Tolinda Ridge, Jan 11th

Winter weather this year in Portland is looking a lot like spring. Lots of rain and relatively mild temperatures. That is making us miss snowshoeing and also being able to do nice hikes. Still, Val and I had to get out and stretch our legs on a trail for a while. Smell the wet ground and see some green. Generally we don’t go to Forest Park because, well, it’s a park but we forget that you can still get pretty far and away from road noises to feel like you are in the forest. Val did some searching and found a very interesting loop connecting several trail in the northeast side of Forest Park. We started our hike from a small and very muddy parking area of Germantown road heading uphill o the Waterline trail. The trail is very easy to follow as it climbs thru dense forests and gets away from civilization and noise. Very soon you feel you’re far from everything. Being a wet day, it took almost no time for us to reach the clouds. At some point we reached the Wildwood trail that traverses the entire park. We didn’t see a lot of people in the area which was nice. At the roughly midpoint, we crossed the Northwest Springville Road and then had to start almost guessing were to turn. This section has a lot of spur trails that can get anyone confused. Our original plan was to take the Hardesty trail and connect then with the ridge trail but we missed the turn. Luckily for us, the wildwood trail crosses the Ridge Trail again further down. We did shorten the loop by missing that turn but the hiked down on the ridge trail back to the lower section. Towards the end, the views open towards the St Johns Bridge that offers some really nice scenery as you return to civilization.
The only bad part is that he trail ends on the side of a bridge without much space. To return to the car, the only option is to walk on the side of the road to the Germantown junction and then follow the road up back to the parking lot.



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