There’s a newspaper clipping from September 28, 1958, from the Oregonian archives. The headline is about opening Forest Park’s primitive boulevard, Leif Erikson Drive, to automobiles for a weekend. I’ve only ever known it as the winding gravel road used only by cyclists, hikers and runners. The idea of driving the road in a car didn’t appeal to me, but tucked into the middle of the article is a paragraph that caught my attention:

Along this stretch of park is found the most primitive woods, including the biggest tree in the city, a Douglas Fir, 29¾ feet in circumference, 8½ feet in diameter, about 200 feet high, despite a broken top. The tree, unofficially called the “Munger Fir,” is not marked in any way as yet.

Not marked in any way as yet. Sixty-seven years later, that “as yet”seemed to awaken a yearning in me for a good old fashioned treasure hunt. I decided to see if I could find it.

The approach I chose followed a creek watershed. The ferns were thigh-high and the overgrown trail crossed the steep canyon near a downed trunk approaching 5 feet in diameter. Its shattered extremity climbed the opposite side of the canyon. It was clear I was in a neighborhood of tall trees, but I was looking for something unmissable: a trunk the width of a school bus, a column of bark rising into the canopy like a freight elevator shaft.

I found big trees. Several in fact. Enough to tire of craning my neck back. But the Munger Fir, if I passed it, didn’t announce itself. I eventually climbed back up to the old road and walked its length in both directions, scrutinizing every dark shape in the stand. At some point I stopped looking and shrugged it off.

LiDAR

I came home and found the Oregon Tall Trees LiDAR GIS layer instead.

The map renders the forest in shades of green: light green is <100 feet, medium green is 100-150 feet, dark green is 150-200 feet, and magenta is >200 feet, So, each magenta dot marks tree that should be taller than 200 feet, taller than a 20 story building. These measurements are taken by beaming laser light from an airplane over an area and measuring how long it takes the light to bounce back. It’s incredibly precise.

I started counting the dots. One watershed had 94. Across the whole park, working through eight map tiles systematically, the count approached 600. Six hundred Douglas-firs over 200 feet tall, in a city park. Not too shabby!

The tree that made headlines in 1958 for being 200 feet tall despite having a broken top, turns out to be, by this measure, unremarkable. Or rather: remarkable in the way that changes the definition of the word. If 600 trees share the distinction, it’s not a curiosity, but a population.

The tallest LiDAR “canopy hit” I found in this watershed was 242 feet, the same height as a Douglas-fir a few miles south of here in Balch Creek Canyon, which was crowned Portland’s tallest in 1997. More recently, another Douglas-fir less than a half mile away from there was measured at 268 feet in 2019, and is quietly holding the title of the tallest tree in Portland today.

After discovering the Oregon Tall Tree website, I had a thirst for more precision; something that would output latitude and longitude coordinates. I downloaded QGIS, a free, open source app, which was about as intuitive as learning to fly a helicopter. I then downloaded canopy data from the state’s spatial data library, a hulking dataset, which arrived in formats with inscrutable filenames. Finally, I succeeded in generating a “canopy layer model”, but I never could work out how to make the “Oregon Lambert” coordinate reference points translate to standard Google Earth coordinates, and ultimately gave up.

While I was in the weeds of all this, I kept thinking about a book I’d read years ago: The Wild Trees, by Richard Preston. It chronicles the small obsessive community of researchers who climb the coastal redwoods of Northern California in search of the tallest living thing on earth. In 2006 they ultimately find it: a coast redwood they name Hyperion, standing 380 feet tall, in a place so remote and deliberately unspecified that its coordinates remain unpublished. The book reads like a thriller. The trees are the mystery.

What struck me, while clicking through LiDAR pixels, was how much of that story is about the gap between what is known and what is recorded. Hyperion wasn’t the tallest tree on earth until the day someone decided to measure it and tell someone else. The forest doesn’t keep records.

That brings me to the fallen ones.

Historical Titans of the Pacific Northwest

Near a small Washington town called Mineral, a Douglas-fir once stood that was calculated have once reached 393 feet tall. First recorded in 1905, the top had recently broken off. The downed section measured 168 feet, while the standing portion measured 225 feet, for a combined 393 feet in height. It was 15.4 feet in diameter at a height of 6 feet. Twenty-five years later, the topped giant fell in a windstorm, in the winter of 1930. A cross-section was given to the Wind River Arboretum as a memorial. It’s still there, a little over an hour’s drive away; I could go count the rings right now if I wanted to. The nearby sign tells visitors it was approximately 875 years old, though other sources report 1080 years. It is now officially considered the tallest Douglas-fir reliably recorded in Washington state.

And then there is the Nooksack Giant: measured with a tape after felling at a claimed 465 feet in length, and nearly 11 feet in diameter at the base. These measurements strike many as embellished. Nonetheless, thorough analysis suggests the tree was conceivably towering.

Of course, these trees are now gone. What remains are measurements, newspaper clippings, black and white photos, and a section of a log in an arboretum.

I grew up here in the Pacific Northwest, and took the trees for granted, the way you take gravity for granted. It takes a while to comprehend that a Douglas-fir has a theoretical ceiling somewhere in the 400 foot range; that the species comfortably lived in that range before, and that the trees currently growing in the forests around me are still slowly reaching for those heights again.

The tallest living Douglas-fir is the Doerner Fir in Oregon’s Coast Range, standing 325.8 feet. Remarkable, but well short of what the species once achieved. Hyperion, the champion coast redwood bests it by 55 feet. It gives me pause to consider a substantially taller Douglas-fir was measured within the last century. Is there another one out there, hiding in a remote Siskiyou-Rogue River National Forest canyon? Or in the coastal forests of British Columbia?

A Douglas-fir that is 200 years old today could, in the absence of fire, wind or chainsaw, could till be growing 400 years from now. At that point it would be 600 years old, still four centuries younger than the Mineral Tree when it fell. Our grandchildren’s grandchildren’s grandchildren could conceivably stand at its base and look up at something that was a seedling when Lewis and Clark came through.

The Munger Fir, wherever it stands, if it still stands, is probably not a contender for a superlative tree, but it has had sixty-seven more years to grow since a journalist described it, so it would be interesting to observe how it has changed.

Thornton Munger headed the Committee of Fifty; the civic body that pushed through the legislation, rallied public support, and ultimately gave Portland its great urban forest. A forest Economist by training, he spent decades thinking about what trees meant to a city, to a civilization.

Alas I never located a tree that matched the description of the Munger Fir. After my hunt came up short, I sat with the question, what exactly was I looking for? Was it for that one tree? Was it simply to say, “There it is! I found it!” Or something more like “ There it is; the oldest living thing for miles and miles and miles.” Or…what? Maybe both; maybe to feel some connection I can’t really put words to.

Once More, for Good Measure

A few weeks later I made another pass through the area, taking the same route. This time, however, I had an app on my phone called Arboreal Tree, which can take triangulated measurements using GPS, the phone’s camera and accelerometer. I’m not sure how accurate it is, but the trees I was able to measure gave plausible readings. The difficulty though, is in taking the first measurement, which requires you to be 1.3m away from the trunk. That’s not much to ask on flat ground with a sparse understory. On a steep slope with brambles and downed wood, you have to pick your battles.

I had made most of the circuit attempting to match a couple tall trees I spotted on the LiDAR map (measuring in the 230-240 foot range) with those in front of me, without much success. You wouldn’t think it would be that hard, but puzzling it out in the field without precise coordinates proved to be a challenge.

Finally, about 20 feet down from the Leif Erikson Drive, I stopped to take a measurement of one last tree, out of curiosity. It was tall, to be sure, but it also didn’t match the description of the Munger Fir. It was closer to the road, and there was no broken top that I could make out. I snapped a selfie next to it for scale:

When I walked back up to the road and away from the tree to pinpoint its top, the result was computed to be 278 feet, which if true, would be the new tallest tree in Portland!

However, it’s likely it was an inaccurate measurement (and is not corroborated by the LiDAR data as far as I can tell) but still it was a thrill just to gaze in wonder at the number. Out of a field of six hundred trees over 200 feet tall in the park, there’s bound to be one that is closing in on, or has already silently surpassed the reigning 268 feet. tall champ, just a few miles to the south.

Despite the mountains of data we humans generate, compile and compute, there are still many things that remain unquantified, and unknown. Maybe it’s better that way.

This quest arose from my research into Forest Park and the Wildwood Trail. I decided that the 10-part series wasn’t general interest enough to justify weekly newsletter sends, so many of the last dispatches are being published straight-to-blog as a reference collection. The latest one gives context, both narratively and geographically, for this post:

Lastly, this Forest Park series is a related project to my first vinyl LP release, Wildwood Trail Soundwalk. It’s a thing of beauty, officially landing June 26. Check it out!

Wildwood Trail Soundwalk LP

Thanks for reading and listening!

