trail to this park and continue through it (in an unspecified direction) to the next trailhead” it says things like, “a faint dirt pathway between a douglas fir and a bigleaf maple...” I can find that! When you tell me there are four flagstone steps at the top of the cobblestone walkway I'm reassured that we're on the right path. I love this.

The walk comes up out of the park into the Arlington Heights neighborhood, an interesting mix of big old colonial, italianate and tudor houses interspersed with smaller, humbler homes. Two blocks of house envy and we're back in Washington Park, up a steep path and a bunch of stairs, and back out into Arlington Heights. More houses, including a huge old stone house with the largest lace leaf maples I've ever seen, and then we had a decision to make. Should we take the optional one mile side trip, described in the book as “heart thumping” or skip the detour and head into the park? We gamely headed uphill for a fun game of “what does this house tell us about the owner?”. The quirky house numbers and...interestingly painted door of one house imply artsy, avant garde homeowners, while the potted geraniums, trimmed hedges and lacy curtains of another make me think 'grandparents'. Huge plants in front of the door and all the blinds closed? Reclusive. The gray ranch house with two doors in front and the entire yard done in red gravel and stepping stones....yeah, I'm not sure about that one. Definitely no house envy there, though.

We looped back down to the beginning of our detour and picked up the walk heading into the International Rose Test Gardens, one of my favorite parts of Washington Park. This is where the book really earns its keep. It tells us that the terraces the roses were planted on were developed as homesites but the digging of the reservoirs at the base of the hill destabilized the land, making the sites unsalable. The developer sued the city; not only did he lose but the city eventually got control of the land and added it to Washington Park. The test gardens were established during WWI, when European gardeners were afraid of losing their historic roses to the ravages of war and sent cuttings overseas to safety. Oh, and the road leading into the park was graded by elephants from the nearby zoo. How cool is that?

We descended through the park and out into the King's Hill Historic District (more gorgeous houses), then back up to the formal entrance to Washington Park. Somewhere near this entrance is a time capsule, buried there in 1903 by President Theodore Roosevelt. Unfortunately when they were going to dig it up 100 years later they found that the exact location of the capsule was never recorded. They looked through public records and newspapers, called in scientists and psychics, but never did find it.

Back through the park, and we began to descend the stairs we had bypassed on our way in. Two hundred and fifty one steps later, we were back at the walk's starting point (though still .6 miles away from the car). All total, we walked 5.7 miles, including 259 steps up and 340 down. Not too bad for a bonus walk!