Enchanted Forest

From Interstate 5 south of Salem, a giant egg can be seen sitting on top of a castle. The egg is Humpty Dumpty, and a road sign topped by a waving Humpty announces the exit for Enchanted Forest, a theme park on a forested hill at Turner, in Marion County. Only the top ridge of the castle shows from the freeway. Past the entry building the park lies under a nearly continuous canopy of second-growth Douglas fir, bigleaf maple, vine maple and Pacific rhododendron. The trees are thinned just enough to let light reach the attractions. Concrete and brick paths follow the steep grade of the hill. Handrails are concrete sculpted to look like tree limbs, and trash cans and drinking fountains rise out of concrete stumps.

The park runs from late March to the end of September. The 2026 season opened March 21 and closed September 27, and the park’s site gives March 20, 2027, as the next opening day. The park’s accessibility page puts the terrain in one line: “This park is built on a hill.” The Tofte family owns and operates it. Roger Tofte’s daughters, Susan Vaslev and Mary Tofte, co-manage the park, and three generations of the family work there.

The castle, the shoe and the witch’s hair

The storybook castle, one of the earliest things built here, is the first stop on the old trail. A bridge crosses a water-filled moat with a concrete alligator in it, and small dioramas inside the castle show fairy-tale scenes, among them Old King Cole on his throne. Beyond it Storybook Lane runs deeper into the trees. Visitors pass a gingerbread house scaled to a young child, with Hansel, Gretel and an unpleasant-looking witch inside. They can crawl through Alice in Wonderland’s rabbit hole to the Mad Hatter’s Tea Party. They pass Jack and Jill, Little Miss Muffet, and the Crooked Man and his crooked house. They can slide down the shoe of the Old Lady Who Lived in a Shoe, and they can climb into the witch’s castle through her mouth and slide out through her hair. The Seven Dwarves’ Mine has a clearance of 23 inches. Wherever possible, each piece is sized for children and made to be climbed through, crawled into or slid down.

Most of Roger Tofte’s original creations still stand on this lane. Kyle Cuitti, who has worked at the park for more than a decade and once served as Tofte’s assistant, helped sculpt figures along the trail. “Everything is uneven — but a lot of it is intentional,” he said. The family appears throughout the park. Mary Tofte’s hand was used for a mold at the Peter, Peter, Pumpkin Eater display, and family voices speak in the Snow White and Goldilocks scenes.

Tofteville, Old Europe and the rides up the hill

Beyond the lane the path reaches the newer parts of the park in roughly the order they were built. Tofteville Western Town has a shooting gallery, remote-control boats, Fort Fearless, a museum and a cave system, one passage of which narrows to 14 inches. The Wagon Wheel Opera House gift shop shows a documentary on the park’s creation, with old footage and interviews with Roger Tofte and his family. The town also holds the Haunted House, three floors of spirits. Susan Vaslev is the voice of the spooky woman in the attic, and Roger Tofte and his son are the singing skeletons. Up the hill at Pan for Treasure, two ride tickets buy a sifting plate of sand, and the guest keeps whatever fool’s gold, crystal or agate remains in the sifter. Every pan is guaranteed to turn up treasure.

The Old European Village turns the path into a street. Its windows show glass slippers, a sword lodged in a stone, and a villager looking out from a second story. At Sir Newton’s Gravity Factory, silver spheres roll through a maze of contraptions. Inside the Jolly Roger Inn, the Fantasy Fountains show sends 359 water jets and colored lights up to music composed and choreographed by Susan Vaslev. The show repeats every fifteen minutes, and the inn serves pizza, popcorn and peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwiches. Elsewhere, Gretel’s Grill sells corn dogs and nachos, and Ma’s and Pa’s BBQ serves pulled pork and potato salad. Picnics are welcome, and covered picnic buildings stand near the Ice Cream Parlour.

Admission covers the grounds and the shows. Rides cost one dollar a ticket, at three to five tickets a ride. The Ice Mountain Bobsled stands 100 feet tall and runs 1,600 feet of track in two and a half minutes, and from Long John’s Lookout in the English Village visitors can watch its cars go past. The Big Timber Log Ride floats through an old logging mill and drops 40 feet to a splashdown. The gift shops sell ponchos for $3. Tofte called it the biggest log ride in the Northwest. In the Challenge of Mondor, riders with infrared guns fight the creatures of the dark to free the Drumlins. The cars keep score, top scorers of the day get a medallion, and all-time leaders have their names engraved on a plaque at the entrance. The carousel carries rabbits, a pig and ostriches along with its horses. The Tiny Tune Train circles miniature villages that Roger Tofte made by hand, among them Pinocchio’s village and the houses of the Three Little Pigs.

A theater built for a daughter

“Basically, dad just built me a theater,” Susan Vaslev said. She has written and directed every production in the Comedy Theatre, which the park dates to 1973. She makes musical comedies out of fairy tales and credits Fractured Fairy Tales on Bullwinkle and the Carol Burnett Show as her influences. The park’s attractions page lists Jack and the Beanstalk as the season’s show. The landscape survey dates the outdoor Summer Theater to 1985. Vaslev also leads Possibly Irish, the house Irish band, which plays twenty-minute shows in the Gathering Hall in the Old European Village, daily through the summer.