The trail crosses Springville Road near the 22.5-mile mark. Springville road is older than the park by several generations. It was one of the first wagon road passes through the Tualatin Mountains, used by early settlers to move goods between the Willamette River flats and the Tualatin Valley. When Linnton was a shipping outpost and the Tualatin Valley was farming country, this road was the connection between them. Springville was a trading center before Portland was much of anything. You cross it in a few strides and continue north.

The Munger Fir

About 100 feet below Leif Ericson Drive, roughly 1,200 feet northwest of that crossing, stands a Douglas fir that a 1958 Oregonian article called the biggest tree in the city. It measured 29.5 feet in circumference, a whopping 8.5 feet in diameter, about 200 feet tall, despite a broken top. The article called it the Munger Fir, a name that never re-appears.

The true tallest tree in the park is somewhere else entirely. A 242-foot Douglas fir grows alongside a trail but its “champion” status is not disclosed on site or in official print, as form of protection it would seem. In 2019 a tree on private land less than a half mile away was measured at 268 ft. Similarly, it’s easily found along a trail open to the public, but unmarked and unheralded as the reigning tallest tree in Portland.

Whitwood Court

Adjacent Springville road, and downslope from this section of the trail is the platted development of Whitwood Court. A 1950s plat map show the extent to which this section of the park was prepared for development, including roads, lots, and water/sewer infrastructure.

Today Whitwood Court is a pocket neighborhood on the west side of the St. Johns Bridge of about 50 homes with a rural charm. But in 1923, two hundred and thirty-two lots were being offered at auction for whatever they would bring. The salesman, a George Francis Rowe of Seattle, placed an advertisement in the Oregon Journal that August with a headline remarkable for its candor: Here’s An Auction Sale of Portland Real Estate Which Has All the Earmarks of a Genuine ‘Frost’. (Frost is taken here to mean a flop.) He reported that the president of the West St. Johns Land Company had assured him thus: “What if we can’t get any more than fifty dollars an acre?” “Well, you’ll have to take the bid, and let the property go.” Rowe closed the ad with the admission that the parcels would likely have to be given away, and that he would do the best he could. “And angels can do no more.”

The lots that didn’t sell eventually went to the county for unpaid taxes. This speculative real estate flop was due in large part to the perceived risk of along Hillside Drive.

Hillside Drive - Leif Ericson Drive

In 1903, John Olmsted wrote to the Portland City Council with a warning that nobody acted on. “It is true that some people look upon such woods merely as a troublesome encumbrance standing in the way of more profitable use of the land,” he wrote. “But such primeval woods will become as rare about Portland as they now are about Boston. If these woods are preserved, they will surely come to be regarded as marvelously beautiful.” Lumber companies ignored the challenge. City planners encouraged developers to subdivide the forested hillsides. In 1914 a private consortium built Hillside Drive along the east face of the Tualatin Mountains, the road that would eventually be renamed Leif Erikson Drive, specifically to open the hills to residential development. Lots were platted. Assessments were levied. Sales were anticipated.

Then the road washed out.

A landslide in 1915 closed the main access route. Without the road, the lots were unreachable, and unreachable lots do not sell. During the next two decades, landowners walked away from their properties. Multnomah County collected what it could in tax-delinquent land., and eventually the county transferred the land to the city.

Mike Houck, urban naturalist with the Portland Audubon Society, put it plainly at the park’s 50th anniversary: “If Leif Erikson road had not washed out, and the already platted subdivision had not gone into tax foreclosure, what has been described as the jewel or crown of Portland’s park system would not exist today.”

Camp Tolinda

Near Germantown Road the trail passes the area once occupied by Camp Tolinda, a Camp Fire Girls summer camp that operated here for decades. The shelter burned to the ground in December 1975. Summer programs continued for another decade in its absence, but eventually those too ended. The intersecting Tolinda Trail follows the old camp road, keeping the name alive.

The isolated camp structures were actually twice destroyed. First in 1961 by ax-wielding vandals, then again in 1975 by suspected arson.

Bruno Kolkowsky

In September 1985, a 75-year-old parks volunteer named Bruno Kolkowsky began working on an 18-inch-wide rough path in Forest Park just north of Germantown Road. Over the next 15 months he donated 640 hours of his time, using hand tools to remove stumps, widen the path, grade it, and smooth it into a 6-foot-wide trail for 1¾ miles. The Parks Bureau gave him its Volunteer of the Year award in May 1986. He worked closely with Fred Nilsen, Forest Park arboriculturist, and Bill Sauerwein, who had spent years walking these hills and who, somewhere in this same stretch of park, had located the “biggest” tree in the city. A bench along the trail carries a placard that reads: This Trail is his Legacy.

At the same 1986 awards ceremony, the Bureau’s life service award went to Barbara Walker for many years of leadership and efforts to preserve open space in the city. Walker helped create the Marquam Nature Park, and was president of the 40-Mile Loop Land Trust. The Barbara Walker Crossing over West Burnside St., where this series began in Part 1, is named for her. She and Kolkowsky received their awards on the same night, on a stern-wheeler on the Willamette.

The leg ends at the BPA power line corridor, where the canopy opens abruptly and the sky reappears. The power lines run through on a utility easement, as they have since the mid-20th century. After miles of enclosed forest the sudden exposure feels almost disorienting. The sky comes into view for a moment, before the forest envelops the hiker once again.

I spent a few days with my son hiking in the North Cascades last summer. The North Cascades is, according to one YouTuber who titled his video The Most Breathtaking Hike of my Life!, the “American Alps”.

It’s also one of the least visited National Parks in the US lower 48. It ranks as the second-least, to be precise, after Isle Royale National Park in Michigan, a large island in Lake Superior which requires over 12 hours travel time from the closest major airport. All of this to say, it’s a mystery to me why so few people visit the North Cascades.

We saved this hike for our last day, because we were staying on the east side of the range and the hike was on the west side. What we failed to comprehend was the east side forecast calling for clouds meant west side rain. The North Cascades operates like a giant squeegee, scraping the moisture from the cloud layer. And so it was, that the grand vistas of chromatic glacial valleys were replaced by a visibility of 100 feet or so; a blanket of silvery grey.

The hike started at the end of a gravel spur road. The trail was essentially switchback after switchback for over 3 miles, gaining 1,700 feet in elevation as it climbed the SW flank of Sahale Mountain under a conifer canopy. Streams and seeps were alive with water coming down the slope. The canopy was a safe, warm refuge for the birds on that day. They called to each other as we climbed.

I have to say, I was really enjoying the thick fog. The construction of the trail was superb; a nice even climb. The canopy filtered out the fine rain. I focused my attention on the near field wonders. The numerous little waterfalls were vivid landscapes in miniature. The wildflowers and mosses seemed to glow in the visibility deprivation tank.

As we got closer to the exposed ridge traverse the fog thickened and heavy rain began to fall. It felt like we were in the clouds. “Every cloud has a silver lining,” according to the Milton poem that birthed the phrase. The metaphor of the bright cloud edge is taken here to mean every negative situation holds positive qualities, so long as you are able to notice them.

We made the call to turn around before the pass, which was only a few hundred yards away.

The experience didn’t match the expectations we set for it, and I’d be lying if I said it wasn’t a disappointment for both of us. Still, it was memorable and special for its dreamlike quality. As the visible was minimized, the audible was maximized; ephemeral, resonant, and enveloping.

Thanks for joining me here. Cascade Pass Rain is available on all music streaming services today June 5th, 2025. Also, the first two singles from my vinyl LP release Wildwood Trail Soundwalk are also out and available to stream. Find the limited run LP only on Bandcamp. (20% off pricing is extended through release day, June 26) Lastly, I posted Part 7 from my in-depth series on the Wildwood Trail a few days ago. So long for now!

The Hardesty Trail descends east from this junction toward Leif Erikson Drive, named for William Preston Hardesty, a city engineer turned Mazamas president who organized the club’s walks department for decades before his death in August 1944. The Mazamas cut the trail that same year, in the burned interior. Nearby they planted 5000 Douglas-fir and 50 western redcedar trees in the late 40’s.

Hardesty left a trust fund to the organization, paid out 21 years after his death. The money arrived around 1965, just as a new generation of teenagers was cutting trails a few miles to the south.

Most people who hike this trail have no idea how much labor goes into making it feel effortless. The work is meant to be invisible. Leif Hoven, a veteran trail volunteer who now chairs the Mount Hood chapter of the Pacific Crest Trail Association, described it this way: “You don’t want to have it look like it’s just been completely mowed and shaven and barren. All of a sudden you come to a spot that’s been touched up and cleaned up, you do tend to notice it.” The goal is to make it appear as natural as possible.

After an unusually challenging hike on one of my favorite loops in the park, I was coming back up to the trailhead when I noticed a gentleman, maybe in his late sixties, wearing a sturdy backpack with a hand saw lashed to it. This was the day after a storm system moved through, and he asked me what I saw.

“There’s several smaller blowdowns, and one big one,” I said, looking at his gear, “I think you’ll need more than what you’ve got there.”

