Fields Bridge Hike

Overview

Some time during the last Ice Age, a 15 1/2 ton iron/nickel meteorite found itself embedded in a thick ice sheet, somewhere in what is now southern British Columbia or far northern Idaho/Montana. Several thousand years later, a cycle of massive floods, known as the Missoula or Bretz Floods (after the geologist J. Harlen Bretz) hurtled at 60 mph down the course of the Columbia River all the way to the Pacific Ocean. These floods, perhaps up to 100 of them between 15,000 - 18,000 years ago, came as huge ice dams gave way at the end of the Ice Age and massive amounts of meltwater from the continental ice sheet were released. The floods deposited sediments all along their course, but also transported large icebergs, some of them rafting massive boulders, among them what is now known as the Willamette Meteorite. On a side eddy up the Tualatin River, the meteorites frigid caddy came to rest on a West Linn hillside. The famous rock, which is the largest North American meteorite, was venerated by the Clackamas Indians, who recognized its singularity, but only became known to settlers in 1902. It now resides in the American Museum of Natural History in New York. The walk described here takes you to a series of interpretive signs about the meteorite and continues through two West Linn parks, Fields Bridge and the Tualatin River Open Space, to offer views of the Tualatin River. The Fields Bridge Park interpretive site is part of the Ice Age Floods National Geologic Trail, designated as part of the Omnibus Public Land Management Act of 2009. Walk down the paved trail with the Tualatin River flowing to your left. Come to a trail junction at a backwater, and go left under Douglas-firs and alders. Keep left at the next junction, passing picnic tables and benches and getting views down the final stretch of the Tualatin before it meets the Willamette. At a stone wall, read the interpretive sings about the Willamette Meteorite's rafting journey with the Ice Age floods. Go right at the next junction to stop under leafy bowers

Trail Stats

Photos

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