Michael Bentley has acted in the wooded amphitheater on and off since 2000. In 2025 a teenager asked him to recreate a photograph the boy’s family had taken of the two of them when the boy was four. “I make people laugh for a living,” Bentley said. “There’s kind of nothing cooler than that.” Timothy Ward started as an actor in 2014 and became Vaslev’s full-time assistant in 2019. Kyle Cuitti lived on the grounds during one off-season and later married at the park. A brick in the English Village path records the wedding.

Idiot Hill

Roger Tofte was born January 8, 1930, in Chippewa Falls, Wisconsin, and moved to Astoria at five. He finished high school in Silverton and served in the Navy during the Korean War. In 1954 he married Mavis Bjorke. For about a year the couple kept a jewelry store in Camas, Washington, which made no money, and after their first child was born Roger took a job as a draftsman and artist with the Oregon State Highway Department. He had wanted to be an illustrator in the mold of Norman Rockwell.

The accounts of where the idea came from differ in their dates. The Historic American Landscapes Survey, drawing on a 2010 interview with Tofte, places it in 1962, after a visit to family in Minnesota and to several roadside attractions along the way. NPR places it on a family road trip in 1963. Tofte told NPR that those parks were “just plywood and there wasn’t much to them so I kinda started dreaming up what I’d like to do.” The park’s own history adds that by then he had four young children and saw little for a family to do together in Salem.

In 1964 he bought twenty acres of steep, forested hillside beside the interstate for $4,000. The site was unattractive to developers and therefore cheap. The park’s history says he paid in monthly installments of fifty dollars. NPR gives a $500 down payment. He raised money by repairing watches for co-workers and taking freelance commercial art jobs, and Mavis worked as a caseworker for the Marion County Welfare Department. On evenings and weekends the family built a trail lined with figures of rebar, cement, wire mesh and plaster. Sack concrete was hauled to the site in a Volkswagen, and Mavis’s brother Dale Bjorke did the carpentry. The Toftes’ own backyard filled with storybook figures. Co-workers at the Highway Department called the property “Idiot Hill,” and several of them ended up working on it, along with boys from the neighborhood. Nothing was built with permits. Close to opening, the family needed $2,000 for the last touches. Their own bank refused the loan, and only one bank would lend it.

Tofte had expected the trail to take two years, and it took seven. At 2:00 on Sunday, August 8, 1971, by the park’s account, Roger and Mavis hung a piece of butcher paper reading “OPEN” on the fence. The landscape survey gives August 15. Admission was a dollar for adults and fifty cents for children, the starting wage was $1.65 an hour, and the staff was Roger, Mavis and their children Susan, Ken, Mary and Lori. Seventy-five people paid on the first day. The park and NPR say 1,000 came the next Sunday. The Oregon Encyclopedia counts 515 adults and 398 children by the second Sunday. The survey puts the total at 15,000 by year’s end. Mary Tofte was eighteen when she started at the hot dog stand. “It’s what we did,” she said. “It’s all we knew.” In 1973 her father left the Highway Department to work on the park full time.

Ice, fire and the bricks in the path

Tofteville followed in the second year. The sources disagree on most of the later dates. The Haunted House is given as 1973 or 1974. The Ice Mountain Bobsled, the first ride, is dated 1982, 1983 or 1984. It first ran on a 24-inch fiberglass track, which proved too slow to move visitors through, and it was redesigned two years later. Work on Old Europe Village began in 1988. The plan there was a restaurant with a stage for Susan’s music, but the excavated hillside looked right for waterfalls. The water-light show opened instead, and no live performance was ever held on that stage. Ken Tofte designed and built the animatronic figures for the village’s second phase, which opened in 1993. The Log Ride followed in 1996 by the park’s count, or 1997 by others, and it came in over budget. Challenge of Mondor came in 2006, built with cars and a trackless system from ETF of the Netherlands. The carousel came in 2017. Mavis ran the business until 1991, according to the survey, then handed it to Susan and Mary, and she later wrote books on the park’s history.

The forest has done its own damage. In 1990 a winter storm brought down twenty trees and badly damaged the bobsled, and a 2009 ice storm toppled more. In 2014 two visitors trying to take a photograph sent Humpty Dumpty off his wall, and he broke apart. “We were all crying,” Vaslev said. Her father, then 84, spent fifty days building a replacement. In 2020 the state kept amusement parks closed for the first half of the season. The park reopened at the end of June at about seven percent of capacity. That same year 13-year-old Wyatt Tofte and his grandmother, Peggy Mosso, died in the Beachie Creek fire. On February 12, 2021, an ice storm brought down several dozen large trees, crushed the kiddie train and pushed opening day from March to early June. The family auctioned Roger’s paintings and started a Buy-A-Brick campaign. More than 8,000 people gave almost $500,000.

Roger Tofte died February 13, 2026, at 96, with family by his side. Until then he had kept planning attractions, riding his moped through the park and making repairs. “It’s now three generations in the park instead of four,” Vaslev said. The question the sisters hear most is about the 2018 Ghost Adventures episode, in which the hosts looked into whether the purported remains of a bloody battleground might account for paranormal activity on the grounds. “I’ve never seen anything myself,” Mary Tofte said. Still, if something falls off a shelf, the sisters say, “Oh, that must be dad,” or “That must be mom.”