The Boring Lava Field has played an important role in local affairs, including the development of the Robertson Tunnel, recreation, and nature parks.

[26] These cleared and burned land plots sustain rich stands of secondary forest, featuring gorse, huckleberry, nettles, poison oak, salal, and blackberry.

[26] The riparian zones in the Lava Field area host diverse species, and they are influenced by uplands that serve as migration connections for birds, mammals, reptiles, and some amphibians.

[30] The nearby Portland area was inhabited by the Chinook people,[31] though much of the local indigenous culture is poorly understood as a result of disturbance of archeological sites and artifacts by erosion and human development.

[32] Oral history, limited archeological evidence, and ethnographic research inform current knowledge about local Native American communities.

[32] The area surrounding Portland constituted one of the most densely populated communities in the Pacific Northwest, made up predominantly of Chinook people including the Multnomah and the Clackamas.

[31] In 1805 and 1806, Meriwether Lewis and William Clark documented villages and encampments near what is now East Portland, trading with members of the community and describing their plank houses, language, customs, and material culture.

[33] Local indigenous populations were greatly reduced after forced displacement and disease,[34] but a small Native American community persists in Multnomah County.

The park is public land 6 miles (9.7 km) to the southeast of downtown Portland named after a pioneer family, covers an area of 22.63 acres (9.16 ha), including part of the Boring Lava Field.

Historically, it sustained a quarry, prompting the creation of the Kelly Butte Jail, which used prisoner labor (under guard supervision) to gather crushed rocks for building roads in Portland until the 1950s.

Eventually the building was converted into an emergency services dispatch center from 1974 through 1994, when it was abandoned due to rising costs for renovation and space limitations.

With the new reservoir came improvements to the Powell Butte park, including resurfaced and realigned trails, reduced environmental impacts, better accessibility measures, and reduction of steep grades.

The government also built a visitor center, caretaker's house, public restrooms, maintenance yard, and a permeable parking area that permitted filtration of rainwater through asphalt to an underground stone bed, where it could be absorbed by the soil and then into the nearest aquifer.

For the first 3,900 feet (1,200 m) of the tunnel, the core shows Boring lava flows with cinder, breccia, and loess dated from 1.47 million to 120,000 years ago, which have been deformed by the Sylvan fault.

Collaborators for opening the park include the U.S. Forest Service, local citizens, Metro, The Trust for Public Land, and the Buttes Conservancy organization.

[10] It includes more than 80 known small vents and associated lava flows, with more volcanic deposits likely present under sedimentary rock deposits from the Missoula Floods[3] (also known as the Bretz or Ice Age Floods),[46] which took place between 21,000 and 15,000 years ago and probably destroyed small cinder cones (including those made from tuff) and maar craters, burying them under up to 98 feet (30 m) of silt from slack water.

[3] The Global Volcanism Program reports that the field includes somewhere between 32 and 50 shield volcanoes and cinder cones, with many vents concentrated northwest of the town of Boring.

[7] It marks one of five volcanic fields along the Quaternary Cascade arc, along with Indian Heaven, Tumalo in Oregon, the Mount Bachelor chain, and Caribou in California.

[3] The Boring Lava Field has erupted material derived from hot mantle magma, and the subducting Juan de Fuca plate may be as shallow as 50 miles (80 km) in depth at their location.

[20] The Boring Lava Field sits on the floor of the Portland Basin,[51] residing in the forearc setting between tectonic extension to the south and compression to the north.

[63] The Boring Lava exposures show aeromagnetic anomalies with short wavelengths and high amplitudes suggestive of their relatively young geological ages.

[64] At points where the Boring Lava sits over Troutdale Formation deposits, landslides are frequent, producing steep head scarps with heights of up to 66 feet (20 m).

These scarps tend to have grabens at their bases and Boring Lava blocks at their tops, and they show variable slide surfaces from hummocky to flat.

[68] Along the Washougal River, a large landslide occurred as a result of failure due to the Boring Lava pushing down on rock from the Troutdale formation.

[73] Eruptive vents on the western edge of the field formed along a fault line that trended to the northeast, located north of present-day Carver.

[75] D. E. Trimble (1963) argued that the Boring Lava Field was produced by eruptive activity at 30 volcanic centers;[76] these include shield and cinder cone volcanoes.

[60] The Rocky Butte plug, which reaches a height of 330 feet (100 m) above its surroundings, was dated to 125,000 ± 40,000 years old by R. Evarts and B. Fleck from the United States Geological Survey (USGS).

These formations, created by lava flows cooling at the surface while their hot interior kept draining, were first identified by R. J. Deacon in 1968, then analyzed by L. R. Squier in 1970;[83] they were studied in greater detail by J. E. Allen and his team in 1974.

[83] The tubes were produced by a small vent at the southern end of the northern segment of the field,[84] extending 2.5 miles (4.0 km) from its base to the south and then the west.

[46] R. Evarts and Fleck originally reported that lava flows at the Barnes Road deposit of the field represented the youngest eruptive products in the Boring area, with a radiometric dating age of 105,000 ± 6,000 years.