He was unfazed. He’d probably heard that before. “We’ll see. I’ve got my saw,” he said, with a game expression.

I don’t know why, but I had assumed that people just stopped using hand saws when it came to downed trees, even if they had to pack a chainsaw in over a mile from a trailhead. I checked in on the fallen tree the next time I made the loop. That 30-inch diameter tree was cut clean through. Two strips of bark had been removed from the circumference with axe work, revealing fine-grained log cuts on each side of the trail. I thought about what a tough job that must have been, but imagined it also came with its own sense of triumph and altruism. I haven’t looked at a cut log on the side of the trail the same way since.

Just a couple quick announcements before the main course: I have a new album out: Cedar Grove Soundwalk is available on all music streaming services today, May 22, 2026.

This was recorded on the wooded west slope of Powell Butte, here in Portland, Oregon, USA. I have more to say about it, but perhaps I’ll save it for a whole East Buttes series down the road. Also, “Swainson’s Thrush Meditation”, is my first single release in many years. If you haven’t checked that out, please do wherever music streams. Lastly a gentle reminder that my first-ever vinyl LP Wildwood Trail Soundwalk is hot off the presses, and shipping now, over a month before the streaming release, Jun 26th. Early bird 20% off price is still on offer through May! Now, on to today’s program…

This is an in-depth 10-part soundwalk series on the 30-mile Wildwood Trail in Portland’s Forest Park. Parts 1, 2, 3, 4, & 5 span Washington Park trailhead north to Ridge Trail. Feel free to press play below for the soundwalk environmental sound as we head further north!

The hills I’ve been walking through has a name most Portlanders don’t use. Not the West Hills. The Tualatin Mountains. It first appeared on a U.S. survey map in 1855, borrowed from the Tualatin tribe who, as a 1957 Oregonian writer noted in an off-hand, very mid-century way, “weren’t using it at the moment.” Tualatin means lazy, or sluggish; the character of the river that drains the range to the south. This is not a lazy range. Thirty-five miles long, covering 200 square miles, rising to over 1,600 feet, it separates the Willamette Valley from the Tualatin Valley in a series of steep ravines and forested ridge lines.

That same writer observed that few cities could claim a wilderness within their limits “where cougars roam at will, making headlines at happy intervals, where full-scale logging operations have been conducted…and big-time forest fires have raged in full view from the city’s main streets.”

Cougars still roam; though a doorbell camera at a nearby home might have a better chance of glimpsing one than the park visitor. Logging ceased in the 70’s. And while fires seem a distant memory, the risk is now greater than ever.

North of Saltzman Road, that character is on display. The trail drops into Doane Creek Canyon and the sounds change: water in the ravine below, birds in the alder canopy, not much else. The neighborhoods have fallen away. This is the interior.

The oldest layer visible in this landscape is the logging. On the largest stumps near the trail, rectangular grooves have been chopped into the wood at roughly chest height. These are springboard notches. A logger would fit a board into the notch, stand on it, and work from that platform rather than from the ground, cutting above the widened base of the trunk where the wood was cleaner. The loggers who made these cuts worked this hillside in the late 19th or early 20th century. The stumps are still here, slowly returning to the soil.

Fire came after the logging. A 1940 burn scorched hillsides south of Saltzman. The 1951 Bonny Slope fire was worse. It burned 1,600 acres on a hot August night, started by smoldering campfires in the wooded canyons near the St. John’s Bridge. A U.S. Forest Service researcher named William Morris watched it all Sunday night. At 10:30pm a spot fire appeared fifty feet from his observation post. By 11pm the wind had driven it to the viewpoint ridge. Standing trees crackled. The fire-scarred snags still standing in this section are what remains of that night.

Beginning in 1944, the mountain-climbing outdoor group known as The Mazamas ran a tree-planting campaign they called the Mazama Forest, cutting the Hardesty Trail to access the burned interior on the north end of the fire’s reach. By 1948 they had planted roughly 9,000 small trees across the park and built or improved six miles of trail. In March of that year they held their own dedication ceremony on a burned-over section overlooking the Doane Creek Canyon called Presidents Ridge. The younger, even-aged Douglas-firs growing through parts of this section owe something to that effort. They are now in their early eighties.

The 1951 fire had one lasting administrative consequence: fifteen fire lanes were cut broadly across the slope in the early 1950s, perpendicular to the hillside like rungs on a ladder.

Firelanes 5, 7, and 7A cross this leg of the trail. Colloquially, Firelanes 7 and 7A are called Oil Line Road and Gas Line Road — public utility easements for pipelines installed in 1956. The infrastructure of extraction runs beneath the wilderness. You’d never know it walking above.

One of the smaller trails branching off in this section carries a name that arrived by accident. Wiregate Trail was named by a park employee clearing storm debris, who found an old wire gate lying in the middle of the path — miles from any fence. Nobody knew where it came from.

On a Wildwood Trail related note, I have an announcement: My 100th soundwalk album, Wildwood Trail Soundwalk, is also my first vinyl LP. It will be released June 26th, and is available for order through Bandcamp today! The album is a celebration of the sounds of the iconic Forest Park trail and my bespoke composition for woodwinds, electric piano and synthesizers. An early bird 20%off special will run til May 31, and LP orders will ship starting today.

The first single “Swainson’s Thrush Meditation” is available on all music streaming services today, May 12, 2026. I’ll be sharing more about it over the coming weeks. I’m delighted to have something tangible and special to share with you. Thanks goes to MusicOregon Echo Fund and Portland Office of Arts and Culture for their support!

Now, back to the in-depth 10-part soundwalk series on the 30-mile Wildwood Trail in Portland’s Forest Park. Parts 1, 2, 3, 4 span Washington Park trailhead north to Chestnut Trail. Feel free to press play for the environmental sound as we head further north!

The trail drops into Rocking Chair Creek Canyon in a series of switchbacks and enters a stand the 1976 Oregonian described as “a hushed cathedral.” The big trees are here: Douglas-firs that survived the logging era that stripped most of their contemporaries from these slopes. One in particular beckons you: over five feet in diameter, growing close enough to the trail to reach out and run your hand along its bark.

How old is it? Growth rates vary by site and competition, but a Douglas-fir of this girth on the west slope of the Tualatin Mountains was likely a seedling in the 1700s. That puts its germination around the time of early European exploration of the Pacific Coast — before any settler set foot in the Tualatin Hills, before the Donation Land Act, before the logging that stripped most of these slopes bare.

Nearby Munger Creek is named for Thornton Munger, a Yale-trained forester who joined the U.S. Forest Service in 1908, and director of the Pacific Northwest Research Station in Portland. In his retirement he turned his energy toward Forest Park — chairing the Committee of Fifty, working the civic machinery, writing the history. The Oregon Journal described him in 1968 as “a crusading nature lover and conservationist” who “worked, led, pushed, cajoled, lobbied, inspired and contributed generously of his own funds,” adding that he “rebelled against greed, short-sightedness, and unmindfulness in entrenched bureaucracy.” He died in 1975, the year the Wildwood Trail was designated a National Recreation Trail.

It was Munger who organized the dedication ceremony for Forest Park on September 23, 1948, and the choice of location was fitting in ways that weren’t entirely intentional. The program was held, as the Oregon Journal announced, “on the old oil well site east of Skyline Boulevard, nine-tenths of a mile north of the junction of Thompson Road and Skyline.” That site lies near the original eastward, downhill turn of the Wildwood Trail in 1968, a segment since re-named Maple Trail, before the trail was rerouted north, keeping roughly to the 800 foot elevation to navigate the deeply cut Doane Creek canyon.

Around the time the City Club was writing its 1945 feasibility study recommending the park, rumors were circulating that the geology of the Tualatin Mountains suggested oil. The City Club, recommended the city explore the possibility first, reasoning that if no oil was found, the land was suited to nothing but parkland or clear-cutting. The City of Portland leased 2,000 acres within the proposed park to the Richfield Oil Company in November 1945, with Multnomah County leasing an adjacent 3,000 acres. Richfield drilled to 7,885 feet and found nothing. They terminated their leases in September 1946.

Two years later, Munger stood at the dry well site and dedicated the park. The dedication article noted, almost in passing, that “there are only remnants of the dense woodland that once covered these hills, and few and small are the spots where virgin forest remains. One of the noblest of these even now is being cut.” At the moment of dedication, logging was still happening on privately held land inside the park’s proposed boundaries.

A short distance further, the character of the forest shifts noticeably. The stately old-growth gives way to a stand of younger, even-aged Douglas-firs, still decades from the spaciousness of the trees upstream. These were planted by volunteers to reforest hillsides burned in the 1951 fire that seared 1,600 acres in the park’s midsection. They are now in their early seventies. The old trees and the young ones tell different stories. Age is part of it, but not all. The ancient survivors near Munger Creek earned their character through centuries growth undisturbed. In contrast, the planted stand is in its infancy, evolving. You can see both at once on this stretch of trail.

