Fields Bridge Hike
From Oregon Hikers Field Guide
- Start point: Fields Bridge Trailhead
- End point: Tualatin Open Space East End
- Hike type: In and out
- Distance: 1.5 miles
- Elevation gain: 195 feet
- High point: 200 feet
- Difficulty: Easy
- Seasons: All year
- Family Friendly: Yes
- Backpackable: No
- Crowded: No
- Fields Bridge Accessibility Information (Access Recreation)
Contents |
Description
Some time during the last Ice Age, a 15 1/2 ton iron/nickel meteorite found itself embedded in a thick ice sheet, somewhere in what is now southern British Columbia or far northern Idaho/Montana. Several thousand years later, a cycle of massive floods, known as the Missoula or Bretz Floods (after the geologist J. Harlen Bretz) hurtled at 60 mph down the course of the Columbia River all the way to the Pacific Ocean. These floods, perhaps up to 100 of them between 15,000 - 18,000 years ago, came as huge ice dams gave way at the end of the Ice Age and massive amounts of meltwater from the continental ice sheet were released. The floods deposited sediments all along their course, but also transported large icebergs, some of them rafting massive boulders, among them what is now known as the Willamette Meteorite. On a side eddy up the Tualatin River, the meteorites frigid caddy came to rest on a West Linn hillside. The famous rock, which is the largest North American meteorite, was venerated by the Clackamas Indians, who recognized its singularity, but only became known to settlers in 1902. It now resides in the American Museum of Natural History in New York. The walk described here takes you to a series of interpretive signs about the meteorite and continues through two West Linn parks, Fields Bridge and the Tualatin River Open Space, to offer views of the Tualatin River.
The Fields Bridge Park interpretive site is part of the Ice Age Floods National Geologic Trail, designated as part of the Omnibus Public Land Management Act of 2009.
Walk down the paved trail with the Tualatin River flowing to your left. Come to a trail junction at a backwater, and go left under Douglas-firs and alders. Keep left at the next junction, passing picnic tables and benches and getting views down the final stretch of the Tualatin before it meets the Willamette. At a stone wall, read the interpretive sings about the Willamette Meteorite's rafting journey with the Ice Age floods. Go right at the next junction to stop under leafy bowers and read about the meteorite's Native American connections and its transportation to New York. Walk back now towards the river and go right to find a third set of interpretive panels describing the meteorite's plunge from space and the origins of the floods that carried it to a slope near here. There's a fishing platform with a picnic table to your left as you walk out towards the children's play area and, to your right, find three glacial erratics that were discovered in the vicinity. Note how different they are from the dark native basalts. The main parking area for Fields Bridge Park is beyond these rocks, next to the baseball diamond.
Now continue around the play area. Take a gravel path between the Tualatin and the community garden. Pass a send and the site of a recently demolished farmhouse. After walking by another section of the community garden, walk under the road bridge over the Tualatin to Dollar Street. Walk up past the former River House Restaurant and nursery. Turn left onto Brandon Place and, at the end of the Douglas-fir grove on the nursery property, a paved access lane leads down past a gate and a gaging station in the Tualatin River Open Space. Here, pick up a gravel trail leading right along the river. The area is grassy, with big-leaf maples, hazel, Oregon ash and red osier dogwood overhanging the path. Modern homes rise to your right. Reach the end of this path on the river.
You can walk back the way you came, or for a little loop in suburbia, head steeply up along a wooden fence, with blackberry thickets on your left. Reach River Heights Circle and go right. Stroll down the sidewalk, join Dollar Street, and go right to stroll back to Fields Bridge Park the way you came.
Fees, Regulations, etc.
- Dogs on leash
Maps
Trip Reports
- Search Trip Reports for Fields Bridge Hike
Related Discussions / Q&A
- Search Trail Q&A for Fields Bridge Hike
Guidebooks that cover this hike
- PDXccentric by Scott Cook & Aimee Wade
More Links
- Fields Bridge Park (West Linn Parks & Recreation)
- Tualatin River (Open Space) (West Linn Parks & Recreation)
- Original Fields Bridge Park Master Plan (West Linn Parks & Recreation)
- Fields Bridge Park West Linn Oregon (Active Rain)
- "Blue Heron "Art unveiling" at Fields Bridge Park Monday Oct. 22" (Oregon Live)
- "New trail in West Linn shows off giant ice age boulders" (Oregon Live)
- Willamette Meteorite (Wikipedia)
- Willamette Meteorite Agreement (American Museum of Natural History)
- The Willamette Meteorite: Lessons from Oregon’s Ancient Extraterrestrial Visitor (University of Oregon Library)
- Ice Age Floods National Geologic Trail Tour Stop I - Willamette Meteorite Interpretive Trail (Huge Floods.com)
- The Amazing Heavenly and Earthly Journey of the Willamette Meteorite (American Local History Network)
- The Crown Section of the Willamette Meteorite (Willamette Meteorite.com)
- Ice Age Floods National Geologic Trail (Wikipedia)
Page Contributors
- bobcat (creator)