Cooper Mountain Nature Park: Listen to a legacy

By Karen Mathieson, Metro volunteer

Each time I introduce friends to Cooper Mountain Nature Park, I point out the metal ear trumpets facing like fluted, otherworldly flowers toward the gentle hills and green fields of the Tualatin Valley. Bend to place an ear against the aperture at the narrow end, and you will catch the conversation of birds, and perhaps an amplified patter of rain or a swoosh of wind through dry grasses. What I hear when I stoop to listen or walk the looping, graveled paths of the 230-acre park is the past, the present and the future of humans connecting with a landscape.

Over thousands of years, native peoples established a complex relationship with the earth, plants and animals of this place and across the fertile lands in the distance. Through practices such as controlled burns to halt encroaching conifers and preserve oak trees with their nourishing acorns, tribes thrived to the seventh generation and beyond. The ecosystem was affected by the human presence, but it was also held in balance.

A decade and a half ago, that ecosystem lay in shreds on Cooper Mountain. Vast mounds of Himalayan blackberries shrouded the logged-off terrain. What trees remained struggled in a stranglehold of English ivy. Small rodents sought in vain the seeds of native shrubs to keep them through the winter, and raptors circled fruitlessly above the impenetrable foliage. It seemed logical to assume that giant machinery would soon arrive to level the site for another suburban subdivision, harvesting all that remained of value: the view.

Then in November 1995, voters in Clackamas, Multnomah and Washington counties changed the future of Cooper Mountain. The passage of a visionary bond measure to preserve significant green space in the region allowed Metro to purchase the site, and an army of staff and volunteers began years of hand-to-hand combat with invasive vegetation.

My association with Cooper Mountain dates to blistering summer days in 2008, as I gingerly crouched amid poison oak to seek out sparse clumps of native perennial flowers such as the rare pale larkspur. From beneath the broad brim of my straw hat, I saw fellow volunteers from Metro’s Native Plant Center inching across the prairie of the past and future. The seeds we gathered have been nurtured to vigorous life, and amplified for restorative planting in areas deliberately scorched by fire as in millennia past.

In June 2009, Cooper Mountain Nature Park opened to the public, managed through a cooperative partnership between Metro and the Tualatin Hills Park & Recreation District. The Nature House – a charming red barn with firehouse doors that open to the fresh air in good weather – is a hub of activity and education throughout much of the year. Along hillside trails that pass between thousands of tiny trees and shrubs clad in protective netting, one finds coyote scat, deer tracks and reflective peace.

When I listen to Cooper Mountain Nature Park, I sense a legacy echoing across centuries to come. I can see things too, scenes that stretch from this very summer into the future: A small boy watches a red-legged frog emerge from life among the polliwogs in a pond dug as the quarry for a logging road. The boy smiles, and a wildlife biologist is born. As night approaches on Cooper Mountain, a young girl learns from a Metro naturalist about constellations familiar to Northwest people of long ago. The girl studies the sky, and begins to dream of reaching for the stars.

**********

Native prairie and oak woodland habitats restored at Cooper Mountain Nature Park

Two centuries ago, Native Americans hunted game and gathered plants in the oak woodlands that blanketed the Willamette Valley. Today, much of the valley’s historic oak habitat has been lost to agriculture, logging, urban development and fire suppression. At Cooper Mountain Nature Park, a remnant of this rare habitat has been preserved and restored for future generations of people and wildlife.

Over many years and with the support of thousands of volunteers, the benefits of Metro's extensive habitat restoration are becoming apparent. Rare wildflowers are blooming in the site’s upland prairies, birds and squirrels are chattering and chirping in the restored oak woodlands.

The 231-acre nature park, located in Beaverton, is home to several unique and varied landscape types including mixed conifer forests, perched wetlands and rare oak woodlands. The site also supports breeding populations of wildlife species whose numbers are threatened regionally, including the Northern red-legged frog and Western gray squirrel.

When Metro acquired the natural area in 1997, years of logging - including multiple clear-cuts, fire-suppression and construction of dirt and mountain bike trails had degraded some of the natural plant and animal habitat found on the property and threatened the health of the sensitive oak woodlands.

By the time the park opened in 2009, staff and volunteers had planted more than 100,000 native trees and shrubs, seeded native forbs and grasses, removed invasive plants like scotch broom, and performed a series of prescribed burns to enhance oak and upland prairie habitat. Fire is an important part of prairie ecology and many plants, including many wildflowers, rely on the disturbance of fire to thrive. Cooper Mountain supports a diverse wildflower community, including what is perhaps the largest remaining population of the endangered pale larkspur and meadow checkermallow in the state.

Restoring the oak woodland at Cooper Mountain required the removal and control of some encroaching Douglas fir trees. Douglas fir trees, like those found at Cooper Mountain, grow faster and taller than oaks and, without natural wildfires to keep them in check, will out-compete the slow-growing oaks for sunlight. Some of the encroaching fir trees were not removed but instead “girdled,” a technique that kills the tree from the top down, leaving the dead tree standing. These dead trees, or “snags,” provide excellent habitat for birds, insects and squirrels.

Overlooking the Tualatin River Valley, Cooper Mountain Nature Park sits on the southern edge of Beaverton, shouldered by suburban neighborhoods to the north and open agricultural lands to the south.