In Search of Urban Forests
How many have you visited?
I happen to live near a very large urban forest…
Most mornings, I take a steep walk through a hilly neighborhood to get to a trailhead into Forest Park, a 5100-acre forest that is often described as “one of the largest urban forests in America.”
It is a truly massive park. There are 80 miles of trails. I’m in the south end of it almost every day, I’ve trekked through the north end a few times, and I have no idea what’s going on in the middle, because it’s kind of a lot to venture there and back, or go all the way through it, in a day.
Recently, it occurred to me to wonder where the other, larger urban forests were. What city could possibly have a larger urban forest than this one?
A city in Texas, of course.
But first, take a look at the other truly enormous urban parks in the United States and around the world.
I looked at a few different data sources for this, and finally decided that this Wikipedia chart seemed like a good starting point. Go browse it if you like, it’ll give you plenty of ideas for future urban park-oriented trips you might take. (The 61,000 acre Forest of Fontainebleau in Paris? Okay!)
Most very large urban parks in the United States, starting with the mind-boggling Chugach State Park in Anchorage (almost 500,000 acres, roughly two-thirds the size of Rhode Island), are not forests per se. I’m sure Chugach has some trees, but I’d call that more of a mountains/tundra environment. Several others on the list—a huge park in Scottsdale, another in El Paso—are deserts, and some, like the Bayou Sauvage National Wildlife Refuge in New Orleans, are swamps. I was looking for forests—as in, mostly trees—and urban—as in, located within or right next to a city.
Which brings us to Texas!
The largest urban forest in America is, of course, in Texas. As a fifth-generation Texan, I know how important it is for Texas to have the biggest of everything. Just to be sure they have the largest urban forest, they actually have two.
The largest, at 7800 acres, is George Bush Park in Houston. (I was just back in Texas. You would not believe how many things are named after George Bush. I would like to point out that George Bush was born in Connecticut and his father of the same name was born in Massachusetts. Harumph.)
However, I’m not sure we could call all of George Bush Park a forest. It’s a floodplain, which is being sensibly preserved to manage flooding. There are some sports fields, walking paths, and, of course, why am I surprised…a 563-acre gun range.
I feel like the gun range, at least, should be excluded from the acreage we’d call “forest”. But I’m not going to get between Texans, their guns, and the largeness of their large things. Let’s move on.
The Great Trinity Forest (or, as we called it, the bottoms)
When I was a kid growing up in Dallas/Fort Worth, my parents would sometimes take a shortcut from my grandparents’ house through what they called “the bottoms,” which meant the Trinity river bottom.
It always seemed kind of exciting and daredevilish to ride through the bottoms, late at night. It was a swamp, basically, a kind of no-man’s land. Garbage land, really. There were no streetlights out there. Late at night, it’d be pitch dark on that narrow road. If your car broke down (and in the seventies, cars broke down, especially ours), there was no gas station to walk to, and no payphone. You’d be out there in the dark, hoping to flag down a passing car. This was a fearsome and exciting possibility to an imaginative little kid.
The bottoms was where you’d go to dump your trash, or a body. But now it’s been cleaned up and rebranded the Great Trinity Forest. At 6000 acres (the Wikipedia chart has it at 10,000 acres, but that includes adjacent non-forest parkland), it might be the largest urban forest in the country. So when I went back to Dallas to see my family last week, I stopped by to have a look.
And it was…weird.
It’s a forest in the sense that it’s covered in trees. Small and scrawny trees, at least on the trails I walked, but trees nonetheless.
The trails were among the most overbuilt I’ve ever seen. Texans love their freeways—you have never seen such wide, comfortable, beautifully maintained and lavishly adorned freeways as you will in Texas—so when somebody told them to put in a trail, they put in a two-lane trail, complete with a yellow stripe down the middle, wide enough to drive a car down, because someday you might have to.
At disturbingly regular intervals, there were these signs.
I had the trails entirely to myself, which was nice in the sense that I could hear the birds and log them in my Merlin app, but it was also a little creepy. At one point, an alarmingly large (again, Texas) coyote ran across the trail in front of me, and I had a moment of panic. Is it coyotes that you’re supposed to stand up to? Make yourself big and yell? Don’t even try to run, because they will outrun you? Should I climb a tree? Or is that bears, or mountain lions? I later read that people dump unwanted dogs in this area (horrible, I know), and that the coyotes and dogs sometimes join up and form packs that run together, and that they might be interbreeding, resulting in a hybrid called a coydog, and I’m really glad I didn’t know any of that while I was out on this trail.
It was also, by Portland standards, a boring forest. I kept walking and walking, waiting to see something different or interesting. Eventually I realized that I was only ever going to see more of this—flat water, short, scrubby, bare trees, and this incredibly wide and comfortable trail. Here in the Pacific Northwest, around any corner you might come across… a waterfall! A babbling brook! An amazing view! A rickety bridge! An enormous old-growth Douglas fir!
But that kind of landscape is not what Dallas has to offer. Nonetheless, I’m intrigued by the potential for this place, and I’m happy to see “Texas” and “conservation” used in the same sentence. Texans will preserve things that they see as connected to their identity, which is why we all stopped littering when the legendary “Don’t Mess with Texas” anti-litter campaign rolled out. Hopefully this garbage-dump-swamp-turned-restored-wetland-forest will inspire the same sense of pride—as long as we keep assuring them that theirs is, in fact, the largest in the country.
Anyway, those are the other large urban forests I was able to find. At about 6000 acres, the Jefferson Memorial Forest in Louisville, KY might also rival Portland’s Forest Park. Maybe there are more massive urban forests that just aren’t on the list. Some of you may know about them, and if you do, please tell me about it!
A Sketchbook Flip-Through for Paid Subscribers
This week, I’m walking subscribers through the sketchbook I just finished, and talking about materials, ideas, approaches, what worked and what didn’t.
Last week we did a little exercise about drawing from memory, and the week before that, I posted a live-sketching demo of me drawing in the great outdoors.
And…I just got back from a trip where I was able to film myself sketching in the city and also out in nature. So more of those to come, along with more lessons, art supply reviews, live zooms, and basically anything and everything sketchbook-related.
Subscribers get all that for the price of a couple of pencils, and you help keep the lights on around here. Much appreciated.
The bit at the end
Come find me on Instagram, or see paintings for sale- Right here
Order signed copies of some of my books from my husband’s bookstore, or order my books and many books I love at Bookshop.org
Take one of my online writing or art classes here
Leave a comment! I love to hear from you!
This is delightful! There are a few great foresty parks here In Nashville. I love getting out for a hike through them.
I live about half a mile from the 4,400 acre Superior Municipal Forest in Superior, Wisconsin. It's the third largest forest within a city in the US. Fine hiking, biking and crosscountry ski trails.