For the better part of three years, the corner of Southwest 150th Avenue and Sunrise Lane looked like a construction site because it was one. Chain link fencing ran the perimeter, heavy equipment staged where the meadow used to open up, and anyone who used to cut through Sunrise Park on a morning walk rerouted around it and mostly stopped thinking about it. If your mental map of that corner still says "closed," it's about a year out of date.
Tigard held a ribbon cutting on August 28, 2025, for the finished project: a fully buried 4.5-million-gallon reservoir sitting under what is once again open meadow and forest, with new wood-chipped walking trails and benches laid across the top. The city's public works team wanted the site to still feel like a park rather than a piece of infrastructure, and burying a 202-foot-diameter, 12-foot-tall concrete tank under graded soil rather than leaving it exposed was the whole point. Jessica Love, the department's communications program coordinator, put it plainly: officials wanted to "maintain the park's natural character" while still getting a badly needed reservoir built. They also saved themselves roughly 2,085 dump truck loads of hauling by keeping the excavated dirt on site to bury the tank instead of trucking it away.
None of this happened because anyone wanted a nicer park. Tigard needed the capacity to serve the 560-foot elevation service area, which includes the still-growing River Terrace development, and Sunrise Park beat out the alternative site (the Cach Water Site nearby) mostly on cost and permitting, since it had no wetlands to navigate. The park upgrade rode along on a $33.2 million water project. That's the part worth sitting with if you've spent any time on this hill: the nicest thing that's happened to Bull Mountain's green space in the last year came out of a pipe budget, not a parks budget.
The other half of the hill got its trails a different way
A half mile east, Bull Mountain Park sits at 13950 SW Alpine Crest Way, and its story runs on a completely different clock. There's no reservoir under this one. The picnic shelter, the accessible trails, and the nature play structure, built from salvaged logs of varying lengths arranged into a climber and shaded by Douglas fir, came from Friends of Bull Mountain Park, a volunteer group that pushed for years to get the site developed after the city acquired it. The play structure opened in 2017, built with help from local high schoolers and neighbors rather than a construction contract. There's no elegant civic story here about capacity planning. It exists because people who live near it kept showing up.
The two parks were always meant to connect. Ascension Trail climbs out of Bull Mountain Park through a fern-covered canyon and comes out at the edge of what was, until last year, an unfinished Sunrise Park site the city bought back in 2011 with parks bond money. For most of the last decade that connection led somewhere half-built. Now it leads to an actual destination again, a meadow with a real trail across it instead of equipment staging.
That's the piece I'd point out to anyone who's lived here through the closure: this hill effectively has one continuous trail system again, built out of two completely different funding mechanisms fifteen years apart, and it only just finished reconnecting.
What the walk actually looks like right now
If you're using Bull Mountain Park's Alpine Crest entrance as your starting point, the short option is the Morningstar Loop, a 0.8-mile easy loop with about 131 feet of elevation gain that takes most people around 23 minutes. Trail reports rate it quiet, and the ones I've seen note you're unlikely to run into a crowd even on a weekend. AllTrails lists January through August as the best window to visit, which tracks with this being a fully shaded, wooded stretch that gets muddy in the wet months.
A few practical notes before you head out:
- Dogs are welcome throughout Bull Mountain Park, but they need to stay leashed. There's no off-leash area here despite how often people search for one.
- The restroom situation is a portable toilet, not the permanent bathroom some longtime visitors remember. Plan accordingly if you're bringing kids.
- Some recent trail reports flagged ongoing work near the upper trailhead that temporarily cut off the connection to the greenway in both directions. If you're planning to walk the full Ascension Trail connector to Sunrise Park rather than just the short Morningstar Loop, it's worth checking current conditions before you commit to the route.
- Sunrise Park itself had intermittent closures through last October while crews finished stormwater drainage work on the southern end. That work should be long complete by now, but the trail is new enough that it's still worth a quick look at Tigard's Sunrise Park page if you haven't walked it yet this year.
If you want more distance than the hill itself offers, Dirksen Nature Park along Fanno Creek is what one regular Bull Mountain Park visitor told the city's parks team they save for weekends, distinct from the shorter daily loop closer to home. It's a different kind of walk, wetter and more open, and it's a reasonable pairing if you're making a morning of it rather than squeezing in a quick loop before work.
Why the timing matters
I think the interesting thing here isn't the reservoir itself. It's that two green spaces less than a mile apart on the same hill ended up on completely different timelines for completely different reasons, and this is the first stretch since the city bought the Sunrise Park land in 2011 that both halves have actually been usable at the same time. One got finished because a growing subdivision across town needed more water pressure. The other got built one weekend at a time by neighbors who wanted somewhere for their kids to climb on logs. Neither timeline had anything to do with the other, and yet they were always going to meet at that canyon trail eventually.
If you've been putting off checking out Sunrise Park because you remember it as a construction zone, it's time to update that. The fencing has been down for a year now, the meadow is graded and planted, and the trail across the top of a four and a half million gallon tank you'll never see has been walkable end to end from Alpine Crest Way since last summer.
I cover a lot of what's changing across Bull Mountain and the rest of Portland's Westside, not just what's for sale. If you're weighing a move to this hill, or you already live here and have questions about how a specific stretch of it is trending, Julie Williams is glad to talk it through. Schedule a consultation whenever it's useful.
