Portland Adventures Part 3: Hoyt Arboretum

One of my roommates left on Thursday, and on Friday my other roommate and I decided to go to Hoyt Arboretum (we were going to go to the Japanese Rose Garden too, but the weather took a turn for worse and we had to rush back to hotel to check out.)
We took the  MAX into downtown to the Washington Park station, which is 260 feet below ground, the deepest transit station in North America and one of the deepest in the world. The artwork in the elevator (pictured to the left) shows the elevator cars traveling through the different soil gradients from the present to 16 million years ago, a time frame further illustrated in the soil core of geological time decorating the wall of the station, the most recent of which is shown to the right.

The Hoyt Arboretum was right behind the station once we came up to the light. There were not many people there early on a Friday morning. Except for one person, a guy sitting up on the wall next to the Garden of Solace (the Vietnam Memorial) jamming to his Jimmy Hendrix out loud and smoking. Not quite memorial-esque, but to each their own.

The Garden of Solace was beautifully thought-provoking. It was a spiral that wound through the hill, with inscribed benches along the way for each year with the names of those who gave their lives and the positive events that happened at home, an aspect of a memorial I'd never seen before.

The trail out of the Garden of Solace took up the top of another hill where there was a gorgeous view with an orchid research field in the foreground.

On the way back to the MAX station we found a banana slug! It was next to the trail. The two young scientists had a real geek out about this slug! I got very excited about this slug! And this slug is a great way to end this post!