August 20, 2011 - Hike 2

Wildwood Trail, Washington Park - Burnside to Cornell Road - Approximately 4 miles round trip

If you have never hiked the Wildwood Trail in Washington Park you should give it a try. The Wildwood is 30 miles of beautiful trail. There are many places you can start on the trail and I am sure I will probably hike the entire 30 miles before this quest is over. On this day, we started at a little parking area on Burnside just down from the turn-off to Pittock Mansion. There is room for about a dozen cars to park. Once parked, we crossed Burnside to head up the hill through a shady canopy to Pittock Mansion. I would say it is about 1/2 mile to the mansion. The first part of the trail you can hear the traffic from Burnside but you quickly get into the forest and the city sounds fade away. About a 1/4 mile into the trail we heard a loud sound coming from high in a tree. It was a beautiful woodpecker, probably 12 inches tall with a nice red head. It looked like the picture below so I believe it was a Pileated Woodpecker (Woody Woodpecker). They sure can make a racket and bark was flying down from where he was pecking the tree.

After watching the bird for a while, we continued on to the Pittock Mansion. The grounds of the mansion are so pretty that it is worth walking around a bit before you carry on with the trail. The trail continues on the north side of the Pittock parking lot. From the mansion is is mostly downhill until you get to Macleay Park which is on Cornell. At this point we turned around to head back to the car.

It is a nice work out climbing the hill back to the mansion.

On the way back to the mansion, we ran into several Southridge High students who were training for cross country track. One of the students was Patrick Nikong, a brilliant student. I am his advisor for his extended essay but he has been fortunate to have worked with an environmental scientist from PSU over the summer. The work he did with the professor may be published, in which case Patrick would be a second author of the paper. That would be quite a feather in his cap. Wonderful kid - it is great that he is training his body as well as his mind.

Well that is the second hike of 50, 48 remaining.