Friends of Nob Hill Nature Park Reflect on 2022

The Friends of Nob Hill Nature Park took time to reflect on their 2022 year of stewardship, conservation, and support of Nob Hill Nature Park. The City of St. Helens would like to thank the Friends of Nob Hill for all of their work in 2022 and beyond. You can read the full letter from Friends of Nob Hill below:

Happy New Year to all! This is a slightly belated report on Nob Hill Nature Park’s eventful 2022 year. The Friends of Nob Hill Nature Park have much to report, and many people to thank.

First, we’d like to thank Shanna Duggan at the City of St. Helens for her help and support in 2022. We look forward to working with Mouhamed Zaher and Buck Tupper in 2023 as the St. Helens Public Works Department starts to oversee the Parks Department!

In April 2022, the Friends of Nob Hill Nature Park held the first of our two volunteer work parties, as well as a native plant ID walk held with the Native Plant Society of Oregon (NPSO). We saw native lilies, including white Trillium and brown checker lilies and later, purple cluster lilies and ethereal blue camas. The park is a repository for many native wildflowers. Spring is the ideal time to view and photograph them.

Last spring, we received a $600 grant for the park from Portland Garden Club (PGC). Half the grant is to be used to purchase native plants for the park from Sauvie Island Natives, and the other half for wire caging material to screen new plants from deer damage. We selected larger shrubs with high value for wildlife including serviceberry, elderberry, choke cherry and bitter cherry. One of our long-range goals is to slowly remove non-native cherry trees from the lower park, while increasing native varieties.

In the summer months, we acquired and installed two more free Trex benches. We are grateful to Kathy Srystad and the St. Helens Lions Club for their substantial help with this service project to obtain free benches for schools and community groups such as ours.

We also had help from a PCC student Lexie Ellis. As part of a PCC map-making program, she custom-designed a user map for Nob Hill. The laminated map is posted on the kiosk at the park entrance. It has a QR code to take users to city’s web site.

We also had help from Lecia Schall of NPSO to get started in the iNaturalist program to document sightings of wildlife at Nob Hill. As well as plants, this includes birds and animals. We are grateful to Jon Hakim for setting up the park boundaries in the iNat system, so that we now have a project that documents sightings specific to the park. We have recorded more than 100 wildlife observations. The project name is Nob Hill Nature Park. Feel free to add your own observations.

This fall, an anonymous donor helped us have one round of professional work crew to spot-treat blackberries. In the early days, much of the park, especially the lower area, was choked by blackberry. Ongoing blackberry removal is important, as well as replacement with native alternatives.

In November, we held two volunteer work parties. The first, on November 5, was to plant native grasses in the area of the lower bridge. They are marked with little yellow flags. Thank you to Scappoose Bay Watershed Council for those donated plants. Then on November 12, we had volunteers from Friends of Baltimore Woods, a community group based in north Portland. They came to help us finish up putting in and caging plants purchased with our PGC grant. There was no rain that day, a first ever for our work parties!

This has been a more active year for the Friends of Nob Hill Nature Park than usual. We know we can’t always keep up this pace, but it really does take a village to maintain a nature park. We look forward to new friends coming to help in April and November of 2023. We also added a new work party on March 4 for the Fifth Street right-of-way trail. Work party info is posted on our kiosk. You might get muddy, but work parties are a lot of fun.

Nob Hill Nature Park is an oak woodland located across from City’s wastewater treatment facility at 451 Plymouth Street. A kiosk at the park entrance features our new user map and information about the park’s ecosystem. The City park has views of the Columbia River and northern tip of Sauvie Island, where the Multnomah Channel and Lewis River joins the Columbia River. It has an easy, gravel loop trail. It’s a great place for bird-watching, botanizing, and nature study. The park is open daily, dawn to dusk. Come visit soon!

You can learn more about Nob Hill Nature Park on our website.