Wake up and be curious.
That’s the motto of Carye Bye, a Portland resident who has been exploring the region for 15 years.
Her disposition for exploration is exactly what inspired Bye to begin an adventure to visit every Metro park.
“I’m interested in the concept of the city as a museum, and that includes natural spaces,” Bye said. “What I really love about the Metro sites is they’re full of history and have good signage. You don’t really have to know anything before you arrive and suddenly you’re in a place, you feel it, you feel all the history, you see all the nature – and also there’s usually public art.
“I could just go walk in the woods, but I’m more interested in learning history,” Bye said. “I’m not a naturalist, I don’t have a background of any sort, so it’s really cool to me. It’s very intro level, get you out there, you don’t have to have any skills.”
The idea to embark on this challenge first came to Bye when the Metro Destination Guide, a map of regional parks, trails and natural areas, arrived in her mailbox.
“I’m a very map-based person. I’m very visual. So that was like ‘oh, here they all are,’” Bye said. “This sounds like fun.”
With Blue Lake and Oxbow regional parks already in her portfolio, Bye made her first trip to Graham Oaks Nature Park. She’s since ventured to Canemah Bluff and Scouters Mountain.
“I’ve done Graham Oaks in Wilsonville and Canemah Bluff in Oregon City, and both of those were just magical to me,” Bye said. “Both had just a different landscape that is not anything that I’ve been to in the area. Especially Canemah Bluff with the madrones, I just felt like I walked into this bluff wonderland and it was just delightful.”
Cooper Mountain is the next site Bye is looking forward to exploring. She’s making a point not to visit multiple locations in one trip, to extend and enjoy the process.
“I like that there are multiple experiences,” Bye said. “So each one usually has wheelchair accessibility, higher level hiking – my husband works with a woman with cerebral palsy and she’s in a wheelchair and after we went to Scouter’s Mountain together he’s like ‘oh, I’m going to bring her out here on a field trip.’”
Bye has been a bicycling enthusiast for many years and is a commuter by bike. She prides herself in having learned to do just about everything by bicycle, not owning a car. She has found the experience of learning to travel to the parks, throughout the metro region, to be an interesting element to the adventure.
“For Graham Oaks, we had to go during the week. I went with my friend Gretchin, and we took the (WES) commuter train to Wilsonville, and then biked to the park,” Bye said. “Then Canemah Bluff, I biked to Oregon City.”
After getting into the local biking community in 2004, Bye began giving biking museum tours. This inspired her to launch a website as a personal project, Hidden Portland. The site is a resource for exploring the museums and collections Portland has to offer. Her concept continued to grow, now with a print edition of her Hidden Portland Museum Guide.
Inspired by her experience of Portland as a museum, Bye founded a Facebook group, Hidden Portland for the Curious. With the motto “stay curious,” the group inspires each other to see the special things one might otherwise pass right by throughout their day.
Every day in Hidden Portland for the Curious group, members post photos of things they’ve found. They share their thoughts about it, their stories of it, the history they know.
“[Hidden Portland for the Curious] grew into this whole big thing that I didn’t expect, almost 12,000 people,” Bye said. “It’s reminding people that we’re in this place together and somehow the best way you can be is to be curious, and explore and learn from each other.
“I’ve been reporting my little journeys, and then other people have said, ‘because you posted I went and saw it,’ ‘thanks for putting that in, I didn’t realize we had that accessibility to these parks,’” Bye said.
“I really am interested in the idea of place and what happened and what’s happening now,” Bye said. “So I think the Metro sites are very successful.”