Walk the loop from the 3rd Street trailhead this week and the north side feels like it always has. Wide dirt path, ponderosa pine and Douglas fir closing in overhead, the lake showing up in pieces through the trees before it opens all the way at the outcropping above Harrison Slough. Keep going toward the 10th Street side and the rhythm changes. There are still sections rerouted, still a stretch of the south loop that has been harder to reach than it was a year ago. If you have hiked Tubbs Hill more than a handful of times this summer, you have probably already noticed this. What you may not know is why the two sides are behaving so differently, and what that difference actually tells you about how this 165-acre park gets taken care of.
The short version: the north and south sides of Tubbs Hill are on separate maintenance timelines this year, and the gap between them is wider than the city originally expected.
Two Phases, Two Very Different Timelines
The work started last year. In 2025, crews completed what the city called Phase 1 of a forest fuel reduction project, treating 58 acres on the north side of the hill over about four weeks. The goal was straightforward: thin out dead wood and dense undergrowth that turns a forest fire from manageable to dangerous, especially on a peninsula where homes, downtown infrastructure, and one of the most walked trails in Kootenai County all sit close together.
Phase 2 targeted the south side, a smaller footprint at roughly 13 acres, and it began on Memorial Day, May 25, 2026. Coeur d'Alene Trails Coordinator Shane O'Shea told local press at the time that the south-side project was expected to move faster than Phase 1, given the smaller acreage. Crews cut and piled ground fuels, pulled down hazardous dead trees, and posted barriers to route hikers around the active work zones. The Kootenai County FireSmart Program and Idaho Forest Management partnered with the city on the job.
That is where the timeline gets interesting. A smaller project was supposed to wrap up quicker than the four weeks Phase 1 took. Instead, as of a trail status update in late August, part of the south-side route was still flagged as temporarily inaccessible, meaning the smaller phase has now run considerably longer than the larger one did. Nobody has published a public explanation for the gap, and it is not this post's job to guess at one. What matters for anyone planning a walk this week is simpler: if you are heading to the south loop expecting the same open access you had two summers ago, build in a few extra minutes to find the marked detour.
What "Loved to Death" Actually Costs in Hours
The reason Tubbs Hill needs this kind of rolling, sectioned maintenance at all comes down to sheer use. A trail counter installed in the park logged nearly 400,000 visits in 2024 alone, on a peninsula that measures 165 acres and holds a 2.2-mile interpretive loop. That volume of foot traffic does two things at once. It packs down soil and roots along the main trail, and it pushes hikers to carve unofficial shortcuts down toward the water, which is exactly the kind of unauthorized trail that erodes hillside and threatens plant life the fastest.
Friends of Tubbs Hill, the volunteer nonprofit that works alongside the city's Parks Department, has described the pattern bluntly: the hill is being loved to death by its own popularity. Volunteer board member Dave Yadon has said as much publicly, and the numbers back him up. In 2024, more than 135 Friends of Tubbs Hill members logged 423 documented hours across 25 separate trail projects, work the group calculated at roughly $12,792 in donated labor. That figure does not include the two annual cleanup days or the informal litter-picking and brush-trimming that happens whenever a volunteer notices something out of place.
This spring's restoration went a step further than trail repair. Following the fuel reduction work, contractors planted 500 native trees on the hill in April 2026, a mix of western larch, white pine, and ponderosa pine chosen specifically to help rebuild forest density where the fuel-cutting had opened things up. Roughly 300 of the seedlings were wrapped in protective sleeves to guard against browsing deer, and the rest were treated with a repellent. If you walk the north side this fall and notice young trees in plastic sleeves among the older growth, that is what you are looking at.
The city has also leaned harder on people power to manage the crowding itself. The Tubbs Hill Ambassadors program places volunteers on the hill through the summer season specifically to answer questions, point hikers toward open sections, and remind visitors of the leash and pack-out rules posted at both trailheads. If you run into someone in a Friends of Tubbs Hill shirt near the moose statue at the 3rd Street entrance, that is who they are.
What's Actually Open Right Now
For anyone planning a hike in the next couple of weeks, here is where things stand:
- The north loop, covering the area treated in 2025's Phase 1, is fully open and shows the visible result of April's tree planting.
- The south side, where Phase 2 work began Memorial Day weekend, still has a temporarily inaccessible section as of the most recent trail status update in late August. Other parts of the south loop, including the beach access on the southwestern side, remain usable.
- Both trailheads, at the south end of 3rd Street next to McEuen Park and at the south end of 10th Street, are open and staffed periodically by Ambassadors during peak hours.
- Signs and physical barriers mark the active restoration zones. Friends of Tubbs Hill asks hikers not to remove flagging tape even if it looks like leftover construction debris, since crews use it to track work areas.
None of this makes Tubbs Hill closed. It makes it a park in the middle of a multi-year restoration effort that happens to overlap with the exact weeks most people want to use it.
The Other Clock Running Downtown
Tubbs Hill is not the only thing on a countdown right now. A few blocks away, downtown Coeur d'Alene's summer calendar is closing out on the same schedule. The 5th Street Farmers Market, which expanded to three full blocks this year for the first time, running along 5th Street between Front Avenue and Coeur d'Alene Street, wraps its regular Wednesday season on September 2. So does Music at McEuen, the free concert series that has run every Wednesday evening at McEuen Park since it kicked off on July 8. That leaves two Wednesdays, August 26 and September 2, before both disappear until next spring.
The market itself has grown into something more than a seasonal add-on. It draws about 80 vendors selling fresh flowers, local food, and handcrafted goods, all held to a rule that farm products must be grown or produced within 200 air miles of downtown Coeur d'Alene. Erika Murphy, who runs CDA Soap Co. and has sold at the market for four years, has credited it directly with growing her business into national shipping. That is the kind of return a local market delivers when it is run as tightly as this one is, by the Coeur d'Alene Downtown Association rather than as an afterthought.
Once the Wednesday season ends, the calendar does not go quiet. The Coeur d'Alene Symphony Orchestra plays its Labor Day concert at the Rotary Band Shell in City Park at noon on September 7, a free, all-ages show built around television and film music. Then on September 18 and 19, Sherman Avenue turns into downtown's Oktoberfest, with more than 20 local beer, cider, and German-style brews poured alongside food from participating restaurants.
Put the two clocks side by side and the pattern is hard to miss. The trail that most residents treat as a daily habit is being rebuilt in sections precisely because so many people rely on it. The downtown calendar that fills the blocks around it is winding down its summer format at the exact moment fall programming picks up. Neither one is static. Both are worth checking before you plan the walk, the market run, or the Saturday you finally make it to Oktoberfest.
That is the version of Tubbs Hill worth knowing right now: not a single trail with a single status, but a park being actively managed in real time by people whose names show up in city council notes and Facebook posts more often than they show up anywhere official. Knowing that is what turns a detour sign from an inconvenience into information.
For more on what makes Kootenai County's neighborhoods work the way they do, from trail systems to the calendar that fills them, Idaho Luxe keeps a close eye on the details that make North Idaho worth paying attention to, on and off the market.
