Errol Heights has an epic slide, a mini skate area, and trails through beaver habitat.

ON AN IDYLLIC FRIDAY MORNING, southeast Portland’s Errol Heights Park hums with activity. Toddlers pull themselves on all fours up a gentle turf slope. An older kid dangles upside down from a rope bridge as another hop-hop-hops up a series of log steps. At the mini skate area by the community garden, two neighborhood teenagers taking a break from carving turns gush when landscape architect Carol Mayer-Reed, whose firm helped design the park, asks how they like it.

“This is awesome,” says Solomon Dolinar, 17. “We were really hoping a skate park would come up around here. It’s perfect.”

Michael Milch, meanwhile, is visiting with his wife and two grandsons, 7 and 5, from Gladstone. Milch is mayor of the nearby city and learned about this park from a constituent: a second grader unimpressed with the slides in his own community. But the newly installed slide at Errol Heights—a German-made steel twister that towers 24 feet in the air—was, he told Milch, “the best.”

Word, it seems, is getting out about the recent $12 million glow-up at Errol Heights, which sits on the southern fringes of Portland, just across Johnson Creek from Milwaukie. And this part of the park is lovely indeed, with grassy expanses, play areas tucked between trees, 11 picnic tables (five of them ADA-accessible), and a small splash pad. A striking bronze-and-steel sculpture by Portland artists Terresa White and Mike Suri features, among other birds, a peacock: the neighborhood is home to a semi-feral muster whose screams regularly split the air.

But there’s more. Wend your way west, and you’ll reach an elevated steel walkway that switchbacks, in an appealingly irregular fashion, down a steep grassy hillside. As you follow its 337 feet—it, too, is ADA-accessible—a large pond comes into view. Ringed by cottonwoods, bigleaf maples, and Doug firs, on this spring day it’s as busy as the playground above. Ducklings skitter across the surface as geese flap overhead. Swallows swoop low, and warblers trill from the canopies. Pacific tree frogs ribbit in a steady chorus.

Things down here feel a world away from the scene above, the calm interrupted only by the occasional car gunning up SE 45th Avenue. That’s because this part of Errol Heights owes its existence not to humans but to another builder, the OG landscape architect: the assiduous, semiaquatic rodent that is our state animal.

THERE WAS NOT ALWAYS A VAST POND AT ERROL HEIGHTS. For decades, this spring-fed creek was dotted with man-made dams, which created a trio of small pools amid thickets of trees. But in 2007, the Bureau of Environmental Services (BES) began removing these dams—and another dam builder began to move in. This was by design: in a 2016 blog post about a restoration project in the area, BES proudly noted that it was “letting local beavers engineer and build it.”

And build it they have. The beavers at Errol Heights—city employees estimate it’s a family of four to six—have constructed a sprawling complex of dams, taking out hundreds of trees and flooding the area in the process. As some of the dams have aged, they’ve become fixtures of the landscape, sprouting vegetation where waterfowl build nests. It’s among the best places in the city to witness the work of the industrious rodent: their log-and-mud dams, the chew marks they leave on trees, the profusion of wood chips they produce.

“Anybody in Portland can walk through Errol Heights and see active beaver habitat,” says Ali Young, a capital project manager with BES. “That’s a cool, unique thing. Not a lot of other cities have that.” What you’re unlikely to see is the animal itself. Beavers, especially in cities, are most active at night. But you might hear the thwack of a tail against water, their trademark warning call.

Accordingly, the work in this part of the park has been about facilitating immersion in the natural environment. Trails are wide, in places cantilevering over the water—with sufficient clearance should beaver activity cause levels to rise. Scenic overlooks invite lingering. Much was designed with school classes in mind: a rock-lined cove just off the trail can serve as a de facto classroom, while a dock allows students to scoop water samples for testing.

There’s never any doubt you’re in the city. The pond laps against a retaining wall along SE Harney Street, and an industrial fabrication facility sits opposite. It’s easy to rue this sort of human impact, to wonder how this area might have looked even 100 years ago. But there’s also something enchanting about this unlikely urban oasis.

“We’ve destroyed so much habitat, and [wildlife] pathways have been disrupted,” says Christian Haaning, a natural resources ecologist with Portland Parks and Recreation. “So once they get here, they hang out here. You could walk in the forest for hours—days!—and see half the species in that pristine wilderness that you would see in an hour in this park.”

Once, as in so many wetlands, people dumped trash here; Haaning tells me crews had to remove an entire school bus from the site. Invasive weeds remain a challenge. But as he and I tour the park, we’re startled by a western tanager, its plumage a lick of flame, alighting on a branch a few feet from us (“hello, handsome,” croons Haaning). On a later visit, I listen to a red-breasted sapsucker hammer against a tree as a pair of deer amble leisurely by. Haaning says he’s seen minks, muskrats, and river otters.

For Mayer-Reed, this part of the park is where “the person becomes secondary to nature.” Here, she says, we learn to see a world outside ourselves: “Sometimes being in a park, especially a park like this, can round off some of the rough edges we have as human beings.”

Some of those edges gnawed off, no doubt, by a bucktoothed rodent.

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