Here are some photos from a wander around Metro's shiny new Chehalem Ridge Nature Park, in the Chehalem Mountains, the hilly area between the Tualatin and Yamhill Valleys. I probably ought to say up front that although it's generally nice and seems to have a well-designed trail system, outside of a few key viewpoints most of the park does not have those gazillion-dollar views that the name tends to conjure up. And I say that up front because my photos of the place might lead you to believe otherwise, because I liked the scenic viewpoint parts and took lots of photos there.
I gather Metro had wanted to add a regional park somewhere in the Chehalem Mountains area for a very long time, and eventually they came across this former tree farm, and bought it and slowly rehabbed it into a place people might enjoy visiting. It may not have been the absolutely most desirable land in the area, but it had enough acreage, and seemed to have good bones, and it came on the market right when Metro had a pile of cash to spend, so here we are.
The most desirable land was probably not affordable anyway, even for regional governments flush with greenspace bond money. Like areas with views (like along Mountain Top Rd. and Bald Peak Rd, where south-facing McMansions perch above the Yamhill Valley) or quality vineyard land maybe 3+ levels of nested AVAs deep. (For example, the nearby Ribbon Ridge AVA which is inside the larger Chehalem Mountains one, which in turn is one part of the overall Willamette Valley AVA, and in general anything with a designation more specific than "Willamette Valley" is going to cost more, sometimes a lot more.) Note that all of this happened despite local vigilance bordering on paranoia about development proposals -- see, for example, this forum thread from 2010 about a proposed McMansion / hobby farm subdivision somewhere in the Yamhill Valley that was seen as yet another harbinger of Napa-style development doom.
There's an old joke-that-isn't-a-joke among winemakers that the best way to make a small fortune in the wine business is to start with a large fortune. In that spirit, the surest way to afford the very best Chehalem Mountain land is to travel back in time to the 1970s and get a job at Intel in Hillsboro. Claw your way up the corporate ladder from there, and do everything you possibly can to avoid working on anything that isn't an x86 processor. When Intel stock hits $40 in August 2000, cash out your massive pile of stock and stock options, and spend your newfound dot-com gazillions on land before it gets insanely expensive, and somehow outwit all the other time travelers who also read this very blog post and are trying to do the same thing, as well as the others working at cross purposes, like me going back to the same exact spot circa 1800 to hand out vaccines and warn everybody about Lewis and Clark.
Anyway, the Chehalem Ridge Master Plan explains what Metro had in mind when designing the park. One thing I liked here is that the plan added trails to most of the park, which seems like a no-brainer but is not what they did at other recent nature parks, like Newell Creek or Canemah Bluff, where the areas open to visitors are sort of crammed into one corner of the property, making those parks feel weirdly cramped and a bit underwhelming. I am not sure why they do this, since the acquired land is typically not pristine old growth forest full of fragile ecosystems that need to be left untouched. Maybe it's that they can only spend greenspace money on land, and other capital expenditures (and operating costs) come out of the general fund, where they will forever be prioritized a few steps below cute zoo animals.
One grumble I do have about this park, in common with the other places I mentioned, is a feeling that things are a bit... over-curated? I'm still trying to put my finger on it, it's not quite helicopter parenting, exactly, but you'll come across things like trails that are signed as one-way for safety, and lots of railings to be extra sure you stay on the trail. Other trails have themes and plenty of signage, like someone was worried visitors won't get anything out of the experience without it being spoon-fed to them. There's one spot here where a trail is a few steps away from a gravel service road, but they aren't connected, and they even added railings between them, I guess to prevent people from switching themed experiences halfway through. I dunno. I am probably making it sound really bad, but I am not actually mad about what they're doing, exactly; I sort of assume this was all imagineered into being by young idealistic twenty-something staffers, people who landed their dream jobs and are ecstatic about designing new parks and really, really want you to love these places just like they do, and they may go a little overboard about it sometimes.
And if you do find yourself humming It's A Small World involuntarily while visiting a Metro Nature Park, let me suggest visiting one of their Natural Areas instead. These are the other kind of Metro greenspace, and are in many ways the complete opposite of what I just described. You won't find a guidebook or even a simple list of these places anywhere on the Metro website, or -- remarkably -- anywhere else on the internet, although I might create one at some point. For now, your best bet is probably to fire up MetroMap, their GIS system, enable the "Parks and Natural Areas" layer (which is off by default), and then look around for unfamiliar green-shaded areas that don't show up on Google Maps. If you visit one, don't expect any handholding. At all. If you're lucky, there will be a cute little Natural Area sign about the size of a picture postcard welcoming you, or at least confirming you're at the right place. Note that this sign, if there is one, won't always be right at the entrance, however, which can make things a bit interesting when you first arrive. You see, Metro also has this fun policy of leaving any existing signs in place, so if (for example) the previous owner was some sort of crazy-eyed militia nut, you will just have to trust GIS and ignore the previous owner's fake security cameras and hand-painted "Trespassers Will Be Violated" signs and keep going til you see the "Ok, ok, fiiine, you win, welcome to the Natural Area" sign, posted just around the first corner so it can't be seen from the road. Which is pretty hilarious, actually. Though (and I shouldn't have to say this, but I will) it really helps to be absolutely positively sure you're in the right place and haven't mistakenly blundered onto the private property next door, which is still owned by a different crazy-eyed militia nut. Anyway, assuming you pass that initial test, the rest of the Natural Area is pretty much whatever was there before Metro bought it, minus any buildings that could otherwise harbor squatters. Some of the Natural Areas are flat-out amazing, others not so much, your mileage may vary and it's not their problem, there's no implied warranty of merchantability for any particular purpose, etcetera, etcetera. I'm a big Natural Area fan, in case you hadn't noticed. But we'll get around to exploring these places in other posts.
If you look at a Chehalem Ridge trail map, or the doc explaining the trail names, you might notice a very odd detail that they don't explain clearly. The name doc explains that the trail names are a diverse mix: Some are in English, a couple are Spanish, and several are in the local Kalapuya dialect. Which seems like a reasonable and unsurprising thing to do. And then you get to the Mampaɬ Trail and encounter an entirely new letter of the alphabet that you've never seen before. The doc says it's pronounced "muhm-pahl", sort of the way you would with a regular non-curlicued 'L', but doesn't explain the letter any further. (We're also told it's the Tualatin Kalapuya word for 'lakeview', in honor of a nearby former lake that was converted to farmland in the early 20th century). It actually worked really well to just search Google for that single character, which leads directly to the Wikipedia article on "voiceless dental and alveolar lateral fricatives". Evidently this squiggly character is a "voiceless alveolar lateral fricative", and represents a sound that simply doesn't exist in English. And you're seeing it because the present-day convention (at least with Pacific Northwest indigenous languages) is to use International Phonetic Alphabet characters whenever the regular Latin alphabet isn't up to the job, which turns out to be rather often. Another recent example is NE Portland's Kʰunamokwst Park, which is pronounced something like "KAHN-ah-mockst" and is a Chinook wawa word meaning "together".
Of course these pronunciations are meant as "close-enough" approximations for English speakers. If you're wondering how to really pronounce the 'ɬ' -- which would be an essential skill when travelling back to 1800 to warn people, for example -- it turns out that the same sound is also the correct way to pronounce the double-L sound in Welsh, and so there are a few instructional videos on YouTube explaining (in English) how to make this sound. Which I've attempted a few times, and am doing quite poorly at so far. Meanwhile over on Wikipedia we're also told that it's the "Lh" sound in Sindarin (e.g. the River Lhûn), and "Hl" in Quenya, both Elvish languages from LOTR and the Silmarillion.
