The Sunday Oregonian (the local newspaper here in Portland) had a nice article about hiking in Portland's Powell Butte Park. It is where the Portland Water Bureau has two underground water reservoirs, each containing 50,000,000 gallons of fresh water. I had no idea how big that was, so I searched for a conversion online and found that 50,000,000 gallons is a little more than 6,600,000 cubic feet. Well how big is that? That would be a cube that would be a little less than 200 feet on each side. That is a lot of water and that is a pretty big body of water - and there are two of them buried in the top of Powell Butte.
We started at the Visitors Center, which unfortunately was closed - but a Portland Water Bureau guy met us at the outside map as we were starting out. He had not read the article we had from the newspaper, but pointed us in the right direction to begin a 4.5 plus mile loop around the park.
Monday was a warm, sunny day, and we were happy that our route took us through the woods - for nearly the first four miles. In the first few hundred yards, they had a variety of informational signs with names for the varieties of fauna and flora.
We initially went by some of the maintenance buildings and the home of the resident caretaker.
In the woods, we came across this large pipe running down hill - it looked like an older pipe to perhaps handle any overflow of water (but that is just my guess).
The trail regularly went up and down, but all at a relative easy pace - there were even stairs in the one place where the trail ascended 200 feet in a short distance.
We came across several trees that had been blown over, exposing a root system that was not very deep.
After the first 90 minutes in the woods, we came out into an open area as we climbed the gently upward sloping trail to the top of the butte. At the top was a mountain finder that had a circular mountain finder - there were signs pointing to all the mountains and buttes in the area.
From the mountain finder, there was a paved 1/2 mile trail back to the visitor center - very gentle sloping trail so that it would be handicap accessible. We met several parents pushing baby strollers up the trail.
All in all, a very pleasant hike that took about two hours at a leisurely pace.
We started at the Visitors Center, which unfortunately was closed - but a Portland Water Bureau guy met us at the outside map as we were starting out. He had not read the article we had from the newspaper, but pointed us in the right direction to begin a 4.5 plus mile loop around the park.
Monday was a warm, sunny day, and we were happy that our route took us through the woods - for nearly the first four miles. In the first few hundred yards, they had a variety of informational signs with names for the varieties of fauna and flora.
We initially went by some of the maintenance buildings and the home of the resident caretaker.
In the woods, we came across this large pipe running down hill - it looked like an older pipe to perhaps handle any overflow of water (but that is just my guess).
The trail regularly went up and down, but all at a relative easy pace - there were even stairs in the one place where the trail ascended 200 feet in a short distance.
We came across several trees that had been blown over, exposing a root system that was not very deep.
After the first 90 minutes in the woods, we came out into an open area as we climbed the gently upward sloping trail to the top of the butte. At the top was a mountain finder that had a circular mountain finder - there were signs pointing to all the mountains and buttes in the area.
From the mountain finder, there was a paved 1/2 mile trail back to the visitor center - very gentle sloping trail so that it would be handicap accessible. We met several parents pushing baby strollers up the trail.
All in all, a very pleasant hike that took about two hours at a leisurely pace.
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