Forest Park - Ridge Trail — Monday, Oct. 14, 2013

Southwest Washington > Columbia River Gorge - OR

Forest Park has miles and miles of trails from the wide gravel road Leif Erickson Drive to narrow single-track routes like the Hardesty or the Nature Trail. We ventured out for a short lollipop loop on the Ridge Trail. We parked at the obvious pull-out on NW Bridge Ave. just a bit SE of the west side of the St. Johns Bridge. At first we explored a user-path right out of the pull-out that we thought was the trail - its not. Rather the trail begins up an ivy covered staircase closer to the end of the St. Johns Bridge. You have to walk back along busy NW Bridge Ave. so keep your kids and dogs close. The loop we hiked ascends up to a jct with Leif Erickson Dr. we continued on the Ridge Trail to the Wildwood Trail and turned left to do a counter-clockwise loop. At the next junction we turned left again to descend back to Leif Erikson which we followed back to the Ridge Trail. The fall colors where beautiful and the ridge is high enough to be above the mist that shrouded the Willamette River below. Sun beams filtered through the trees strikingly beautiful. Along the way we stopped to check out the many, many mushrooms. Lola insisted on stopping to look at each way making the approx. 3 mile loop last much, much longer that I thought it would (we hiked through her usual nap time). Finally her legs got tired and she conceded to the backpack and I was able to make double time back to the car.