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On July 28, the Portland City Council approved a plan to remove homeless campers from urban forests, including Forest Park, to reduce the risk of wildfire.
But Rebecca Lee believes another threat offers greater reason for concern: Lincoln High School students bringing open-flame tiki torches with them to party at a stone ruin called the Witch’s Castle.
Lee, 48, was walking up Lower Macleay Trail into Forest Park on July 31 when she spotted teenagers carrying tiki torches and fuel.
“I saw them setting them up and spreading them around,” Lee says, “and I went up and said, ‘What can I do to convince you to not light those things?’ They were like, ‘Nothing.’ One of the most disturbing things was how completely unaware they were of the danger.”
She stayed in the woods for hours. “I was like, I’m not leaving,” she recalls. “I picked up torches that fell over.…At one point they had one leaning on the side of the castle, and it was basically leaning right under a tree with low-hanging dry branches.”
Parties at the Witch’s Castle—a 1930s stone park shelter and restroom partly destroyed by the Columbus Day Storm in 1962—aren’t new. In fact, neighbors tell WW it’s a long-standing party spot that even many of them frequented in the ‘80s and ‘90s—Lee included. Even the open flames are standard atmosphere.
The difference, according to Lee? “There’s no rain anymore.”
Alarm over the tinder-dry conditions in Portland’s urban forests has rarely been so keenly felt as this summer. Fire officials told WW last month that a wildfire in Forest Park ranks among the city’s most significant natural hazards.
City officials have responded by pledging to remove campsites along the Wildwood Trail. But last week, a post on the social networking site Nextdoor sparked intense debate over whether the real threat is a teenage tradition spanning generations.
Neighbors lamented that the city wasn’t doing enough to enforce the county’s burn ban after hours.
“We’ve tried calling all the usual bureaus that you’d think would respond: rangers, police, fire,” says Nora Gruber, who wrote the original post on Nextdoor. “There’s no nighttime enforcement at all of the burn ban, which is hugely problematic because the city knows about these people. That’s the travesty to me, that there’s no effort being made to actually enforce the ban.”
Officials with the city’s parks and fire bureaus say they’ve posted signs warning of fire danger. And WW encountered park rangers and firefighters posted at trailheads on the night of Aug. 6 to intercept would-be torchbearers.
Gruber and her neighbors have another plan. “Can we deploy our own private patrols? We’re talking about neighborhood associations coming together to fill in the gaps where the city isn’t providing enough security.”
Many of those concerned about the tiki torches partied themselves at the stone structure when they were younger.
“We had bonfires, and we built them in the middle of the castle,” Lee says. “We would bring candles and put them in the windows of the castle.”
The tradition continued. McKean Farnell, a 2019 Lincoln High School graduate, attended about 16 parties at the castle during high school. “When we’re getting closer, you can see the torches through the trees,” he recalls. “That excitement builds, and you can hear the chatter, and you start to hear the music through the speakers.”
He says they’re coordinated events usually led by a group of upperclassmen, shared through word of mouth and group chats, and happen a couple times a month. Every year, a new group of seniors takes over.
It’s usually the party crowd, and mostly Lincoln kids with a few other westside students sprinkled in. But after football games or the end of a semester, Farnell says, everyone from the school would show up.
Akili Kelekele, another 2019 graduate of Lincoln, adds: “It creates this camaraderie in the school and brings you closer together. If the cops came, we would all just mob to the nearest park and play basketball or go to Stepping Stone [Cafe] and get some food.”
But adults are now sending dire warnings to the next generation.
Lincoln High School students received two emails last week, following the
the Nextdoor post.
Lincoln principal Peyton Chapman sent the first midweek. She wrote that families in the West Hills had “shared concerns about youth using lit tiki torches in the woods” and that “the woods are dry and could ignite quickly, causing hundreds of acres and many homes to catch fire and burn rapidly.”
A second email from Lincoln’s booster club, Friends of Lincoln, was sent to students Friday afternoon labeled “URGENT MESSAGE FROM THURMAN BRIDGE FIREWISE TEAM.”
It blamed the city for not responding to complaints: “When we try to report this activity: Park Rangers do not respond as they go home at 9 pm. Portland Police do not respond to calls about tiki parties in the park...the Fire department only comes out if there’s an actual FIRE not ‘fire hazardous activities.’”
Portland Fire & Rescue Lt. Kim Kosmas, who spearheads the efforts to prevent wildfires in Forest Park, says residents aren’t aware of “a lot of stuff happening behind the scenes” to discourage open flames. But she still thinks the kids could find an easier way to light their parties: “They have to find something else, like glowsticks.”
This past weekend, the fire and parks bureaus had rangers and firefighters stand at all three entrance points to the Witch’s Castle, watching for teens with tiki torches.
On Friday night, at the trail entrance along Northwest Holman Street, WW came across two firefighters and one park ranger posted near a car. They’d been there since 7:30 that evening and planned to stay until 11 pm.
Kosmas, who helped coordinate the joint effort, says the two bureaus will be patrolling for two weekends. She says the fire bureau takes the issue seriously and is working on a plan in which calls concerning open flames would result in both a park ranger and the fire bureau responding together going forward.
Kosmas says they spotted no activity on Friday or Saturday night.
On the Nextdoor post, neighbors tossed around a variety of homegrown ideas to deal with the tiki torches.
One woman proposed buying a bunch of LED tiki torches on Amazon and bringing them to the kids on a party night. Another proposed that adults “have nightly jazz concerts in the same location and ruin the vibe for the kids.”
One man wrote: “I’m going to say that I also think you all are going way out of proportion on this. If young adults aren’t able to handle 13 tiki torches without burning down Portland, holy fuck, we are really in trouble.”
The climate change generation, robbed of its parents’ parties, is also seeking solutions.
Farnell, the 2019 Lincoln graduate, says the intention was always to pack out what they brought in, and the organizers would always bring trash bags so they could clean up after themselves. But when cops broke up the parties around midnight—which happened often—everyone would scatter.
Farnell says he spent years “banging my head on a wall” for a way to light the parties without torches. He went to Home Depot to try to find mounted lights, and researched solar panels, he says.
“I really think there’s a path to making this a unique tradition that’s less harmful than it is now.”