Portland Hill Walks features twenty-four miniature adventures stocked with stunning views, hidden stairways, leafy byways, urban forests, and places to sit, eat, and soak in the local scene. The revised and updated edition offers five new walks in addition to the well-loved classics, with new contemporary and historical photos and easier-to-follow directions. Whether you feel like meandering through old streetcar neighborhoods or climbing a lava dome, there is a hill walk for every mood. New walks take you up to Willamette Stone State Park, across the St. Johns Bridge, down to the South Waterfront (with a ride on the aerial tram), along a stream in Gresham, and up Mounts Talbert and Scott. Portland is a walking city, and Portland Hill Walks will inspire you to enjoy it to its fullest!

The author of Portland Hill Walks presents an array of twenty self-guided walking tours of the backstreets and neighborhoods of Portland and five nearby towns, all easily accessible by public transportation, offering fun facts, historical and cultural details, shopping and eating suggestions, and other things to see and do along each route. Original.

Get to Know Portland’s Vibrant and Historic Neighborhoods Grab your walking shoes, and become an urban adventurer. Local author Becky Ohlsen guides you through 33 unique walking tours in the city that’s famous for its great beer and for serious dining on a reasonable budget. Portland is home to hidden gardens, historic landmarks, award-winning restaurants, old-school taverns, oddball shops, and edgy warehouse galleries. Each self-guided tour includes full-color photographs, a map, and need-to-know details like distance, difficulty, points of interest, and more. Stroll past organic coffee shops that line the streets at the foot of an extinct volcano. Swing through an independent bookstore nestled against flavorful food-cart pods. Cross bridges and graveyards. Wander a Smithsonian-honored boulevard. See experiments in urban renewal. You’ll soak up history, stories, and trivia on your way to the best parks, shops, restaurants, and nightlife in Oregon. So find a route that appeals to you, and walk Portland!

Why is it so satisfying to walk up and down stairs? Maybe it's the new layer of discovery with each step up—a new far-off view and a new close-up look at the plants and buildings. Maybe it's the fleeting proximity one has to passing strangers. Maybe it's the great feeling of propelling yourself upward and then floating downward. Maybe it's the best workout you can get without putting on gym clothes. Whatever the reason, stairs are an excellent way to get yourself up or down a landscape, and Portland, Oregon has a whole lot of them built into our public sidewalk and trail infrastructures.With Portland Stair Walks as your guide, you'll have 18 urban adventures on foot (or even bike) with:142 staircases22 hidden paths26 bridges2 tunnels1 island1 floating sidewalk1 aerial tramand several beachesAnd you'll enjoy views of:2 rivers16 river bridges4 volcanos3 creeksmany city vistasand innumerable small details that make the city and its history come aliveStair-loving pedestrians rejoice!

Portland has 196 public staircases, an irresistible asset to this pedestrian-friendly city. In The Portland Stairs Book, Portland's walking guru Laura Foster has gathered the best and most interesting in a handy pocket-sized guide. From Mount Tabor's epic 282 steps to the glass cupola atop 115 steps in Pioneer Courthouse, The Portland Stairs Book features details on twenty outdoor stairs that have amazing stories and something unique to offer an urban explorer. The stairs include the Willamette River Bridge Stairs, The Westover Terraces Steps, and Rocky Butte's Grand Staircase. The book also features indoor stairs that are perfect for a rainy Portland day and five Stair Trails that lead readers on urban treks that contain hundreds of steps in five different areas of town.

Want to know where Chuck Palahniuk's tonsils currently reside? Been looking for a naked mannequin to hide in your kitchen cabinets? What goes on at the Scum Center? How do you get to the Apocalypse Cafe? In the closest thing he may ever write to an autobiography, Chuck Palahniuk provides answers to all these questions and more as he takes you through the streets, sewers, and local haunts of Portland, Oregon. According to Katherine Dunn, author of the cult classic Geek Love, Portland is the home of America's "fugitives and refugees." Get to know these folks, the "most cracked of the crackpots," as Palahniuk calls them, and come along with him on an adventure through the parts of Portland you might not otherwise believe actually exist. Here are strange personal museums, weird annual events, and ghost stories. Tour the tunnels under downtown Portland. Visit swingers' sex clubs, gay and straight. See Frances Gabe's famous 1940s Self-Cleaning House. Look into strange local customs like the I-Tit-a-Rod Race and the Santa Rampage. Learn how to talk like a local in a quick vocabulary lesson. Get to know, I mean really get to know, the animals at the Portland zoo. Oh, the list goes on and on.

Walking with Ramona explores the streets, schools, characters, and neighborhoods of author Beverly Cleary’s Portland. With this newest and most unusual Portland guidebook, readers can walk the very sidewalks Beverly walked and climb the very school steps that Beverly climbed. You'll see the grocery parking lot where Ramona got stuck in the mud, the park lawn where Henry Huggins hunted nightcrawlers, and the real Portland street that became Klickitat Street, their fictional home. Beverly Cleary’s Portland was much different than the Portlandia of today. Walking with Ramona brings to life what that 1920s and 1930s Portland was like for the “girl from Yamhill” who went on to become an internationally beloved author. Characters like Ramona and Beezus, Henry and Ribsy, and Ellen and Austine come to life on this hour-long walking route through the Northeast Portland neighborhood where Beverly grew up. An almost 3-mile walk around Northeast Portland, plus other Oregon destinations.