Hoyt Arboretum

Founded in 1928 to conserve endangered species and educate visitors, Hoyt Arboretum is a 190-acre park in the forest above Portland's NW area. It's only 15 minutes from downtown!

There are 12+ miles of trails to explore, my favorite is the Redwood Trail that takes you through towering redwoods and to the Redwood Deck -- a perfect place to sit and smell the trees and drink morning coffee.

Here's a trail map.

At the visitor center, you can park in the lot for a fee or there is plenty of street side parking. It's a few miles from downtown and there is a free shuttle (May-Oct) in Washington Park, which the Arboretum sits in. 

There's a lovely covered picnic area called Stevens Pavilion Picnic Shelter right near the visitor center, so even if it's rainy you can still come and enjoy the area.

There's more than 6,300 plants and 2,300 species growing here -- 63 of them are vulnerable or endangered. Many of them have signs telling you what you're looking at. 

The Hoyt Arboretum calls itself "a museum of living trees," for good reason: "Much of the value of Hoyt Arboretum’s trees and collections are invisible to the naked eye. When you look at one of the arboretum’s dawn redwoods (Metasequoia glyptostroboides), you may see a tree that looks exactly like others planted elsewhere. However, Hoyt Arboretum’s trees have a pedigree, or provenance, meaning that they were grown from seeds collected in the wild and the arboretum has documentation on where and when the seeds were collected. This means that scientists wanting to do research on native dawn redwoods, for example, which are otherwise found only in a small, remote valley in central China, can use Hoyt’s trees for data and specimens."