Category Archives: Non-bike-specific Car-free Rambles

One of my favorite things about Portland is how much there is to explore: no matter how long I live here, there are always new things to find. (As a side note, this is particularly essential for a person as prone to crazy wanderlust as me:)

And when I want to find something new and learn about it, one of my favorite resources is this happy little book:

(read all about it here!)

It’s full of different self-directed walks all over Portland (though, tellingly, nothing in super East Portland, perhaps since on the whole it’s kind of a shitty place to walk). And the best part of it is that Laura Foster has a humongous wealth of knowledge about Portland history, geography, geology and all sorts of little quirks, so as you walk you can read all about the architecture you’re walking by, the old personalities that fill up the historical space, the cool things to notice about the plants…all sorts of stuff.

Last weekend, James and I had a chance to take one of her walks with our good friends over at Walklandia, who are slowly but surely walking every single street in Portland. (Seriously. Check them out! They’re giant badasses.)

Our walk took us to Willamette Heights–an old neighborhood in NW Portland–and through a few chunks of Forest Park, a lovely excursion for a foggy morning.

(nothing like fog to remind you how many spiderwebs there are in the world:)

(a mural called “Hand by Hand” to commemorate the centennial of the Willamette Heights neighborhood)

At one point, we found ourselves on top of a nondescript little hill that Foster calls “Scot’s Nubbin” but is also mentioned online as Scotch Nubbin–basically, it’s what’s left of a hill after the western side of it was terraced and sluiced away so as to accommodate all the fancy houses.

(How cool is it to be able to say we stood on top of a nubbin? :)

(We also just saw–and hiked through–a bunch of Forest Park, which is super beautiful right now in its fall splendor)

Sometimes, a pre-planned walk like the ones in this book, with historical information and other interesting things of note, gives just the kind of structure you need to transform a random I’ll-just-walk-through-my-neighborhood walk into a real excursion. That little bit of extra pizazz that comes from a walk that feels like a self-directed tour, where afterward you can tell someone about all the cool stuff you saw that you didn’t previously know about–sometimes that’s exactly the right impetus to start a few hours’ worth of exploring.

Not that meandering, no-real-destination walks are bad. I love those walks. But it’s also pretty sweet to go on a walk through your own largely defined backyard (ha! I wish I had some of the backyard these fancy houses had, up against Forest Park!) and come out of it feeling like you have a better sense of your city. I’m grateful to Laura Foster for all the piles of research she must have done to make this book and that feeling possible.

And I’m thankful that I live somewhere that’s as walkable as so much of Portland. Thanks to our Walklandia friends for the company!

(And, if you’re interested in what’s up around Willamette Heights, more pictures here. Enjoy!:)

I guess I’m a few days late in saying so, but the month of October also happens to be the month of Walktober! That is, it’s a few weeks to celebrate walking, the most democratic means of transportation:)

Walktober is put on by Oregon Walks as a way to “promote walking as a fun, healthy, ubiquitous activity in the Portland metro region,” and it consists of a bunch of different organized walks happening all around the city.

Think of it as the Pedalpalooza of walking: Oregon Walks facilitate the calendar, but the individual walks are led by people like you and me. (So if you have a fun idea for a walk, definitely head over to the Walktober site and get it on the calendar.)

So far, I’m kind of psyched about the SW Urban Trails walk happening this Saturday at 9am, and my buddy Shawn over at Urban Adventure League is hosting a Sunday sunset meander at Mt Tabor that ends, should you so desire, with adult beverages. Both of those sound pretty rad, but there are also trail walks, hikes in the Gorge, guided walks at Tualatin Hills Nature Park, and informative, tour-y type walks. There are even two walks where you can learn about being blind or low-vision and navigating the city sans eyesight.

I sort of want to add my own walk to the calendar, since I do so love to wander–I’m just having a hard time settling on a theme:)

Regardless, October with its crisp fall days is a lovely time to get out there with your walking shoes and your happy red cheeks and see the city turn colors. You’ll probably even meet some awesome people:) Go for it!:)

I do an awful lot of writing about bikes here. Which makes sense, of course, since I love-love-love my bike and basically everything there is about biking: being outside and part of the world, interacting with people around me, getting a better sense of the space between things, intimately experiencing the change of seasons…

But! Walking is in some sense even more elegant, since it gives you all of those things but in a more pure way–it requires absolutely no equipment other than your body. Not even shoes, if you’ve got tough little toesies.

I was thinking about that today because I ended up at work without my bike. A friend of mine picked me up early this morning for an adventure, and since we didn’t have time to return home before work she just dropped me off at my office. No worries, public transit here is good and I figured when the time came I’d just hop on the train and then the bus to get home (which takes about 40-45 minutes, just slightly longer than it takes to bike).

But when it came time to leave, I felt grumpy and tired and headachy, and the idea of getting on the MAX and then bus and spending even more time indoors was not super appealing.

So I walked. I figured I’d start just by walking down through Washington Park until I got downtown, and then I could take the bus if I wanted. The network of trails through that park is amazing–I often run on them from work, but I’ve never actually used them as a commute. It’s not direct by any means, but it’s beautiful. And since I was walking right past it anyway, it lent itself to a little stop in at the Japanese Garden. And then the Rose Garden.

By the time I got downtown, I was feeling much better, so I figured I’d keep walking down to the river. And once you’re at the river you might as well walk over it, too. And once I was on the other side of the river, I was already halfway home, so I just kept walking.

All told, walking from the zoo to my house is not really a viable means of transportation, since it’s somewhere between 8 and 9 miles and took about two and a half hours (plus the extra half hour that I hung out in the Japanese Garden:). I’m not about to walk to work on a regular basis. But it was pretty darn cool to take a route that I always, always bike and do it, with modifications, on foot instead.

You know the way that you see way more when you’re biking than when you’re driving, just because you’re going that much more slowly? That increases in much the same way from biking to walking. I had time to appreciate the drum corps at Lincoln High School. I could, literally, stop and smell the roses. I walked down Division Street, which I never bike on, and marveled at all the crazy construction going on there. I got a way better sense of just how many people are biking during commute time, since this time they were all going past me instead of me being part of a group that moves together. And I had a lot of time to think. It was rad.

So, walking. It’s definitely not fast, but sometimes fastness isn’t the point.

It may be hard to believe if you only know me through this blog, but lately I’ve been fixated on planning an adventure that doesn’t involve biking. That’s right. I’m scheming a trip where I purposely leave my bike behind.

Like last year, I’ll have some time off in September. And instead of taking an epic bike trip like my 2012 excursion to South Lake Tahoe, I’m instead hoping to backpack the heck out of Glacier National Park.

Yes. Getting to Glacier, all the way in Montana, can be a car-free adventure. Amtrak has two stations that serve the park, one on the west side and one on the east, and there are even shuttles to get you in between (the main shuttle ends after Labor Day, but luckily for me the east side still has a private shuttle through September).

So I can grab my backpack, hop on a train in Portland and get off in Montana ready to hit the trails. Sweet!

Despite the lack of biking involved, I’m getting super psyched for a long trip through the Glacier backcountry. Just me and my backpack and my hiking shoes: the other car-free adventure:)

If you have any Glacier recommendations, by the way, I’d love to hear them. I’ve been spending a lot of time looking at maps and natural history guides, but I’ve only ever driven through the park on the way home. Let me know if there’s anything I should be sure not to miss! :)