I was on a roll. After hitting up Mount Tabor and Rocky Butte the week before, I decided to ride up to Powell Butte. This would nab me the Triple Crown of East Portland Buttes, a title I just made up right about now. (But feel free to steal it from me!) While there are a few more volcanic cinder cones on the east side of the river1–Kelly Butte, Clatsop Butte, the shoulder of Mount Scott, and a couple unnamed ones on the city’s southern boundary–Tabor, Rocky, and Powell are the most well known, and the best for biking. Kelly is still rough and undeveloped so I go there very infrequently, though there are plans afoot to improve the experience.2 Clatsop Butte has a nice park on top, but the approaches are very steep. I explored this hill in 2013 and then led a ride there later that year. Mount Scott? The ride is an ass-kicker. I did it once in 2011, when I was in much better shape. I can’t imagine doing that now, especially since there’s no “pay off” in a great view–it’s covered with houses. (They get the view, though.)
Anyways, while I’ve biked Tabor, Rocky, and Powell a bunch over the two dozen years I’ve lived in town, I don’t think I’ve biked all three this close together! And it’s been awhile since I’ve been to Powell Butte, the last time I can prove I was there was last March. I said this about Powell Butte in August 2022:
It’s a place I love, yet go to infrequently. Part of it is because the conditions have to be right: clear so that mountains like Hood, St. Helens, Adams, and Jefferson are in view. Dry for a bit, otherwise it’ll be a mud fest on any of the unpaved trails. Part of it is because of where it is in town, not on the way to anything in particular.
Friday June 7th shaped up to be a good day for a Powell Butte adventure. It was sunny with a high of 86F/30C. It hadn’t rained in days, so trails would be dry, though there’s always a few muddy patches. I headed up to the top via my regular route, Old Holgate Trail. This trail starts where SE Holgate Blvd dead-ends into the volcano’s west side. It’s about a mile of upward grunt on a relatively gentle grade of about 6%. The whole climb is in forest, so even on a hot summer day it’s bearable.
Old Holgate brought me to the plateau that forms most of Powell Butte. While the steep sides are a mixed second-growth forest, the top is open meadow. It’s possibly the biggest prairie within the city, at least the biggest accessible one.3 When the city acquired the land sometime in the mid twentieth century, it had been used as a dairy and orchard, so this is how it was. And the city wants that meadow to remain, as underneath the butte is the main tanks for our city’s water supply. But this meadow is an advantage: an unparalleled view, and different flora and fauna than forests.
And for a summer Friday evening, there wasn’t a heck of a lot of people up here. I managed to snag the picnic table near the mountain finder, something I rarely can do. I ate my burrito while basking in the splendor of Mount Hood. (I’m seeing a volcano while being on a volcano!) A few cyclists whizzed by, including a gaggle of five younger dudes on what can be described as “alt-bikes”. (They went to hang out further down the trail.) I took a bunch of photos with various cameras–Minolta XD5, Ricohflex Dia, Pentax IQZoom 150SL–as I rode around the Summit Trail loop.
The sun was low in the western horizon as I made my descent. My usual exit is via the Elderberry Trail to Cedar Grove Trail, which transitions quickly from open meadow to deep forest. The temperature dropped at least ten degrees F, the sunlight disappeared,4 and things got quiet. It’s one of the few places on the east side where I feel like I could be deep in the Cascades rather than barely a mile from busy Powell Blvd.
From there, I got on the Springwater Corridor and headed west. I was a bit tired and thought about catching the Green Line MAX from Lents back to my house. But I decided to push on. By the time I got home, it was dark and I had ridden 27.5 miles total, not too shabby for an after-work ride. And like I tell myself with Mount Tabor and Rocky Butte, I need to get back up here again, sooner than later.
- The oft-repeated factoid is Mount Tabor is the only volcano within a US city. That claim was dubious when propagated sometime in the 20th century, as a few other cities also have volcanoes. Yet there’s more than just one volcano within Portland city limits, so why the claim of just Tabor? I’m guessing it’s because these other volcanoes were outside the municipal boundary until about the 1980s, . ↩︎
- It should be noted that Kelly Butte also housed the city’s nuclear war command center, a (hopefully) blast-proof bunker built around 1957 where city operations would continue if the Russkies bombed us. This was the subject of my Atomic War Preparedness Ride in 2005. About a year after that ride, the city took down the radio tower and buried the entrance. ↩︎
- There is the prairie atop the old North Portland landfill, which should theoretically become a park at some point. It could be bigger than Powell Butte. ↩︎
- For example, I was mostly shooting the XD5 at ISO 125, f/8-16 around 1/125 sec when in open meadow. But when I got into the forest again, it was ISO 800 at f/2.8 and 1/15 sec. ↩︎
Urban Adventure League 
Way back now at the beginning of COVID when I was furloughed from work for a bit I made it my mission to bike to all the buttes in the area. I can’t remember all of the ones I went to without looking at my bike map, but I remember introducing myself to Gresham, Gabbert, and Hogan buttes, plus Kelly butte which I’d somehow never been to. Oh, and Jenne butte, which is a CRAZY hill as I recall, at least the way I took. The Tour de Buttes, I called it, though I never wrote about it.
I think it’s so neat to have these scattered about:) And I didn’t know that about the bunker on Kelly Butte!
Yeah, there’s plenty more buttes on the east side, I just excluded the ones beyond the town line. I need to do more Gresham Buttes exploration. I tried to ride Grant Butte a couple years ago, but didn’t succeed.
It’s wonderful how varied “city riding” can actually be. Turns out we don’t necessarily need to get outside of town to find “gravel adventures” to do lovely, challenging rides!