Cooper Mountain Nature Park

I bet you have never heard of it, even if you live in Beaverton. I only found out about it a few months ago, almost by accident and it is only a couple of miles from me. My excuse is that it is fairly new and has only been open a couple of years. In addition, this is very much a project in the making. This is on land that Metro has been buying up over a number of years and in 2006 started work on making it accessible to the public. One of the first things they did was to burn the whole place!

These days we hate to think about purposely burning a forest, but this is what was necessary to restore it to what it was meant to be and to help with its preservation. It gets rid of much of the brush and weeds and allows the native wildflowers to reestablish themselves, and there are lots of them here. The total land area is 230 acres and it has over 3 ½ miles of trails, some of which are wheelchair accessible and other fairly steep, but all trails are well maintained.

In the park, there are areas predominantly populated with evergreens, but it mostly deciduous forest and prairie, some of which has been undisturbed for hundreds of years. They have also planted 10,000 trees, shrubs, grasses and wildflowers.

(This photograph is available for sale)

I did manage to capture a few of the critters of the park, but there are supposedly mountain lion and bobcats around too. I am sure they only come out at dawn and dusk, but maybe one day…

I have been there a few times now, and each time there are different things blooming. The photographs in this blog were all taken today, and only represent a fraction of the flowers that I saw. If you want to find it for yourself, the address is 18895 SW Kemmer Rd. Beaverton, OR 97007.

Sorry, but they do not allow dogs there, and do keep on the trails because there is a lot of poison oak around, as well as trying to help preserve the environment.

Brian Bailey

I have started to make some of my photographs available for sale. Those that are will have a link underneath them. If there are others that you would be interested in, please drop me an email.

[amazon_enhanced asin=”0897328817″ /] [amazon_enhanced asin=”0977055728″ /][amazon_enhanced asin=”0977055728″ /] [amazon_enhanced asin=”1879415321″ /

[mqMap key=”zWps” width=”350″ height=”310″ src=”http://www.mapquest.com/embed?icid=mqdist_mb_wp&c=zWps&maptype=map&zm=11&cr=45.50273,-122.72695899999998&projection=sm&showScale=false”]My New Map[/mqMap]