This story first appeared in the June 20, 2012, edition of WW.
Forest Park is only eight miles long—it’s about the same size in area as Nauru, the world’s smallest island nation—but walking from one end to another will take you 12 hours. The Wildwood Trail, which winds along the slopes of the park’s many basalt ridges, is so twisted that the path from Northwest Newberry Road to Washington Park runs for 30.2 miles. That’s over 63,000 steps—four miles longer than a marathon and about equal to the distance from downtown Portland to Woodburn. I walked the whole thing in one day, and so can you.
You’ll want to start early. My hiking companions and I arrived at the north entrance of the park, a barely marked trailhead on Northwest Newberry Road, at 7:30 am. If you start any later than 9 am, you’ll be hiking the last few miles in the dark. We drove to the trailhead, but, if you’re very ambitious, it’s possible to take public transit—the line 17 bus stops 1.5 miles down the hill on weekdays. Wear good shoes…