Fern Hill Forest

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.

Baker Creek Falls

Next up we're taking a peek at Baker Creek Falls, a small waterfall in rural Washington County, in the hilly area west of Sherwood. This is part of Metro's Baker Creek Canyon Natural Area, an obscure greeenspace area the agency purchased in 2011 or so. These late summer photos don't really do it justice; a Waymarking page for the falls has a photo of it when it was running at a much higher volume. I meant to go back on an early spring day and get better photos of it but getting there is a bit of a long drive to the far end of the metro area and then a few miles past there, almost into Yamhill County.

This a Metro Natural Area, as opposed to a Nature Park, so there are zero visitor facilities beyond the cute little Natural Area sign (if you can find it) and the agency does absolutely nothing to get the word out about it to potential visitors. Some Natural Areas like this may never get more development than they have now. Others will be upgraded to Nature Parks someday, but not during your lifetime or mine. The thing to understand here is that Metro takes a very long-term view of things, surprising for a government agency in this country. They prioritize buying land above building amenities, on the theory that nobody is making new undeveloped land; what's there now is as much as there will ever be, and it's not going to be any more affordable in the future than it is now.

The good news is that the falls are right next to a road and easy to get to, so you're not going to need much in the way of facilities. Have your favorite driving directions app guide you to the intersection of SW Kruger Rd. and Dutson Dr., which is right at a sorta-hairpin corner on Kruger. This is also where Baker Creek passes under the street. Just west of there, immediately past the bend, there's a flat stretch of shoulder on the westbound side of the road, on the inside of the turn, with enough space for maybe 2-3 regular-size vehicles, or quite a few bikes, or between 0.5 and 2 luxury SUVs. I mention that last bit because this area is a short distance from the vineyards of Yamhill County, and seems to be rapidly filling up with McMansions and hobby farms. So you can kind of sense the urgency of Metro's land-buying efforts here. On the positive side, on the way here you'll see lots of cute llamas and alpacas randomly hanging out watching the world go by, so you can look at them and just ignore the ghastly 6000 square foot Tuscan-Victorian chateaus and whatnot where their people live.

So assuming there's room to park, park there and look for a really obvious unofficial trail heading downhill to the creek. Follow it toward the creek, then look upstream for the waterfall. At this point you can decide for yourself whether it was worth the effort to get here, which is obviously going to depend on the season and how far you had to drive to get to this point. If you're just coming from Sherwood or maybe Tualatin, it probably counts as a cool local attraction, kind of like Cedar Hills Falls in Beaverton. If you're coming from downtown Portland, like I was, it's a lot of trouble to get to for how small it is. I thought it was still worth visiting, but I also recognize that doing things "for the sake of completeness" motivates me a lot more than it does most people, plus even if it had gone completely dry when I visited I'd still get a blog post out of it.

I don't have any news stories to share about the falls, or the creek, or the rest of the general area, but I did come up with a short list of Metro documents and press releases that refer to it, so here we go:

• 2009 press release about salmon returning to the area.
• A 2011 portfolio doc said public access is incompatible with water quality
• 2016-2018 Parks & Nature System Plan softens that policy a bit, and merely says public access is not a high priority because they're busy with water quality work.
• 2019-2022 plan refinement doc
• 2021 news items about restoration work
• News release about a 2022 expansion of Metro holdings in the area