The trail reaches Saltzman Road at the present day 16-mile mark. The 1968 Wildwood Trail alignment northern terminus was a different junction altogether, downhill (that last 1.5 miles segment was rechristened The Maple Trail, and lengthened as a different route.)

Dale Christiansen, who had directed the Youth Task Force teenagers cutting the first segments of this same trail back in 1963, was by now the Parks Bureau superintendent. He had shepherded the Wildwood Trail for over a decade. According to a 1976 article in the Oregonian, the route beyond Saltzman Road was under construction, with the goal of reaching Germantown Road. “The project will take several years to be completed,” he estimated.

Saltzman

Here the trail crosses Saltzman Road, a name associated the ill-fated development of the Tualatin Mountains.

Peter Saltzmann (the family later dropped one “n” from the surname) homesteaded roughly 700 acres near Skyline Ridge around 1893. The access route from his land down to St. Helens Rd. on one side and NW Thompson on the other became Saltzman Road, completed by 1896. By the time Hillside Drive was constructed along the east face of the Tualatin Mountains in 1914, the Saltzman Investment Company had assembled 500 acres along the drive. It was the largest single holding listed among the property owners who funded the drive’s construction, at $20 an acre assessment.

The 1914 Oregon Journal described Hillside Drive as a “scenic highway of merit,” 11 miles of gracefully graded road offering panoramic views of the Willamette Valley, Vancouver, and the volcanic peaks.

The property owners who built it expected the drive to make their lots saleable and the hills developable. It didn’t. Construction and maintenance costs proved ruinous, the city raised assessments, buyers never came, and by the 1920s hundreds of acres along Hillside Drive (Renamed Leif Erikson Drive in 1933) were surrendered to the city for unpaid taxes. As early as 1916 the Saltzman Investment Company was already sidestepping obligations. The Company’s 500 acres eventually became part of Forest Park, while the road and the creek kept the name.

Thanks for joining me on this journey, and remember to check out Wildwood Trail Soundwalk on Bandcamp.

It’s a vignette, recorded from a 5th floor room in the 3rd arrondissement. Just over 6 minutes long. The composition resembles the series of mini albums I offered up last year as Sleeping Animal. The Pianet electric piano meanders its way along, creating a scaffolding for various washes and textures.

Something about the drips in the foreground and sizzle of puddles in the narrow street below are soothing.

Paris Rain is available under the artist name Listening Spot on all streaming platforms Friday, May 8th, 2026.

Thanks for reading and listening!

I’ve always felt a strong pull to Tahoma, having hiked around it on the Pacific Crest Trail in August, 1994. It snowed that August in the higher elevations; the biggest, wettest snowflakes I’ve ever seen and felt in my entire life. It snowed and rained for three days, and it was all I could do to keep my down sleeping bag dry. I was soaked. It’s one reason my experience of the mountain was so dreamlike. I sensed it, but I didn’t really see it. So it goes with mountains, and so it was that I was eager to see it and experience it with my son, thirty years later.

We arrived late in the day. Skies were clear and the sun’s rays bathed the alpine meadow in golden light. The southeastern face of the mountain loomed over our shoulder as we climbed the trail to a picturesque bench. Birds were singing their hearts out. Western Warbling Vireo, Hermit Thrush, Fox Sparrow, Pine Siskin, Townsend’s Warbler, Yellow-rumped Warbler…. We had a snack there, and I set my recording hat 25 feet away to soak up the soundscape.

Bench Lake sat below us; its placid crystal clear water reflecting the subalpine setting. Both Bench and Snow Lakes sit in a cirque—a giant amphitheater with the mountain at one end—that was formed over time by glacial erosion. This amphitheater effect, I think, can be discerned in the birdsong; almost like they chose the spot to amplify their crooning.

Listening back, I’m struck at how the creek—Unicorn Creek—has the same urgent sound of Comet Falls; that wideband shhh of a young creek coursing through steep, boulder-strewn valleys. Such great names here.

Approaching Snow Lake, the creek slowed as it moved through a shaded gully where snow still covered the trail. It was like something from a movie, painted in blue tones of snow reflecting the evening sky.

We scrambled down to a boulder at the edge of Snow Lake and ate M&Ms. Snow Lake was quiet and so were we.

Since then, my son has grown. Instead of two inches shorter, he is now at least two inches taller than me. In the time since, he’s also made significant progress on the piano, and is now composing songs that sound to me like they could have been written by the artists we both admire: Dustin O’Halloran, Joep Beving, Sergio Diaz De Rojas…

It’s almost like life has been speeding up. The pace of change is dramatic. And yet I look at myself in the mirror, and I see the same person, with lines slightly more drawn. My changes are largely hidden from view, my advances scarcely measurable. People make pronouncements about how one decade of life will feel compared to another—as if we move through them all the same. “Make memories,” they say, as if it’s just that easy.

Thanks for coming along. As always Snow Lake Soundwalk is available on all music streaming services today, May 1, 2026.

“Wildwood” is an old English word meaning forest in its untamed, unmanaged state. It’s poetic, slightly archaic even in the early 20th century. Wordsworth used it. Tennyson used it. By the time Portland was platting its west hills, “wildwood” had the aura of something romanticized: the forest of imagination as much as fact. It turned up elsewhere in Oregon: the name of a ship, a hamlet near Mount Hood, a golf course in Scappoose, a farm on Mount Scott, and a Girl Scouts camp that relocated several times in the region.

Camp Wildwood was established in 1908 and operated in various forms and locations over the following decades: Welches, Lake Oswego, and the Molalla River near Canby. The Girl Scouts also offered an in-town day camp, Camp Sacajawea, which by 1930 had building on a city lot near to the Holman Park entrance. Holman Park was folded into Forest Park in 1948. Later, in the early 1960s, Camp Sacajawea became the base of operations for Portland’s first Youth Task Force.

Launched in 1963, The Youth Task Force was the city’s summer employment program for teenagers. Sixty boys the first summer; 120 the next. Their mission in Forest Park was to clear brush, maintain roads, and make trails. Among the trails they built and maintained: the Ditch Trail, the Cleator Trail, and Rocking Chair Trail.

The namesake of the Cleator Trail, Fred Cleator, spent his career with the U.S. Forest Service in Portland, retiring in 1945 after decades of trail work across the Pacific Northwest. He helped survey and establish hundreds of miles of routes, including early segments of what would become the Pacific Crest Trail. When the city consolidated Forest Park’s fragmented sections into a single continuous route in 1967, the Cleator Trail was absorbed into the new alignment. Today, a short connector trail in the interior still carries his name, a tribute to a man who had given his working life to the trails of the Northwest.

The 1967-68 Forest Park Trails Log from the City Archives—typed on a manual typewriter, retrieved from City Archives on request—shows the trail system in transition. Ditch Trail, Cleator Trail, Rocking Chair Trail, Wild Cherry Trail, Nature Trail: all appear as separate named segments. And at the head of the Wildwood Trail entry, the starting point is listed plainly as “0.00 Nature Trail & Cleator Trail.” The name had already been chosen. By the fall of 1967, the Wildwood Trail existed, at least on paper.

By August 1969, the Sunday Oregonian was running a full-page feature on Forest Park that described the Wildwood Trail as “the longest in the system,” running twelve miles from Saltzman Road south to the Japanese Gardens in Washington Park.

Timeline

• 1957: Committee of 50 votes on a new name for Forest Park. “Wildwood” was mentioned in the article in a field of five names.

• 1960: Segments of what would become the Wildwood Trail appear on published Forest Park map: Upper Macleay Trail, Lower Macleay Trail, Holman Park Trail, Ditch Trail and Cleator Trail.

• 1961: An Oregonian article outlined a vision for future trail building: “[Dale] Christianson’s long-range plan is to have a trail through the full length of the park. Following the steep contours of the park, this would allow a one-way hike of 12 miles.”

• 1963: An Oregonian article describes how high school boys from Camp Sacajawea, made significant trail-building progress: “In 46 days since the city’s youth work program was started the boys cleared more than 40 acres of rugged wilderness and opened up six miles of trails.”

• 1964: The program returned for a second summer, now 120 boys strong. A separate Oregonian article that year headlined Plan Sees Pittock Tract As Link Connecting Various Parks Sections, stated “Acquisition of The Pittock Estate Would Provide a continuous skyline trip of parks…a botanical paradise ranging all the way from primitive forest to scientific and formal gardens”

• 1967 The first known citation of the name “Wildwood Trail” appears in the 1967-1968 Trail Log.

• 1968: The first widely published record of the Wildwood Trail arrives in an updated Forest Park Trail map. The Wildwood Trail is shown as a 12-mile linear trail.

• 1969: The name “Wildwood Trail” first appears in an Oregonian article

Conclusions

So what conclusions can we draw? Quite a few. Of the five principal questions, where, when, why, how and who, we can tick off about three and a half:

1. Where: The Wildwood name was first applied to a trail segment beginning at the Nature Trail trailhead (where it joined with the Cleator Trail). It wound down 2.5 miles to Leif Erikson Drive.

