A Portland hiker who wrote up a Saturday walk from the Washington Park MAX station through Hoyt Arboretum to Pittock Mansion in mid-July mentioned something almost incidental: even on a warm, blue-sky afternoon, the trail stayed uncrowded. That detail matters more than it seems. It says something true about how West Hills residents actually use this hillside: not as a single, crowded destination but as a web of interchangeable routes, each one leading to the same handful of places.
That web is about to get tested. Two separate closures are active on the Marquam Trail system right now, the same trails that carry West Hills residents up to Council Crest Park and back down toward Marquam Hill. If you only read the headline version, it sounds like your weekend loop just got canceled. It didn't. Here's what's actually closed, what isn't, and why the redundancy built into this trail system is worth understanding if you live above it.
What's Actually Closed Right Now
Starting today, Monday, August 10, 2026, a section of the Marquam Trail near Council Crest Park is closed while Portland Water Bureau crews repair a leaking water main. The closure runs from the Summit Trail junction to the connector trail near the top of Council Crest, and it's in effect from 6am to 5pm daily for roughly a week, though the city's trail closures page notes the timeline could shift once crews get eyes on the leak. Water main breaks aren't rare events unique to this stretch of hillside. The Portland Water Bureau responds to somewhere between 150 and 180 main breaks a year across the city, and proactively replaces more than 30,000 feet of aging pipe annually just to keep that number from climbing. This is routine infrastructure work, not a sign that Council Crest is falling apart.
The second closure is older and easy to miss if you haven't checked the city's page since spring. Towhee Trail, in Marquam Nature Park, has been closed since a landslide made it impassable, an update the city posted back on March 13. The closure runs from Marquam Hill Road to the Marquam Trail junction, and Fairmount Road above the slide is closed too. Nearly five months later, it's still listed as unstable enough that Parks hasn't reopened it.
Why Neither Closure Actually Cuts You Off
Here's the part that generic hiking-app summaries miss because they only look at one trail at a time. The Marquam Trail closure doesn't strand anyone trying to reach the Council Crest summit, because the city explicitly names three other ways up. Summit Trail, the very trail the closure notice tells you to use as a detour, gets you around the closed segment. Zion Trail and Trolley Trail both reach the summit independently. And the 4T Trail, the longer loop that ties this hillside into downtown, is untouched by any of this.
That's four named routes to the same 1,073-foot summit, all still open, while one specific segment gets a new water main. If you live in West Hills and you've only ever walked up via the Marquam Trail because it's the route from your street, this is the week to learn Zion or Trolley instead. Neither is a detour in the sense of a worse substitute. They're separate, established trails that happen to converge on the same viewpoint, one that on a clear day still shows Mount Hood, Mount St. Helens, Mount Adams, Mount Jefferson, and Mount Rainier from a single 180-degree turn.
The Towhee closure works the same way, just from the other direction. It blocks one approach from Marquam Hill Road, near OHSU, into the nature park. It doesn't touch the entrances West Hills residents typically use, the ones off Greenway Avenue and SW Talbot Terrace that feed straight into Council Crest Park from the neighborhood side. If your normal loop starts from home rather than from the hospital campus, this closure likely never crosses your path at all.
The System Behind the Redundancy
None of this redundancy happened by accident. The Wildwood Trail, which anchors the whole network and eventually connects Council Crest's hillside all the way north through Forest Park, was pieced together across nearly two decades by volunteers working alongside Portland Parks & Recreation, reaching its full 30-mile length in 1999. The parallel trails, spur connectors, and alternate summit approaches that let one segment close without stranding a hiker exist because the system was built with more than one way to get anywhere.
That volunteer culture didn't stop once the trail was finished. Forest Park Conservancy recruits more than 2,000 volunteers a year who log over 7,000 hours maintaining the more than 50 miles of soft-surface trail across Forest Park and Marquam Nature Park, running weekly Thursday work parties plus one Saturday session a month. Right now the Conservancy is deep into what it calls brushing season, the May-through-August stretch when volunteer crews cut back overgrown vegetation so the full width of the trail stays usable and hikers aren't pushed toward unstable edges. It's a detail worth knowing if a trail you use looks noticeably better maintained by September than it did in May. It probably is, and a neighbor likely had a hand in it.
The city's Southwest Hills neighborhood page lists its own recurring volunteer calendar for anyone who wants to put in an hour close to home. Portland Parks & Recreation runs Tuesday morning garden sessions at Pittock Mansion, including this Tuesday, August 11, and again on August 18, tending the beds that flank the mansion's paved paths. A separate volunteer event on the MAC Trail in Washington Park runs today, August 10. Both are the kind of low-commitment, high-payoff mornings that fit into an actual week rather than requiring you to clear a Saturday.
The Takeaway for Anyone Planning a Weekend Up Here
If you live in West Hills and you check a trail app before heading out, you'll see two active closures this week and might assume your usual route is off the table. It isn't. The Marquam Trail segment near the summit is closed for a routine water repair, but Summit, Zion, and Trolley trails, along with the entire 4T Trail, still put you on top of Council Crest with the same five-peak view. Towhee Trail's landslide closure affects an approach from Marquam Hill Road, not the entrances West Hills residents use from the neighborhood side. And if you'd rather spend an hour giving back to the hillside than just walking it, there are two named volunteer opportunities open this very week, one at Pittock Mansion's gardens and one on the MAC Trail.
That's the actual story here. Not that the trails are having a rough week, but that a system built with this much redundancy barely notices when one piece needs work.
If you're thinking about what it means to call this hillside home, not just to hike it on a Saturday, the team at TK Real Estate Group knows West Hills block by block, trail by trail. Schedule a free consultation whenever you're ready to talk through what's actually for sale up here.
