Planning and conservation › Natural areas, parks and trails › Planning parks and trails
Metro plans future parks and stitches them together with trails. As a founding member of The Intertwine Alliance, Metro also works with community groups, businesses, local governments and nature lovers to create a world-class outdoor recreation network.
When you visit a park or hike a trail, you probably don’t spend much time thinking about how it came to be. But somebody did.
Metro’s parks and trails planning team transforms a raw resource – land – into a place where people connect with nature, exercise or commute.
After securing resources to publicly open an outdoor space, planners work with the community to answer important questions: What’s the best way to balance sensitive wildlife and plants with the people who want to experience them? How does this site fit into the region’s connected network of parks, trails and natural areas? What is this site telling us about how to better understand our sense of place? How will the final product reflect a site’s natural and cultural history? What does it mean to be a good neighbor? How can our park development help us to be more sustainable?
The answers help shape a master plan, which unfolds on the ground as landscape architects, contractors and artists fill in their parts of the puzzle.
Consider Graham Oaks Nature Park in Wilsonville. Nearly a decade after Metro purchased the land, it opened as a 250-acre park and outdoor learning laboratory. Three miles of trails – including part of the regional Ice Age Tonquin Trail – traverse a restored oak woodland, a wetland and a conifer forest. Along the way, visitors can learn about Native American tribes who harvested acorns at Graham Oaks and farmers who made a living here. Today, plants grow from the green roof on the picnic shelter and solar panels on the restroom feed into Wilsonville’s electric grid.
Learn more about Graham Oaks Nature Park
“It’s an incredible honor to be there at the beginning of these powerful new opportunities to connect people with place,” says Mary Anne Cassin, Metro’s manager of parks planning and development. “We view our job as being translators, both for the community and for the land itself.”
Help shape tomorrow's great places. Metro plans new nature parks and facilities across the region and updates its stewardship strategies for existing natural areas.Learn more
Find out about the ambitious grass-roots effort to establish a network of regional trails and greenways that connect the region’s cities, parks, natural areas and neighborhoods.Learn more
The Metro Council is teaming up with governments, businesses, nonprofits and other nature lovers to create the world’s best network of parks, trails and natural areas.Learn more
"During 30 years as a naturalist, I’ve led hundreds of programs and helped thousands of people connect with nature. Every once in a while, I’m lucky enough to develop a longtime relationship with somebody who lives near one of 'my' parks. Getting to know them is as important a part of my experience as paddling among the painted turtles or seeing the beaver swimming at dusk."
The Intertwine is the name for the region's ever-growing network of integrated parks, trails and natural areas. See a regional map of The Intertwine's best-loved outdoor recreation and education locations, and find nature activities, bike rides, bird walks, volunteer opportunities and many workshops on the calendar.
