Three years ago this August, an unattended campfire on the south side of the Spokane River grew into a wildfire that burned through 80 of the Post Falls Community Forest's 500 acres and forced thirty households in Riverview Terrace out of their homes for several days. The city closed the forest's main trailheads while crews worked, then kept large sections shut through the following winter and into spring 2024 because fire-weakened trees were still falling and nobody could say yet how much ground would shift once the frost let go. A lot of people who hiked or rode that forest before the fire simply crossed it off their rotation and never checked back.
That's the gap worth closing. As of this spring, the city's own natural area trail technician was describing recovery that's outpacing the cautious timeline from 2024, and the forest most locals still picture as half-burned is, in most of the places that matter for a fall walk or ride, open again.
What Actually Burned, and What Didn't
The Parkway Fire's footprint sat on the south side of the river, in the section of the Community Forest that stretches west and south of Q'emiln Park. The city's own reporting on the fire put the burned acreage at 80 of the property's 500 acres, and separately described the fire's overall impact as touching roughly a fifth of the forest. Either way, most of the property was never inside the fire line.
What did stay open the entire time, including through the worst of the closures, is the paved 24-mile Centennial Trail that runs along the Spokane River through Q'emiln Park on its way to Higgens Point on Lake Coeur d'Alene. If your image of "the trail by the falls" is a flat riverside path rather than a backcountry loop, that path was never part of the story. The closures applied to the unpaved hiking and climbing network in the Community Forest and around the Q'emiln granite walls, not to the paved corridor most commuters and dog walkers actually use.
How the Reopening Unfolded, Trail by Trail
By February 2024, six months after the fire, the Community Forest was still described by the city as mostly off limits. Urban forester Preston Hill told the Coeur d'Alene Press that the concern wasn't the burn itself but what the burn had done underneath, root systems and trunks weakened by heat that nobody could fully assess until winter's freeze and thaw had run its course. Climbing stayed prohibited across a large section of the property that spring, and the city was still routing a maintenance road and installing a gate for emergency access rather than reopening trails to the public.
That's the version of the forest that stuck in a lot of people's heads, and it's out of date. In April 2026, the Coeur d'Alene Press returned to check on the property and found grasses filling back in and planted seedlings already at head height. Daniel Lambert, the city's natural area trail technician, put it plainly:
"A lot of the grasses have come back already and some of the seedlings we've planted, we have pictures where they're already as tall as I am."
That's not a press release promising future recovery. That's a city employee describing what he's already standing next to.
What's Rideable and Walkable This Fall
The forest's trail system runs to roughly 10 miles on its own, tying into another 20 miles of connected loop routes across the wider property, so the question for most people isn't whether the forest reopened but which route fits the day you actually have.
For an easy loop with a payoff, the Old Wagon Loop follows the river for about 2.4 miles, an hour's walk that rewards you with quiet water views best caught early. If you want more distance and rougher footing, the Yellow Trail runs 3.7 miles through terrain that parallels the river in stretches and turns muddy and rocky in others, worth knowing before you commit to it in shoes meant for pavement. The Purple O Trail threads a middle path at 3 miles and is one of the few routes that starts and ends at both trailheads, useful if you're trying to link a hike to wherever you parked. For the full connector between the Community Forest and Q'emiln Park, the route runs about 5 miles with modest elevation change, roughly two hours if you stop at the river partway through.
On two wheels, the Upper Falls Community Forest Loop covers 3.6 miles and is the circuit most bikers in the area default to, while the Shoreline Trail runs along the river for close to a mile and stays popular for its river-level views. None of this reads like a forest still working through hazard-tree removal. It reads like a trail system that's back to being used the way it was before 2023.
The Volunteers Working Alongside the City
Part of why the recovery has moved faster than the 2024 timeline suggested is that the city isn't doing this alone anymore. Back in 2024, Preston Hill mentioned that the city had started fielding interest from residents who wanted to help maintain the property, and hoped to get a board together. That group now exists as the Friends of the Post Falls Community Forest, and in June this year it partnered with Coeur Climbing for a National Trails Day workday at the Q'emiln Park Trailhead, clearing and pruning overgrown sections with tools and safety gear the city supplied. Daniel Lambert is the contact for anyone who wants in on the next one.
That's a meaningful shift from the story three years ago, when recovery depended entirely on grant-funded crews working through a $125,000 hazard fuels project along the forest's southern and eastern boundaries. A volunteer group with a standing partnership and a named point of contact means trail maintenance here isn't a one-time post-fire cleanup. It's ongoing, and it's community-run in a way the forest didn't have before the fire forced the question.
Two Trailheads, Two Different Seasons
If you're planning a fall visit, the two trailheads behave differently depending on the time of year. The Riverview Drive lot is free and open all year, which makes it the better choice once the weather turns and you don't want to think about parking fees. The Q'emiln Park entrance carries a small fee during peak summer months, so timing a visit for after Labor Day often means skipping that cost entirely.
The Q'emiln boat launch runs on a schedule set by Avista based on water levels, weather, and dam operations rather than a fixed calendar date, and it typically closes by mid-November before reopening in late spring or early summer. If boating is part of your plan, that's the window to work around. For hiking and biking, the trails themselves don't share that seasonal cutoff. The granite walls and bouldering areas around Q'emiln, the same terrain that stayed closed through parts of 2024 while root systems and rock faces were assessed for stability, are part of the network climbers are using again today.
None of this means every square foot of the forest looks the way it did in 2022. Burn scars don't disappear in three years, and some sections still carry visible reminders of what happened here. But the forest most Post Falls residents are picturing when they think "still closed" or "not worth the trip" is a forest that has been reopening, trail by trail, for some time now.
If you're weighing what a neighborhood like Post Falls actually offers day to day, beyond the listings and the drive-bys, this is the kind of detail worth having before you draw conclusions from three-year-old memory. Rachael Holzhauser spends her time in these same North Idaho communities and is always glad to talk through what's changed on the ground, whether the question is about a trail or a street you're trying to picture yourself living on.
