If you live on the hill, you already know the drill. Prune Hill Sports Park for the kids, a lap around Lacamas when you have an hour, maybe the Round Lake Loop when out-of-town family visits. That is the standard rotation, and it is fine. It is also missing at least two walks that have quietly become worth doing.
The thesis of this post is small but specific: in the last few years, the trail network within two miles of Prune Hill has reorganized itself. A new open space on the northeast edge of Camas finally has real signage. An older canyon route on the east slope still connects to Dorothy Fox Park the way it always did, but almost no one talks about it. And the Grass Valley wetland at the base of your own hill is a better wildlife stop than most locals give it credit for. Put together, they form a rotation that looks nothing like the one on the fridge.
The trail that finally got a proper map
Green Mountain, on the far northeast corner of Camas, is the most under-discussed walk near the hill. The City of Camas closed on the acquisition in November 2021, and the joint master planning process with Clark County was set to kick off in 2024, with the City owning 115 acres and the County owning 320. That is not a small piece of ground.
For years, the route up was informal. Volunteers changed that. By early 2024, trip reports described new signage at the summit, brushed-out tread, and a decommissioning of the old cliff connector that used to make the west approach unpleasant. The Washington Trails Association now lists it as roughly a 3-mile roundtrip through mixed fir and maple, moderate grade, with a brightly colored summit sign in place. As of 2026, the tread is holding up: well brushed, free of erosions.
A few practical notes the WTA page buries in its directions:
- Parking is a 12-space lot at the end of an alley off NE 93rd Lane, next to a residents-only community pool. Arrive early on weekends or park down the block on Boxwood.
- From Highway 14, the cleanest route is SE 192nd north to NE 13th, which becomes NE Goodwin Road, then a left on Ingle and into the housing at NE 92nd.
- The short spur to the cliff viewpoint in the BPA powerline corridor is the payoff shot: from there, you are looking straight back across at Prune Hill. It is the only place around where you get to see your own neighborhood in profile.
This is the one to add to the rotation. Twelve minutes from most Prune Hill addresses, and until recently, you basically had to be a volunteer to know how the trail worked.
The canyon most Prune Hill drivers cross without noticing
Ostenson Canyon Greenway runs along the east slope of the hill, and the trail through it is old news to a small group of neighbors and invisible to everyone else. The route drops into a canopy of cedar, Douglas-fir, big-leaf maple, and cottonwood, crosses a footbridge, passes two small silted-in reservoirs, and eventually surfaces near Sierra Street across from Dorothy Fox Park.
A few things make this walk different from what you would expect on a hillside residential edge:
- The bottomland is still salmonberry thicket and sword fern, with ivy dominant in the lower stretch and holly showing up as an invasive throughout. It reads more like a lowland forest fragment than a suburban greenway.
- The upper end passes the grassy dam wall of the Haight Reservoir, where fishing exists but is reserved for HOA residents. This is not a gotcha, just a thing to know before you show up with a rod.
- From the canyon you can loop north to a paved path that climbs to 16th Avenue, then loop back down through Klickitat Park and out to a small park across 12th Avenue. Stitching the connectors together turns a 20-minute stroll into a real walk without ever crossing a highway.
The Camas Parks, Recreation & Open Space Plan classifies Ostensen Canyon Greenway and Prune Hill South as natural open space, meaning the city's intent is trails, viewpoints, and light-touch features rather than active recreation. Translation: what is there is what you get. No dog park expansion is coming.
At a glance: four walks within reach
| Walk | Roundtrip | Surface | What you actually see |
|---|---|---|---|
| Green Mountain summit | ~3 mi | Gravel then hard clay tread | Signed summit, BPA-corridor cliff view back toward Prune Hill |
| Ostenson Canyon connector to Dorothy Fox | ~1.5–2 mi loop | Paved then natural | Cedar/fir canopy, footbridge, Haight Reservoir dam wall |
| Prune Hill Loop via Grass Valley | ~2–3 mi | Mixed paved and dirt | Wetland at the northwest base of the hill, beaver and deer habitat |
| Washougal River Greenway | 1.1 mi | Flat gravel | River views, heron, cormorant, osprey, bald eagle |
Numbers are drawn from City of Camas materials, the Washington Trails Association listing for Green Mountain, and the Oregon Hikers field guide for the Prune Hill Loop.
