Feel the edge of the largest urban forest in the United States. Forest Park covers 5,200 acres of the Tualatin Mountains — the ridge Portlanders call the West Hills — with Douglas fir, western red cedar, bigleaf maple, and red alder forest stretching nearly twelve miles from the Willamette waterfront to the city's western edge. The Wildwood Trail runs 30.2 miles through the park, making it the longest single trail within city limits of any American city.
The forest was preserved when it was: by the 1930s the hillsides had been logged, the houses that were being built on them were sliding off in the rainy winters, and the Olmsted Brothers — the landscape architecture firm founded by the sons of Frederick Law Olmsted — had recommended in a 1903 plan that Portland preserve the watershed. The city purchased the land through the 1940s, and Forest Park was formally established in 1948. The forest that has grown back in the eighty subsequent years is dense, shaded, and inhabited by black-tailed deer, coyotes, barred owls, pileated woodpeckers, and the occasional black bear.
You are within the city limits of a major American city. You can see the downtown skyline from the park's eastern edge. And you are in a forest that would not embarrass the Oregon wilderness.
Portland fought to keep this, and kept it.