2. When: 1967. The name was in use by 1967 and ascribed to six other previously named trail sections in 1968.

3. Why: Consolidation. Several different names for a continuous route is confusing. The 1967-1968 Trail Log document illustrates just how confusing the trail network was. The only name that could descriptively accommodate all the sections was also the most recent: Wildwood. (This is speculation, of course, but it does stand to reason. Half point.)

4. How: Like most place names, it first appears on a log or map, then it just sticks.

5. Who: The records don't say.

The most likely candidates for who are a small circle of Parks Bureau planners, particularly Dale Christensen, the city park forester who directed the Youth Task Force. What we do know is that “Wildwood” had already been formally proposed as the name for the entire park a decade earlier, in 1957, when the city solicited suggestions from the public. More than fifty names came in; a committee narrowed the field to five, Wildwood among them. The final vote: Portland Forest Park 45, Skyline Forest Park 44. Wildwood didn’t make the final two. The trail, quietly, took the name the park had turned down.

There may be a living person who knows the rest of the story. If so, they haven’t written it down anywhere I can find it. The trail got its name the way trails often get named: informally, by someone with the authority to put a word on paper.

Camp Sacajawea is gone. The old Cleator Trail is gone, folded into something larger. Those teenagers are in their late seventies now, if they're still around. But the name Wildwood is still out there on signs at every trailhead, on maps and apps and trail guides. Some names outlast their origins by quite a lot.

I’ve mentioned this before, but I think waterfalls rarely translate the way you’d hope they would in sound. They’re so dazzling to look at, and it’s exhilarating to feel the rush of wind and spray near the bottom, but not all that interesting to listen to, it turns out. They kind of sound like FM radio static: Shhh. Most of them anyway. And alas, Comet Falls is no remarkable exception on that score.

And so it goes most any waterfall may be more sonogenic when captured in a soundwalk format, as this captures a dimensionality that isn’t conveyed in a fixed point recording.

The hike to Comet Falls follows Van Trump Creek through the canopy and along hillside openings with talus slopes, where you might find Pika (sounding a high-pitched peep). The wildlife was subdued under the grey sky on this day. Varied Thrush, Dark-eyed Junco, and Pacific Wren can be heard to the attentive listener in headphones, but this is mostly a water soundwalk. Our journey takes us to the waterfall viewpoint and follows a return path for a couple minutes.

Another thing about waterfall sound: unless you get really close (like next to water splattering on rocks) it’s difficult to discern when you are “there”.

This is another composition where I’m keeping to the low octaves of a particularly sonorous electric piano. (It would not sound good on a phone speaker.) I do this to preserve listening space for all the water and wildlife frequencies, and also because I just like the dark (as opposed to bright) vibe for this one.

I’ve always thought that a waterfall walk would make an interesting canvas for a super-minimal synth score for droning synth pads and very slowly morphing pitches and timbres, mirroring the manifold sound of the waterfall’s creek outlet. This is not that, exactly. Though it occasionally goes there, it’s more melodic and approachable. Written in a D minor, the composition evokes the cloudy sky and the slow climb through the valley. The harmonics are ponderous, peppered as they are with sustained second chords, and textured with organ washes and soft, flutey synth pads.

Thanks for reading and listening. Comet Falls Soundwalk is available on all music streaming services tomorrow April 10th, 2026.

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One thing that is not abundant along the Netherlands coastline are hills, canyons, and gullies. It’s for this reason, the bicycle is embraced as a primary form of transportation for many (maybe most) people. Amsterdam is alive with cyclists in part because the flat landscape is so conducive to cycling. And, because more trips are made via bicycle, the inner city does not pulse with automobile traffic sounds in the same way that a hilly, post-industrial city might. San Fransisco, for example. Or wherever.

All of this is background to presenting to you today the first of many soundscape and soundwalk recordings that embrace anthropogenic sounds (alongside the wildlife sounds) in these urban environments. Consider this an easing-in.

We are getting our feet wet, so to speak, in the Oud Zuid district of Amsterdam, alongside the Noorder Amstelkanaal, as the city wakes up, on a summer day. Sirens mix with songbirds in a strangely musical way. Overall, though, it’s astonishingly quiet. The buildings and canals form an engineered canyon, of sorts.

It’s well known that travel can spark a person to reconsider assumptions; to make new associations. I guess that can be said of my travels in Europe last summer, leading me to re-evaluate my approach to making environmental recordings. In some ways the cities sounded familiar to the one I call home. In others, quite distinct. On the whole, I was able to find new appreciation for these city sounds in general, hearing them with fresh ears.

There is a futility in attempting to record soundscapes free of any anthropogenic sound. Our noisy machines routinely puncture the soundscapes of even the most remote locations. It comes as a relief to me, therefore, to chart a new course that embraces the totality of sound, with less rigidity.

Amsterdam Dawn is available under the artist name Listening Spot on all streaming platforms tomorrow, Friday, April 3rd, 2026. Thank you for meeting me here; for listening and reading. There’s a lot to read and hear in this modern world. I’m grateful for your interest in my little corner.

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This soundscape was recorded in Forest Park last year around this time, on a dead-end, unnamed trail that doesn’t see a lot of use, but nonetheless features a sturdy old bench. It is a pretty sweet listening spot for this reason, and this particular time slice offers a pretty accurate sound portrait of our soft rain. Our soft power.

Did you know that the Pacific Temperate Rainforest—a bioregion extending from the northern California redwoods to the coastal forests along the gulf of Alaska—can pack more carbon per acre than a tropical rainforest like the Amazon?

The Pacific Temperate Rainforest is the second-most dense biomass repository and carbon sink in the world (bested only by the Eucalyptus regnans forests of Victoria and Tasmania, Australia) and it’s what gives our Pacific Northwest rain its unique character (and sound). The Pacific Temperate Rainforest operates like a giant lung. Just as a lung draws in air, extracts what's vital, and releases what the body needs to stay alive, the Pacific Temperate Rainforest breathes on a continental scale, pulling carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere and locking it away in massive old-growth trunks, roots, and the deep organic soils beneath them, while exhaling oxygen and releasing moisture that cycles inland as rain. The forest doesn't just store carbon passively; it actively pumps water vapor into the atmosphere, seeding clouds and feeding rivers that sustain salmon, which in turn fertilize the forest floor when they die. It’s a closed loop where nothing is wasted.

Spring Shower is available under the artist name Listening Spot on all streaming platforms Friday, March 20th, 2026. I’ve made it available here in its entirety with the idea it might be useful.

Thanks for reading and listening!

Nature Trail was built in the 1960’s in the interior of the roughly 5,000-acre nature park that had been dedicated 20 years prior, but received little attention in the way of development. Indeed, the most newsworthy question in those early years seemed to be what should we call it? In 1957, a call for suggestions—perhaps favoring something more showy than the functional, socially adopted name, The Forest Park—yielded many (Skyline, Tualatin, Wildwood, Tualatin Mountain…) but the de-facto name won the day. Officially, “Portland’s Forest Park” was favored by one vote over “Skyline Forest Park”. The “Portland’s” part never seemed to really catch on.

Actually, the biggest changes to the park, to this day, came in response to a 1951 fire that burned over 1200 acres in the center of it. Fifteen emergency access fire lanes were constructed in the early 1950’s, broadly perpendicular to the slope of the Tualatin Mountains, like rungs on a ladder.

What was nature for in the 1950’s? Accessible nature was becoming scarce. The public wanted protections from both development and the threat posed by wildfire.

These fire lanes likely became informal points of entry for the park users in the early years. A network of hiking trails was modest: around 10 miles in total, on the southern end in 1960. Today there are over 80 miles of trails.

What was nature for in 1960? A refuge to visit and admire via trails and lanes.

Today, Nature Trail still harbors subtle clues to its origins There’s an old steel pole gate and concrete bollards covered by so much moss they could pass for stumps at the end of Fire Lane 1. It all appears quite out of place in the quiet interior of Forest Park. Nearby there is a meadow-like ridge with a couple weathered picnic tables.

Starting in the late 60’s and running for about two decades or so, this was the drop zone for thousands of children in a campaign to foster a connection with nature, formalized in 1968.

A rare 1968 publication in the Library Use Only stacks of Multnomah County Library holds the key to understanding Nature Trail: Portland’s Forest Park Nature Trail was a 32-page interpretive guide authored by Oregon Outdoor Education Councils as informal curriculum for a generation of school children. Fifty-two markers on Nature Trail were keyed to entries in the guide. Midway through the trail was a shelter, bathroom and campfire area. Bus drop off and pickup areas were located on each end.

What was nature for in 1968? Nature was a common good. It was a living lab for learning about the interconnectedness of plants, animals and humans, as stated in the booklet introduction:

If you are quiet and observant, you may see some of the animals that live here.

