If you live on Bull Mountain and want to get outside this weekend, you've probably been treating your options as a menu: drive down to Summerlake if the dog needs to run off leash, drive to Dirksen if the kids want the nature play area, drive to Cook Park if you want the river. Three separate destinations, three separate trips, three separate parking decisions.
That's no longer accurate. Tigard finished the last connecting segments of the Fanno Creek Trail between 2024 and 2025, and the paved greenway now runs 8.3 miles, linking downtown Tigard to Dirksen Nature Park, the library, City Hall, and Cook Family Park in one continuous route. The parks you've been driving to individually are, for the first time, one system you can walk.
The Loop That's Actually On the Hill
Start with what's already yours. Bull Mountain Park sits right in the neighborhood, built through the advocacy of a grassroots group called Friends of Bull Mountain Park, and it centers on the Morningstar Loop, an easy 0.8-mile trail that takes most walkers about 23 minutes. The park has accessible trails, a picnic shelter, and a nature play structure with a log array and climber, and the accessible parking sits next to the shelter off the Alpine Crest entrance. It has its regulars, too. One frequent visitor comes daily, sometimes twice, with her corgi and chihuahua in tow.
Worth knowing before you assume this is your dog's off-leash spot: it isn't. The trail is dog-friendly, but on leash only, with no fenced off-leash area on site. That distinction matters more than it sounds like it should, because it changes where you actually need to go for a real run-around, which brings us to the part of the system most residents haven't fully clocked yet.
Where the Connected System Actually Starts
The Fanno Creek Trail is paved asphalt for most of its length in Tigard, eight feet wide and flat through most sections, which means it works for cyclists, joggers, strollers, and mobility devices without anyone having to pick a different route for a different kind of visitor. The 2024-2025 expansion closed the gaps that used to make this a set of disconnected trail fragments, and it now ties directly into Dirksen Nature Park and Cook Family Park.
Four parks. One paved connection. No more moving the car between them.
That's the shift. It's not that Tigard built new parks. It's that the parks you already knew about stopped requiring a separate car trip to reach from each other.
What's Actually Waiting at the Other End
Once you're on the connected trail, here's what you're walking toward:
- Summerlake Park, about 30 acres, built around a lake ringed by three footbridges and a rhododendron garden, with fishing permitted on the north side. It holds one of Tigard's three off-leash dog areas, plus tennis and pickleball courts where the weekend morning schedule fills up fast, according to the city's posted booking calendar.
- Dirksen Nature Park, at 48 acres one of the largest and most ecologically built-out parks in the system, with a nature play area for kids five to twelve that includes climbing logs, a hidden cave, and a living willow tunnel, plus a separate toddler zone.
- Cook Family Park, the oldest and most recognized park in Tigard, home to an ADA-accessible inclusive playground and the Jim Griffith Memorial Skate Park, named for the former Tigard mayor who championed the skate park project. It also has a boat ramp onto the Tualatin River, and one visitor's review put the full walking loop around the park at roughly four miles. The park hosts the Tigard Festival of Balloons every June, a three-day event with a carnival, live music, food vendors, a pancake breakfast, and an evening Night Glow when the balloon pilots light their envelopes at sunset.
None of that is new information about any single park. What's new is that you can string several of them together on foot instead of choosing one per outing.
Correcting the Dog Assumption
Here's the piece that actually changes behavior. If you've been taking your dog to Bull Mountain Park because it's the closest option and calling it good enough, you've been managing around a limitation you might not have needed to accept. The neighborhood park is on-leash only. The off-leash space is at Summerlake, and it's now reachable by the same paved trail that used to feel like a separate destination requiring its own trip down the hill.
That's a small correction, but it's the kind that saves you a car trip every week instead of once.
A Practical Route for the Weeks Ahead
Late August into fall is a reasonable stretch to test this out. The Tigard area tends toward mild, sunny weather easing into crisp autumn days with changing foliage before the wetter winter months settle in, which makes the next several weekends a comfortable window for a longer walk before the paved sections get slick.
If you want to try the connected system rather than picking one park, a simple version looks like this:
- Start at Bull Mountain Park's Morningstar Loop for a short warm-up walk on the hill.
- Drive or bike down to the Fanno Creek Trail access point near downtown Tigard.
- Follow the paved greenway toward Dirksen Nature Park if you have kids who want the nature play areas, or continue on to Cook Family Park if the destination is the river and the skate park.
- If the dog needs off-leash time, route toward Summerlake instead, where the lake loop and the off-leash area are both on site.
You can shorten or extend any of this. The point isn't the exact route. It's that for the first time, the route exists as one trail rather than three separate points you have to reach independently.
Why This Is Worth Knowing Now
Neighborhoods change in small increments that don't always announce themselves. Nobody sent Bull Mountain residents a notice that the trail gaps closed. The parks didn't rename themselves or get new signage calling attention to the connection. The system just became more useful than it used to be, quietly, over about a year, and the only way to notice is to actually walk it rather than drive past the entrance points on the way to somewhere else. Dave, who owns Hops on Tap in Tigard, spends his Wednesdays off exploring Tigard's parks with his grandsons. That kind of regular, unhurried use is exactly what a connected trail system is supposed to make easier.
If you've lived here long enough to have a habit built around driving to one park at a time, it might be worth breaking that habit at least once this fall. The trail is already built. The only thing missing was someone mentioning it.
If you ever want to talk about what's happening with homes in the neighborhoods around these trails, or you're weighing a move that would put you closer to this kind of daily access, Julie Williams is always glad to help. Schedule a consultation whenever the timing feels right.
