A friend and I engineered a 12 1/2 mile loop in Forest Park from the Tolinda Trailhead which went like this: Tolinda - Waterline - Wildwood - Hardest - Firelane 7 (briefly) - Trillium - Wildwood - Ridge - Leif Erikson Drive - Springville Road - Germantown Road - Tolinda Trailhead.
The trails were slick and squelchy in places, with patches of snow at the Wildwood level. Taking the old Tolinda Camp Road, we passed one of those old house foundations and then a cistern at the site of Tolinda Camp. Waterline took us up to the Wildwood, where we admired a big tree. Then we ascended the Hardesty and dropped down to the Wildwood again. The stretch of the Wildwood between Doane Creek and Firelane 7 offers views of the many madrones in the woods here reaching for the canopy in competition with fast-growing Douglas-firs. Some of the madrones have lost the battle and stand stark, dead, and skeletal in the understory.
We took the Ridge Trail down to get the view of the St. Johns Bridge and then returned to Leif Erikson Drive. I had never seen the lower end of Springville Road, so we headed down and soon understood why it’s not a trailhead. A little Christmas boat, complete with docking bollards and algae-covered lights and tinsel, decorated the roadside. The most fraught part of the hike was heading up Germantown Road 0.4 miles to the trailhead. There was no verge but constant traffic, necessitating some vigilance on the ascent.