Grass Valley's wetland edge is doing more than it looks like it is doing
Grass Valley Park sits centrally in Camas at about 305 feet of elevation, and it is easy to think of it as the ballfield park. The wetland at the northwestern base of Prune Hill's slope is the reason to reframe it.
The plant list alone tells you what the habitat is doing: red osier dogwood, willow, hawthorn, alder, maple, and reed canarygrass, with a small creek that drains directly into the park. It is a working wildlife corridor. Beavers and deer show up in it. The Prune Hill Loop that traces the northwestern base runs past exactly this pocket before climbing back through the ferns and Douglas-fir on the hillside.
For families, this is the low-effort birding and wildlife walk that does not require a drive. The park is stocked with waste bags, leashed dogs are welcome, and the ball courts, playground, and picnic tables mean you can absorb a soccer practice and a wetland loop in the same trip. It is not exotic. It is close.
Prune Hill Sports Park is not the interesting one, but it is the useful one
The neighborhood park at 4270 NW 16th Ave covers 8.94 acres next to Prune Hill Elementary, with basketball, little league fields, paved paths, playground, restrooms, soccer fields, and universal accessibility features. That combination is the reason it stays booked, and it is the reason most Prune Hill families default to it.
The point worth making here is what the Sports Park is not: it is not the trail experience of the neighborhood. Treating it as the "outdoors box" for Prune Hill is what causes the other three walks above to stay underused. The Sports Park handles the after-school half hour. Green Mountain, Ostenson Canyon, and the Grass Valley loop are the Saturday morning menu.
A short note on the name, because it is a good one
Prune Hill is a 750-foot Boring volcano, part of the same volcanic field that gave the east metro its scattered cones. Its name comes from the prune orchards planted on the summit in the 1880s, back when Clark County was briefly known as the prune capital of the world until prices collapsed during the Great Depression. Fisher Quarry, still active on the western edge, mines the basalt that ends up in coastal jetties. That is a lot of geologic and agricultural history packed into a hill most people describe as "the one with the views."
Bring this up next time someone at a First Friday asks why the neighborhood has such a strange name. It is a better story than most Camas trivia.
Seasonal notes that actually matter
A few things worth knowing before you head out this month:
- Green Mountain trail is well brushed and drains fine, but the lower gravel section holds water after heavy rain. The clay tread higher up is slick in the wet season. Traction is the difference between a good and a bad August walk after a storm.
- Ostenson Canyon undulates and gets slippery in the wet season. It is a shoulder-season walk more than a January walk.
- Round Lake Loop's Pothole Falls is a summer swimming hole where cliff jumping into Lacamas Creek happens. Worth knowing exists, worth deciding for yourself whether to include kids in that scene.
- Washougal River Greenway birding is best in the shoulder seasons when the herons, cormorants, ospreys, and bald eagles are visible from the flat gravel path near NE Second Avenue and SE Yale Street.
The loop worth building this month
If you want a single reason to change your rotation, it is Green Mountain. It is the newest, most under-known, and closest thing Prune Hill has to a proper hike, and it exists because a small group of volunteers built it. Combine one Green Mountain morning, one Ostenson Canyon loop through Dorothy Fox, and one Grass Valley wetland stroll over the next three weekends, and you will have covered more of your own hill than most neighbors who have lived here for a decade.
Then go back to Lacamas.
If you are curious about how the trail network shapes the day-to-day feel of living on Prune Hill, or you are thinking about a move within Camas and want to talk through what different parts of the hill actually offer, the team at Peter Cutile is happy to walk through it with you. Schedule a consultation whenever it fits your week.
