Next up, here are a few photos from Metro's super-obscure Fern Hill Forest Natural Area, in rural Washington County, Oregon, a few miles south of Forest Grove. It's more or less across the street from the Penstemon Prairie Natural Area we visited a while back, and not far from the shiny new Chehalem Ridge Nature Park. (Despite the very similar names this is not the same place as the nearby Fernhill Wetlands, Forest Grove's wastewater treatment complex slash nature area, which is a very popular birdwatching spot and allegedly much less stinky than you might expect, though birders always say that.)
I parked right about here, on the wide shoulder off SW Fern Hill Road, and wandered into the park for a while. The place doesn't seem to have any trails of any significance; part of the whole idea of Metro natural areas is that they don't add infrastructure to places after buying them, beyond a couple of tiny signs confirming they own the place. Metro does like to buy chunks of private timberland after they've been replanted (and the owner decides they don't want to wait another 30 years to make their money back), so that's usually how a natural area gets airquote-trails, but that doesn't seem to have happened here. Or at least I didn't see any, and I don't see anything that looks like an old road or hidden trail on the state LIDAR map, and while I was looking I quickly noticed there were quite a few stinging nettles around here. So it wasn't long before I shrugged and headed off to the next adventure.
There isn't a whole lot out there on the interwebs that I can tell you about the place either. Here's what I've got:
- The only relevant news item I've encountered is a brief mention in a 2014 story about a Metro Council visit to Forest Grove. The article just notes that the place exists and doesn't elaborate.
- Metro's 2020 Chehalem Ridge Master Plan mentions Fern Hill briefly:
Fern Hill Forest is adjacent to Penstemon Prairie to the southeast, and it protects a steep forested hillside and a key potential habitat connection between Chehalem and the complex of protected wetlands along the Tualatin River.
Which is a long way of saying it's between two areas they're interested in protecting, and keeping it natural here might help with that. The creeks that flow through here do seem to end up over on the Penstemon Prairie side of the street, so I would imagine that's the main point of this place. - A 2025 pdf from a regional trails planning effort includes Fern Hill Forest in a table of westside Metro natural areas, as part of a larger section on improving maps of the region. It does tell us the natural area comes to 262 acres but has no further useful info about it, not even the year it was established, and the comment column of the table just says "No info available", and indicates it wasn't on the old map they were updating, and also wouldn't be on the updated new map, unlike most of the other natural areas nearby.
- Metro's records site has an entry for a "Fern Hill Forest Natural Area Site Conservation Plan", indicating there's a plan for the place, but the actual document isn't online, and I haven't gone to the trouble of doing a public records request. The next few items indicate there's more to the plan than just benignly neglecting the place.
- A March 2026 Metro budget doc for fiscal year 2025-26 lists a couple of Fern Hill Forest budget items, both of them carried over from previous years: $271k for "LR147 Fern Hill Forest Stream & Savana Restoration", and $270k for "LR155 Fern Hill Forest Stream Restoration".
- A ConstructConnect page for a project titled "Fern Hill Forest Stream Restoration - LR155 - Oregon Metro" that was up for competitive bids in early 2025 and underway as of October. (The photos you see here were from before that, because of my chronic inability to get posts researched and written in anything like a timely manner). The page says of the project "A detailed Scope has not yet been determined. As of May 5, 2025, this project is included in the county's 2025-2029 Capital Improvement Program (CIP)".
- A recent Oregonian data project indicated Metro does use glyphosphate herbicides here, using 1.2 gallons in 2022, the most recent year they had records for. That's probably for taking out invasive plants, if I had to guess.
- And most frustratingly, I came across a few search breadcrumbs indicating there's a video somewhere on Facebook (ugh) involving a Metro restoration expert encountering a baby porcupine here. But I can't find it. I went so far as to actually log in over there and try to search that way, but FB search has always been useless and now is no exception. Which is really annoying, because baby porcupines are adorable, and I can't imagine anyone would rather watch bottom-feeding AI slop than real baby porcupines, but that's how the algorithm's coded, so that's what FB is going to show you, instead of the thing you actually searched for. Yuck.