The forest community is a living area of plants and animals. It has many parts. Some tall plants shade everything on the ground. Under these grow the medium size and the small ground plants. Part of the forest community is the soil and the many organisms that live in the ground. It is the animals that live in the forest. It is the water that comes from the forest. The forest community is many more things. (Portland’s Forest Park Nature Trail, 1968)

Mind you, this was all designed and implemented a couple years before Earth Day made its debut. A 1970 Oregonian article about Nature Trail noted the large coalition involved— the Park Bureau, Multnomah County schools, U.S. Forest Service, Oregon State Game Commission, Industrial Forestry Association, and others. Much of the trail building for Nature Trail was done by the Neighborhood Youth Corps, employing low-income urban teenagers in public works projects. It all took coordination and vision. Precisely who the masterminded Nature Trail isn’t easily discerned, but there is little doubt Thornton T. Munger was a galvanizing force from the late 40’s into the 60’s, inspiring people to work together, while advancing principles of conservation and education in the nascent Forest Park.

Munger’s own connection to nature can be traced back to growing up next to an eighteen-acre natural area called Hillhouse Woods in North Adams, Massachusetts, which fostered his lifelong interest in forests. In 1908 he was hired by the US Forest Service, and trained under Gifford Pinchot, who between 1905 and 1910 oversaw a rapid expansion, roughly tripling the number of National Forests and acreage. In his retirement, Munger chaired the Committee of Fifty, convincing city leaders to designate the lands as a nature park. The committee eventually became the Forest Park Conservancy, that to this day provide a Nature Education Program with free public events, organize volunteers, raise money, and conduct community outreach.

In 1960, Munger—in collaboration with C. Paul Keyser—wrote a 32 page report entitled The History of Portland’s Forest Park. In Part IV A Look Ahead, they write,

In a few years nearly a million people will be living within a few miles of the Forest Park. Residences will crowd about it on three sides and industry will dominate its eastern edges. …There will be pressure to widen the roads, to straighten the curves, to pave, to build more roads. This should be resisted, for this “wilderness within a city” is not a place for speeding motorists; here there should be no need for haste. ...Here within city limits will be a continuous forest 7½ miles long. The roads and trails will be under over-arching trees, varying from virgin forest with giants up to 8 feet in diameter, to thrifty second-growth stands of tall Douglas fir.

What was nature for in the 1960’s and beyond?

1. To provide facilities that will afford extensive nearby outdoor recreation for the people and attract tourists.

2. To beautify the environs of Portland.

3. To provide food, cover, and a sanctuary for wildlife

4. To provide a site on which youth and other groups may carry on educational projects.

5. To grow timber which will in time yield an income and provide a demonstration forest.

That last point became contentious within a couple decades. Limited timber harvests were being recommended by the committee up until 1975, when the Portland Parks superintendent, facing environmentalist pressure, ruled out selective logging as part of over-all park management.

What was nature for in 1975? Forest Park was closer to becoming a quasi-wilderness area, protected from all resource harvesting. (The Forest Park Rock Quarry lease was terminated in 1979.) Fire suppression remained a primary concern, though seasonal manned fire lookouts were by then retired.

So when and why did the Nature Trail program dissolve? It’s not clear when, and I can only speculate on why. For starters, interior access roads around the park were closed to motor vehicles sometime in the 1980’s. Therefore, any bus passage would have been met with more friction. The built elements of Nature Trail would have been approaching their expected lifespan: numbered posts would be weathered and broken, the shelter roof would have by then become what we now call a “living roof”: an ecosystem of duff, mosses and seedlings. Beyond that, the environmentalist awakening of the 1970s met a formidable obstacle with the Reagan administration of the 1980s.

So where are we now? What is nature for in 2026? In the pendulum swing of US politics we are lurching back to the 80’s mindset. Environmental protections are being systematically dismantled by the current administration in naked collusion with the fossil fuel industry. “Drill baby drill,” is one of the president’s most cherished rally cries.

When I think back to my childhood in primary school, my most vivid memories are of when either someone visited the classroom, or the class took a field trip. I distinctly remember going to a site to hunt for fossils. I vividly remember Outdoor School; basically an overnight camp experience for sixth graders. Perhaps that’s what really replaced Nature Trail: the significant expansion of its objectives with Outdoor School.

The first large scale implementation of Outdoor School in Oregon occurred in 1966, serving 500 students. The program grew steadily for decades, but faced budget pressures over the years as schools cut extracurricular spending. In 2016, Ballot Measure 99 saved and expanded it, setting aside Oregon Lottery funds to provide Outdoor School for every one of Oregon's 50,000 fifth and sixth graders, passing with over 67% of the vote. While other states have more modest programs or aspirations, this guaranteed entitlement is unique to Oregon.

Perhaps more than any point in the last 50 years, US leaders have adopted an aggressively extractive attitude toward nature. For Oregonians, the 67% vote for Measure 99 was its own kind of answer to the question Nature Trail was posing back in 1968.

May in Forest Park is peak birdsong time. My score is electric piano centered—I love the deep tones of this one. It’s naive and minimal as per usual.

Thanks for reading and listening. Nature Trail is available on all music streaming services today, March 13th, 2026.

Two months into 2026 and I’m feeling strange, I have to say. My instincts are telling me to just keep my head down, get some work done, take care of my family and myself… My worries are varied, but for the purposes of this post I’ll confine them to the context of my work, which is to make music. Before I go further, I have a new song to share with you that is perhaps a little bit out of character. It’s called “Doomscroll Timer” by Mello C, a pseudonym I invented in 2020. Feel free to press play. It will become clear should you choose to read on.

My repertoire of the last six years or so could be reasonably called “functional music”, or “mood music”. Both have a dismissive connotation in this era, which I have come to weirdly embrace. This body of work uses my own environmental field recordings in equal measure to my compositions. Lately I’ve been trying on the label “environmental music” when I write the requisite blurbs for promotion. It is not a well-codified genre.1

If I were an influencer, you’d call this formula of environmental recordings + minimal compositions my brand. I prefer calling it my practice. The word practice, I think, is a nice word. It holds within it the notions of both imperfection and intention. Amateurs practice to get better. I’ve always thought of myself as an amateur, even when my tax returns paint me in a professional box.

So, yeah, I’ve been feeling strange: a profound uncertainty seems to have settled in, having more than a little bit to do with the gathering clouds of an AI sea change, or at least the projection of one. Functional music may very well be ground zero for AI-generated music displacement in music streaming. The worldwide audience is large, and the bar is pretty low for AI slop. The bar might realistically be, can you fall asleep to it?

While AI can crank out a relaxing tune, it can’t go on a soundwalk. So, while functional musicians are getting squeezed writ large, my obsession with environmental sound (including the place and date noted on every cover, and discussed in detail here on Substack) is perhaps my competitive advantage. My moat, as they say.

Still I’ve been feeling vulnerable, and I’ve been looking at my options for making ends meet, should my streaming revenue plummet. Prior to going all in on ambient and field recording, I created functional music of a different sort: production music. For a while production music licensing was my bread and butter. Like ambient, it too is seemingly low hanging fruit for AI.

What is production music, you ask? Production music is just another type of functional music. It’s any kind of music that goes into a production: it serves the product. The product could be a film, ballet, podcast, or an ad for a product or service, and so on. I fell into a rhythm of creating instrumental music after setting a goal to anonymously write and share three instrumental songs a week via podcast in 2007. My pen name—with a nod to the then-nascent podcast delivery vehicle—was Podington Bear.

When my Podington Bear songwriting sprint was winding down, I pivoted, starting a new podcast called Sound of Picture. It offered up moody, atmospheric songs, one by one, each paired to a photograph: the sound of the picture. This podcast was short-lived, existing just a few years, with sporadic updating. In 2013, when I built up enough instrumental tracks to set up shop as a one-man boutique music licensing house, I appropriated the under-utilized domain soundofpicture.com that I registered a few years prior for my new music licensing site. Thirteen years later, Sound of Picture is still alive and kicking, with well over 4000 tracks on offer. It is also the name of the label imprint that collects all of my musical works after 2008.

By the mid 2010’s Sound of Picture, and music licensing in general, outperformed other revenue streams generated from wearing various other hats in the music industry. I ran/run a label called HUSH Records (est. 1998); I managed merch fulfillment for The Decemberists for well over a decade; and I helped singer-songwriter Laura Veirs run her own label for most of the 2010’s.

In 2018, I retired from these roles, hung up the name Podington Bear, and discovered the rejuvenating effect of listening to the natural soundscape. Field recording became a way to document this listening practice. Before long, all of my recorded output became a kind of “bottling up” of these listening sessions in nature, accompanied by the instrumental music they inspired. My approach fundamentally changed. I wasn’t thinking this will fill out my licensing library. To the contrary. I just wanted to do it for myself. In that spirit I released the new work under my own name, and didn’t bother to add it to my production library. My discography ballooned, and my streaming income grew while my licensing income waned.

