Creating A Healthy Willamette River

The Willamette River Greenway trail at Heron Pointe condominiums on the river’s west side provides walkers with scenic views of the river and nearby Ross Island.

The newly completed Springwater on the Willamette bicycle and pedestrian trail links the downtown Vera Katz Eastbank Esplanade with the Johnson Creek’s Spring Water Corridor trail that extends 18 miles to the town of Boring in east Multnomah County.

The bluff overlooking Oaks Bottom Wildlife Refuge provides an opportunity to view wildlife close at hand and appreciate the integration of the natural and built environments. One-hundred sixty acre Oaks Bottom Wildlife Refuge, Portland ’s first official urban wildlife refuge, is in the foreground with Ross Island and the city’s downtown skyline in the background.

One of the primary tasks for the Institute over the past year has been bringing a portion of Ross Island into public ownership. After many months of meeting with Ross Island Sand and Gravel, the Mayor’s office, and Portland Parks and Recreation, 45 acres of Ross Island was donated to the city on October 31st, 2007.

Ross Island Vision Team: Envisioning Ross Island

The Institute has produced, with its partners at the Willamette Riverkeeper, Audubon Society of Portland, Greenworks landscape architecture, architects, and landscape architects a plan for Ross Island, Envisioning Ross Island, which lays out scenarios for how Ross and its sister islands Hardtack, East and Toe, might be managed as a unit with the Holgate Channel and the 160-acre city-owned Oaks Bottom Wildlife Refuge as an urban wildlife refuge complex, public natural area park, and place to contemplate nature in the heart of downtown Portland.

No Wake Zone for Holgate Channel

Ross Island and Holgate Channel

The Ross Island Vision Team is working with rowing clubs, kayakers and others to petition the State Marine Board to establish a no wake, 10-mile per hour speed limit in the Holgate Channel.

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Portland Memorial Mausoleum Mural

In 1991 Mike Houck worked with ArtFX Murals, Portland based professional muralists, to apply a 70-foot by 50-foot Great Blue Heron mural on one of the west facing walls of the Portland Memorial Mausoleum, which overlooks Oaks Bottom Wildlife Refuge. The original 17 inch by 20 inch water color by local artist Lynn Kitagawa was transferred to the wall by ArtFX painters, thereby beautifying one of the building’s walls closest to the Bottoms.

Portland Memorial Mausoleum Today

Seventeen years later the Institute, again working with ArtFX Murals, plans to expand the existing 3,500-square foot Great Blue Heron to an almost 50,000 square foot wetland motif, with Great Egrets, Great Blue Herons, waterfowl, Belted Kingfishers and other denizens one might see on an outing to Oaks Bottom Wildlife Refuge. Funding for the mural comes from Spirit Mountain Community Fund, Portland Bureau of Environmental Services, the Willamette Fun(d) of the Oregon Community Foundation. The paint is being donated by Miller Paint Company. ArtFX is donating most of the labor.

The Institute is collaborating with TrackersNW, a local environmental education nonprofit, to provide art and natural history field tours and art classes to Lewellyn Elementary, Grant High School and Cleveland High School. The mural is slated to be finished in mid-November of this year.

Portland Memorial Mausoleum With Proposed Mural

Wild on the Willamette

Wild on the Willamette, a joint production of the Urban Greenspaces Institute in the Audubon society Portland, explores the bicycle and pedestrian trails, kayak and canoe access points, and natural history highlights of the lower 35 mile reach of the Willamette River between the Canby Ferry and the rivers confluence with the Columbia at Kelley Point Park. The map was produced using PolyArt, a rip resistant, waterproof paper. The map was patterned after Metro's BikeThere! map, a map of the Portland Metropolitan region's bicycle trail system.

Wild on the Willamette has garnered numerous graphic design awards, recognizing the contributions of graphic designer Laurie Causgrove, Laurie Causgrove Graphic Design and artist Marla Bagetta. The map can be purchased through the Audubon Society of Portland's Nature Store.

"Instead of laying down an arbitrary design for a region, it might be in order to find a plan that nature has already laid down...a regional design of streams and valleys that provide superb natural connectors, into the very heart of the urban area. Where continuity has been broken, the pieces should be reclaimed wherever it is at all possible."

-- William H. Whyte, The Last Landscape, 1968

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