Wildwood Trail, Part 8

This is an in-depth 10-part series on the 30-mile Wildwood Trail in Portland’s Forest Park. Parts 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, & 7 span Washington Park trailhead north to Springville Rd. Feel free to press play below for the environmental sound as we head further north!

The trail crosses Springville Road near the 22.5-mile mark. Springville road is older than the park by several generations. It was one of the first wagon road passes through the Tualatin Mountains, used by early settlers to move goods between the Willamette River flats and the Tualatin Valley. When Linnton was a shipping outpost and the Tualatin Valley was farming country, this road was the connection between them. Springville was a trading center before Portland was much of anything. You cross it in a few strides and continue north.

About 100 feet below Leif Ericson Drive, roughly 1,200 feet northwest of that crossing, stands a Douglas fir that a 1958 Oregonian article called the biggest tree in the city. It measured 29.5 feet in circumference, a whopping 8.5 feet in diameter, about 200 feet tall, despite a broken top. The article called it the Munger Fir, a name that never re-appears.

The true tallest tree in the park is somewhere else entirely. A 242-foot Douglas fir grows alongside a trail but its “champion” status is not disclosed on site or in official print, as form of protection it would seem. In 2019 a tree on private land less than a half mile away was measured at 268 ft. Similarly, it’s easily found along a trail open to the public, but unmarked and unheralded as the reigning tallest tree in Portland.

Adjacent Springville road, and downslope from this section of the trail is the platted development of Whitwood Court. A 1950s plat map shows the extent to which this section of the park was prepared for development, including roads, lots, and water/sewer infrastructure.

Today Whitwood Court is a pocket neighborhood on the west side of the St. Johns Bridge of about 50 homes with a rural charm. But in 1923, two hundred and thirty-two lots were being offered at auction for whatever they would bring. The salesman, a George Francis Rowe of Seattle, placed an advertisement in the Oregon Journal that August with a headline remarkable for its candor: Here’s An Auction Sale of Portland Real Estate Which Has All the Earmarks of a Genuine ‘Frost’. (Frost is taken here to mean a flop.) He reported that the president of the West St. Johns Land Company had assured him thus: “What if we can’t get any more than fifty dollars an acre?” “Well, you’ll have to take the bid, and let the property go.” Rowe closed the ad with the admission that the parcels would likely have to be given away, and that he would do the best he could. “And angels can do no more.”

The lots that didn’t sell eventually went to the county for unpaid taxes. This speculative real estate flop was due in large part to the perceived risk of living along Hillside Drive.

In 1903, John Olmsted wrote to the Portland City Council with a warning that nobody acted on. “It is true that some people look upon such woods merely as a troublesome encumbrance standing in the way of more profitable use of the land,” he wrote. “But such primeval woods will become as rare about Portland as they now are about Boston. If these woods are preserved, they will surely come to be regarded as marvelously beautiful.” Lumber companies ignored the challenge. City planners encouraged developers to subdivide the forested hillsides. In 1914 a private consortium built Hillside Drive along the east face of the Tualatin Mountains, the road that would eventually be renamed Leif Erikson Drive, specifically to open the hills to residential development. Lots were platted. Assessments were levied. Sales were anticipated.

Then the road washed out.

A landslide in 1915 closed the main access route. Without the road, the lots were unreachable, and unreachable lots do not sell. During the next two decades, landowners walked away from their properties. Multnomah County collected what it could in tax-delinquent land., and eventually the county transferred the land to the city.

Mike Houck, urban naturalist with the Portland Audubon Society, put it plainly at the park’s 50th anniversary: “If Leif Erikson road had not washed out, and the already platted subdivision had not gone into tax foreclosure, what has been described as the jewel or crown of Portland’s park system would not exist today.”

Near Germantown Road the trail passes the area once occupied by Camp Tolinda, a Camp Fire Girls summer camp that operated here for decades. The shelter burned to the ground in December 1975. Summer programs continued for another decade in its absence, but eventually those too ended. The intersecting Tolinda Trail follows the old camp road, keeping the name alive.

The isolated camp structures were actually twice destroyed. First in 1961 by ax-wielding vandals, then again in 1975 by suspected arson.

In September 1985, a 75-year-old parks volunteer named Bruno Kolkowsky began working on an 18-inch-wide rough path in Forest Park just north of Germantown Road. Over the next 15 months he donated 640 hours of his time, using hand tools to remove stumps, widen the path, grade it, and smooth it into a 6-foot-wide trail for 1¾ miles. The Parks Bureau gave him its Volunteer of the Year award in May 1986. He worked closely with Fred Nilsen, Forest Park arboriculturist, and Bill Sauerwein, who had spent years walking these hills and who, somewhere in this same stretch of park, had located the “biggest” tree in the city. A bench along the trail carries a placard that reads: This Trail is his Legacy.

At the same 1986 awards ceremony, the Bureau’s life service award went to Barbara Walker for many years of leadership and efforts to preserve open space in the city. Walker helped create the Marquam Nature Park, and was president of the 40-Mile Loop Land Trust. The Barbara Walker Crossing over West Burnside St., where this series began in Part 1, is named for her. She and Kolkowsky received their awards on the same night, on a stern-wheeler on the Willamette.

The leg ends at the BPA power line corridor, where the canopy opens abruptly and the sky reappears. The power lines run through on a utility easement, as they have since the mid-20th century. After miles of enclosed forest the sudden exposure feels almost disorienting. The sky comes into view for a moment, before the forest envelops the hiker once again.