Down by the River

 

The day before yesterday, I did a circumnavigation of the Portland portion of the Willamette River. I started by crossing the St Johns Bridge and going down 30, through NW to downtown, then along the Willamette Greenway Trail on the west side to the Sellwood Bridge. After picking my way across that miserable plank across the river in the far south, I came back up the Springwater Corridor Trail to the East Bank Esplanade, then along my usual commute up Greeley to Willamette and home (for a rough map of my route, click here.)

This route was an interesting combination of street riding and trails. I hadn’t gone from St Johns to downtown on the west side since last summer, when I gave the glass-strewn bikelane through industrial NW one shot before deciding to stick to Mock’s Crest. Riding down 30 is pretty much the worst taste of street biking you can get while still being in a bike lane: no views or interesting architecture, heavy and fast truck traffic sucking at you constantly, dust in your eyes, and sharp objects in your tires. However, on a Saturday it wasn’t too bad; much worse, to my surprise, was the multi-use path along Waterfront Park, downtown. Pedestrians, it turns out, are much more annoying than 18-wheelers.

After practically walking down the Waterfront, I connected to the Willamette Greenway Trail. While parts of this paved, (again!) multi-use trail were very nice, offering views of Ross Island and the boathouses along the Willamette, overall the trail was fairly unpleasant: it cut back and forth from the river to meander around various condos and stretches of private property; it was cracked and bumpy in many places because of growing tree roots; and it was perhaps four feet across and in use by many pedestrians, which meant I was rarely going more than five or six miles an hour. By the time I got to the (wretched) Sellwood Bridge, I had worked myself in quite a state over the inferiorities of urban trail-riding compared to road-riding.

Fortunately, my wrath was immediately tempered by an excellent trail-riding experience on the Springwater Corridor. On the north-south stretch along the Willamette, at least, the Corridor is the ideal urban bike trail. It goes on for miles with no stops or intersections with car traffic, features excellent views of the river, is paved as smooth as butter, and in most places is around eight feet wide and divided by a street-style dotted yellow line, to keep traffic moving in both directions. There were many pedestrians out, but there was enough room for them to keep to the right as I passed without forcing me into on-coming bike traffic. While the Willamette Greenway is more of a paved walking trail that grudgingly permits bikes, the Springwater Corridor is like an actual road, all for cyclists.

On the Springwater Corridor, I also saw some excellent bike graffiti (click on the picture for a larger view):

I don’t know what, exactly, “Gotcha all fixed up” means, but it’s officially entering my lexicon.

The Springwater Corridor connects to OMSI and the East Bank Esplanade through some nicely labeled streets between warehouses. On one of those warehouse walls, I saw this moving expression of faith:

Now that I think about it, if Eric Clapton is God, that explains an awful lot.

The north end of the East Bank Esplanade is a floating sidewalk, a trail that rises and sinks with the water level: riding across it feels almost like biking on the river itself. I paused there, and elsewhere along the east side, to take a few pictures of Portland’s Willamette, my personal favorite Superfund site:

Behind some floating sidewalk, the Steel, Broadway, and Fremont Bridges

 

The Burnside Bridge, and beind it, the Steel and Broadway Bridges

 

Portland really honors its Mark Twain legacy.