At the beginning of the year I couldn’t shake the feeling that it could all wash away. From its height, Sound of Picture business has fallen precipitously. So, I resolved to put a little elbow grease in to my somewhat neglected music licensing enterprise. I remixed all of the environmental music of the last six or seven years—removing the field recordings—concluding that they would certainly be useful to someone, written as they were to accommodate a layer of sound in the frequency range of the human voice. (Birdsong was the stand-in.) The problem with most music libraries, I think, is that the music is overcooked. Musical scores often work better with stark arrangements. There’s little need for verse-chorus-bridge stuff.

After tripling the track count, I implemented new simplified licenses and an affordable subscription model. Lastly I gave the site a little glow-up. I realized it may all be too little too late, but, I also knew it was now or never.

If you use music in your line of work, pop on over and see if something could be useful. I think I have something to offer that bigger services don’t.

Last month I was inspired to make new music in the vein of dusty pseudonyms I invented over the last decade: Mello C was my experimental beat-making from a park bench moniker of the early 2020s. A. A. Aalto was my power-ballad reservoir of the late 2010’s. I’ll be rolling out all-new offerings from both over the coming months. I’ll probably mention these releases in passing, but Soundwalk will continue to serve up the environmental music you’ve come to expect.

Doomscroll Timer is the first stand-alone 3-track single release filed under Mello C, now available on all streaming platforms.

Looking forward, on one hand I know exactly what’s in store this year: I just uploaded practically my entire 2026 release schedule to my distributor. There will be some surprises. On the other, I have no idea—I really do feel like the music landscape is shifting beneath my feet.

Finally, I think the topic of AI and music deserves its own post, so I didn’t delve into the mechanics and thorny issues here. I do have some thoughts.

Dosewallips River Trail is the remains of one such spur road that washed out in 2002. The road reroute/repair proved too costly, and so has added to the relative inaccessibility of the canyon.

When paired with the East Fork Quinault River Trail, this makes an enticing 35-mile multi-day backpack traverse through Enchanted Valley in the southern interior of the park.

The Enchanted Valley offers lush old-growth rainforests, towering mountains with countless waterfalls, and an iconic chalet, nestled in an absolutely stunning valley.

This soundwalk barely scratches the surface of the wilderness soundscape that awaits the visitor here, but it’s an appealing teaser. In these lower reaches, small wetlands thrive, fed by creeks coming down the mountain, making for ideal frog habitat.

Trilliums burst through the resplendent mosses found here.

A Great Blue Heron perches above a creek channel.

The name Dosewallips derives from a Twana Indian myth about a man named Dos-wail-opsh who was turned into a mountain at the river's source. Twana is the umbrella term for nine bands of Coast Salish groups that lived around Hood Canal, the largest being the Skokomish. As with so many tribes of the Pacific Northwest, a defining conflict the Skokomish faced over the last century was the salmon fishery collapse.

The ironically-named 1855 Treaty of Point No Point established a roughly 5000-acre reservation at the Skokomish River delta for the Twana bands, roughly 30 miles south of where the Dosewallips meets the Hood Canal, part of the Salish Sea. The 1920’s-era Cushman Dam projects on the North Fork of the Skokomish not only blocked fish passage to the upper river, they also removed the water from the river, tunneled it through a mountain, and dumped it directly into Hood Canal. From 1930 to 2008 the North Fork of the Skokomish ran nearly dry. Because lower river flows no longer flushed sediment and debris in the lower river, it caused a devastating pattern of flooding in the Skokomish valley where two-thirds of the Skokomish Reservation is within the floodplain.

After decades of legal struggle, the tribe reached a settlement in 2009 with Tacoma Power that resulted in a 2010 amendment to the dam’s federal license. This restored about 40% of natural river flows and gave the tribe joint management authority. The river now has considerably more water, a salmon restoration effort is in place on the North Fork, and the delta benefits from increased flows. Still, it’s just the first step toward restoration. The Skokomish valley is still flood-prone after 80 years of sediment aggradation, and the fish passage solutions are as yet underperforming.

So, what does this have to do with listening to the sounds of the Dosewallips River? For me, listening to a place just naturally arouses my curiosity. Who is making the sound? Why is it called Dosewallips? Who named it? Where are they now? What will I find upriver, downriver? How will the sound change? How has it changed over time?

That the mountain, river, and tribe were named after a mythical chief who was transformed into a mountain tells us something about a worldview tied to the language, where the landscape itself is imbued with not only personhood, but ancestry. Twana people viewed the river not as a resource, the land not as property, but as a living entity, as family. Coast Salish people spoke of animals with a similar non-hierarchical framing. Salmon were seen as gift-bearing relatives.

This was such a departure from the Euro-American worldview it was, and is, both hard to grasp and easy to dismiss. With the benefit of hindsight, though, it’s worth questioning how the English language encodes a worldview that can lead to short-sighted outcomes.

My score for the Dosewallips soundwalk is very relaxed and minimal; just four instrument voices in all. I drew inspiration from the frog choruses. It’s unusual for me to rest on an undulating single chord arpeggio for several minutes, but that’s what felt right for “Part 7, Frog Chorus”.

Now that I know a little more about the area, I’m eager to make a return. Thanks for reading and listening. Dosewallips Soundwalk is available on all music streaming services today, February 13th, 2026.

It was just last October that I introduced you to Mt. Tabor (if you weren’t already acquainted.)

I described it as a “island of green in a patchwork of grey.” And so it is: all 176 acres of it. The deal with mountains, though, is they only give the listener more acoustic vantage as you venture further up and in. There are few folds in the park’s contours, so getting out of earshot of boulevards pulsing with machine energy and airplanes raining down sound waves on approach to PDX, just 5 miles to the north, is nearly impossible. It’s also a well-loved, well-used park. Runners and cyclists breathe heavy scaling its slopes. People talk. On phones. It is not packed on a weekday, but it sure isn’t lonely either. All this sound energy is not a bad thing, don’t get me wrong, but why the first urban quiet park in the US? This is an exemplar?

It’s all about framing isn’t it? I mean yeah, you walk up the mountain and there’s downtown looking like a diorama set against the green West Hills. It looks quiet. It seems quiet. Quiet is so slippery, so subjective.

Maybe it’s the signal-to-noise ratio of the near field soundscape—of being able to key in on small sounds because the background noise is just a wash—that lends itself to the perception of quiet. When you can hear little birds, with their little bird-whisper sounds.

Or rain. Yes, rain with its crowd-suppressing effect; it makes the park seem quieter. Rain and wind in the trees masks the city din. Like passing through a veil, moving through the rain can feel transportive. It sounds a sizzle on the reservoirs, a diffused and hushed drum circle played on millions of leaves.

But still, the first quiet urban park in the whole of the USA? I love the sentiment, but the logic seemed imprecise. Unearned, even.

And then a few weeks ago, on a Wednesday, I went up there for a walk. Something was different. The gate to one of several lanes leading to one of several parking areas was locked shut. “Park Closed to Vehicles on Wednesday” a sign read. I don’t remember this. Is this new?

Then a thought occurred to me: maybe this is why it’s the first urban quiet park. Maybe it is earned. After all, cordoning off whole interior parking lots, even one day a week is sure to rankle some folks. This is what intention looks like, I thought. This is a place that, at least on Wednesdays, sounds different. Measurably quieter. It came with a cost. People can’t vroom in and out. They have to enter from the perimeter and use good old-fashioned human power to move through it.

Mt. Tabor Park, I’m sorry I ever doubted you.

But how long has this been going on? A while, it seems. According to a 2013 article, which references the closure policy, it’s been well over a decade; so long even the internet doesn’t know.

I love it when the internet—and AI, when it’s not hallucinating— doesn’t know something. That’s when I let my fingers do the walking through the maze of research tools the Multnomah County Library provides: not quite microfiche, but as close to it as digital gets.

Could the policy go back to the 1980’s? Conceivably. In a bulletin of Matters to be Considered by City Council, the Apr. 6, 1981 Oregonian references “an ordinance authorizing Parks to install 5 traffic control gates in Mt. Tabor Park” up for consideration. I found no events programmed for the park on a Wednesday thereafter, save for Audubon bird walks embarking from a perimeter entrance in 2006.

If it goes back that far, what really motivated no-vehicle-Wednesdays? Was a day of peace and quiet? Wilderness-in-the-city-Wednesdays? I’d like to think so.

On several spring and summer Wednesday nights, however the quiet park is jolted to life. Established in 2020, Mount Tabor Dance Community (aka MTDC or Tabor Dance) saw another role that the closure policy could lend itself to in summertime: Insulating their outdoor music-fueled events from the dense neighborhoods of SE Portland, while also minimizing potential conflicts of park users. Tracing its roots to the pandemic and dancing in chalk circles drawn for distancing, the event grew over the years to draw crowds in the hundreds. Last spring and summer MTDC started again at Mt. Tabor, then hopped around to at least five other Portland parks, making good on the motto “Portland is our dance floor.”

