By Zac Stafford
When people ask me what I love about Portland I give them a worn list familiar to most local residents.
Within an easy drive you have the Columbia River Gorge with spectacular river views and waterfalls, access to the Pacific coast after a beautiful drive through forests and snow-capped mountain views on a clear day.
It’s a luxury to be able to seek out snow when you want it. In my former home of Minneapolis, winter is like family that comes to visit once a year and stays too long. You pretend to enjoy the company at first, but when they don’t leave, you plan your escape.
This is how my wife and I first came to Portland. Winter was particularly abusive last winter, so instead of going to Florida in March like most Minnesotans, we came here. It took 10 minutes into our drive from the airport to realize that we weren’t slipping over streets coated in a foot of ice. And everything was green!
We were visiting for a three-month house sit in Happy Valley, and we frequently found ourselves in any number of parks that are more like wild forests than any urban park I’ve ever seen in our travels.
One of the parks I kept going back to is Scouters Mountain Nature Park whose many virtues includes a stellar Mount Hood view, a great picnic shelter and a lovely forested trail.
What makes this park really stand out is a series of site-specific benches designed by artist John Christensen. They dot the park at happy intervals and pop out of the forest floor as if nature itself designed them. They aren’t like other benches you’ll find at parks at an overlook or vista; rather, they are designed and positioned to be part of the nature that surrounds them. Not only that, they are adorned with tiny clusters of mushrooms, trees and various other elements you’ll see during a forest hike.
After extolling the vast beauty of Portland (and Oregon in general) for so long, it’s nice to find this amount of beauty even on a micro level.
Now when somebody asks me what I love about Portland, I can honestly answer that its beauty isn’t just relegated to its proximity to natural elements. Don’t get me wrong, I do love being able to drive to the ocean and to vineyards and the high desert and waterfalls.
But I also love that if you aren’t feeling up for a drive, any number of local parks like Scouters Mountain will do just fine.
Zac Stafford and his wife sold their Minneapolis home in 2015 to travel and house sit around the world. They write about their experiences on their travel blog visa-vis.com