My score for Mt. Tabor Rain Soundwalk is very gauzy: mostly languorous synth pads and drones. Electric piano only enters the instrumentation in the final third of the recording. That’s my favorite moment; a tender melody receding into the blue-grey distance.

Thanks, my friends, for reading and listening. Mt. Tabor Rain Soundwalk is available on all music streaming services on January 16th, 2026.

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I picked this album to coincide with the new year because the field recording it is built on is, to me, a kind of tonic. It pulses with the sound of distant surf, wildlife, and a spring rain shower.

Recorded on April 10th last year at Agnes Creek Open Space, a 57 acre woodland in the heart of Lincoln City, Oregon, this soundscape features the low din of the ocean, the ebullient Pacific Wren, and a very nice ensemble of Varied Thrush adding their ethereal single-note song. In the distance we hear cheerful American Robins and Song Sparrows. In time, a Purple Finch and a Douglas’ squirrel take positions in the soundstage. Mixed flocks—bushtits and Chestnut-backed Chickadees primarily—pass through. It sounds like a thriving habitat, but it was not always this way.

The area was clear-cut in the 1960s. After that, it regenerated naturally, resulting in a very dense thicket of young conifers that became draped with invasive species. By 2000, when the city purchased the property with funds from an open space acquisition bond, it was overgrown and trash-strewn.

In 2013 the city conducted a selective forest thinning project, which improved forest health, and provided wood chips for a new loop trail. In 2016 a ribbon cutting ceremony celebrated carved benches and a footbridge created by local groups.

This environmental recording serves as a testament to the forces of both neglect and attention to create renewal. Yes, neglect. Don’t we all have issues we don’t tend to? We make resolutions and then fail to act on them. Sometimes that’s just a necessary step in natural rejuvenation, creating the necessary conditions for real transformation.

My composition takes cues from the low moan of the surf, with a variety of sampled and synthesized instrument voices selected to preserve space in the higher frequencies for the wildlife.

Coastal Forest is available under the artist name Listening Spot on all streaming platforms Friday, January 2nd, 2026. I’ve made it available here in its entirety with the idea it might be somehow useful. Thanks for reading and listening. And, again, may the promise of a fresh new year be a boon to us all!

ps. For a deeper dive from, see also Field Report Vol 26: Nelscott by Chad Crouch available on all-but-one streaming services.

So for starters today, I think we should discuss the weird name of this week’s soundwalk. It comes from a log cabin built in 1907, as the first administrative site in the Olympic National Forest. Ranger Emery J. Finch constructed it for his bride Mabel, and they moved in on April 22, 1908. Word has it he chose the spot for a nearby fishing hole, which came to be known as Ranger Hole. But the name, recorded in early years as “No. 27 Interrorem Administrative Site,” remains something of a mystery. This rustic cabin is still standing proud, near the SE border of the park, and you can even book a stay for $58/night in the near future.

“Interrorem” is latin. It’s law jargon for a legal threat, meant to compel compliance without resorting to a lawsuit or prosecution. It’s basically what a cease and desist letter attempts to accomplish, and it is undoubtedly a primary objective of any ranger: to convey authority over a domain. It is not however, a term that would often enter the lexicon of an early 20th century ranger. It’s difficult to imagine Emery saying to Mabel, after putting his whipsaw and adze to rest, “This will be our home, dear. We’ll call it Interrorem.”

Some say it was a scrambling of the less fussy word “interim.” Seems like we’ll never know. The important thing for this story is that the trail I walked for this soundwalk is basically the same path Ranger Emery J. Finch wore into the once-primeval forest to go down to the Duckabush River fishing hole he prized.

The cabin itself is surrounded by Big Leaf Maple trees in a clearing, giving way along the trail to western hemlock, Douglas-fir, and western red cedar. The Olympic National Forest is famous for its temperate rain forests, and while this watershed may not see the 130” of annual rainfall the famous Hoh Valley does, it too is a mossy wonderland.

On this rainy day soundwalk we are greeted in the beginning by Varied Thrush, before the woodland seems to envelop the visitor in quiet. As the rain lets up a little, we hear Golden-crowned Kinglets and trailside rivulets before the surging Duckabush River comes into the fore. Clocking in at 19 minutes, it’s on the shorter side, but long enough to relax me into slumberland.

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This is just a taste of what’s to come. We’ll hear more soundscapes from Olympic National Park in 2026! Thank you, as always, for joining me here, and for listening.

Interrorem Soundwalk is available on all music streaming services on December 12th, 2025.

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Just 10 minutes up a gravel road from the eastern Oregon city of La Grande, Morgan Lake is mysteriously a world apart. From its shores you see only rolling prairie giving way to distant mountains. Situated on a ridge, Morgan and its sibling Twin Lake have an implacable mirage-like quality. The surrounding topography—the absence of enfolding contours—doesn’t readily explain their presence. There is no incoming stream to feed them. Subterranean springs pump water from an active aquifer hidden below.

I found myself on the lake shore on a breezy March Saturday. People were fishing nearby. The wind billowed through the Ponderosa Pine canopy. An osprey occasionally called out. Nuthatches passed through. Later on, White-throated Sparrows sing in the quiet, followed by a wayfaring Winter Wren.

As I’ve shared in the past, I like to program my releases in batches. This is the last in a trilogy located in the Pacific Northwest, east of the Cascade Range. It’s lodgepole and ponderosa pine country. Once again, the main character in this soundscape is the mesmerizing whisper of the wind in the pines. This particular day was dynamic; the breeze ebbed and flowed. Occasionally it howled.

The arrangement is super sparse. Honestly it would likely fail as a piece of music without the wind. The ratio of solos to duets is about 50/50. Most of my arrangements are comprised of at least duets, most of the time. I think I was responding to the sense of loneliness I felt in the physical space. The chord progression is progressive. Each part adds another chord and more harmonic complexity. There is a touch of minor color, which sounds a little unsettling. Though it was recorded in early spring, it strikes me as a wintry listen. I hope you enjoy it.

Morgan Lake is available under the artist name Listening Spot on all streaming platforms today Friday, December 5th, 2025.

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In this Thanksgiving season, I just wanted to take a moment to express gratitude I’ve been feeling for three people here on Substack that I admire, and who have helped me to connect with a bunch of you.

Carson is a busy artist / illustrator and children’s book author, but when I asked her for her take on Substack almost two years ago she emailed back the same day with a 600 word email. At some point between then and now she added Soundwalk to the recommendations that appear in the sidebar of her newsletter, Slowpoke. In the interim nearly one in five of my subscribers found me through her! That knocked my socks off. It’s a testament to the naturally curious people that gravitate to her and her amazing work. Three cheers for Carson Ellis!

I was immediately curious about Rowen’s fast-growing newsletter, Field Notes, from its title. Her posts relate her observations, challenges and insights in pursuit of becoming both a regenerative flower farmer & florist and aspiring naturalist. Her recent posts indicate a measured advance toward the latter, given the sensory detail emerging in her writing. Rowen’s past recommendation of Soundwalk points to nearly one in ten subscribers finding me through Field Notes. Thanks Rowen!

Colin is the frontman for The Decemberists, the author of many books, and is married to Carson Ellis. You’d be forgiven for thinking he couldn’t possibly sound like his writing in real life, given his ability to weave in some impressive and uncommon vocabulary words in his newsletter, Colin Meloy’s Machine Shop, but I’m here to tell you that he does. He writes like he talks, folks. Colin slipped Soundwalk into a little list he worked up for the official guest-authored compendium The Substack Post halfway through 2024. I recollect my subscriber count jumped by well over 100 overnight! A generous inclusion, to be sure. Thanks Meloy!

It really underscores how meaningful word-of-mouth is to someone like me. If you’re reading this and found me through a recommendation, feel free to let me know with a ‘like’ or comment below.

On to this week’s soundwalk. Last week I shared a recording made at Natural Bridges in Washington, a site with two rock bridges spanning a rock-jumbled ravine. The bridges were the remnants of a lava tube cave ceiling, created 12,000 to 18,000 years ago. A few miles away, another complex of lava tubes known as Guler Ice Cave(s) remain intact.

These caves, once commercialized for their ability keep ice and preserve harvested crops by one Christian Guler, are easily accessed today, though exploring them extensively requires crawling through cold, dark, tight passages.

My recording is centered on the main cave mouth that is pictured above. Once again you hear that marvelous wind in the pines (which appeared in the previous two recordings) juxtaposed against a constellation of drips, plinks and plops in the foreground.

My composition pulls from complimentary instrument voices: the sweep of a dobro-derived synth pads; the resonance of low end stringed instruments; the percussive twinkle of a Dulcitone celeste; the shimmer of a percolating “swarm” synth pad. It’s all designed to mirror the tonality of the cave entrance environment.

Strains of Pine Siskin and Dark-eyed Junco filter in.

This is a short, textural audio postcard. I hope you enjoy it. Ice Cave is available under the artist name Listening Spot on all streaming platforms today Friday, November 21st, 2025.