If you walk out your door on 10th Street and head south, you are on the trail in under a minute. That has been the small daily gift of living in Sanders Beach for as long as anyone can remember. This summer, the gift comes with new fine print. Crews are working the south face of the hill, seedlings are staked into the ground with pink flags and plastic sleeves, and a familiar loop or two has been quietly rerouted.
Here is the thing worth holding on to before we get into any of it. Tubbs Hill in 2026 is no longer just the neighborhood's back porch. It is a working forest under active management, and the hill you walked in 2022 is being deliberately reshaped so it is still there in 2042. If you understand what the city is doing and why, the temporary signs stop feeling like an inconvenience and start feeling like maintenance on a piece of shared property, which, functionally, it is.
The south side is a construction zone this season
Several trails on Tubbs Hill closed for wildfire mitigation starting Memorial Day, with fuel reduction projects intended to slow the spread of wildfire and protect public safety, homes, infrastructure, forest health, and wildlife habitat. The scope is specific and worth knowing if you live on the east side of the hill.
- Kootenai County FireSmart is partnering with the City of Coeur d'Alene to cut and pile ground and ladder fuels, remove hazardous tree snags, and treat around 13 acres.
- The first phase, completed in 2025 over four weeks, treated 58 acres on the north side; the second phase, covering about 13 acres on the south side, is expected to take less time to complete.
- Crews are removing hazardous dead trees called snags, some of which may fall near trails, and cutting and piling ground and ladder fuels.
- The city secured a $240,000 Western States Fuel Mitigation grant for the work, coordinating with the Kootenai County Office of Emergency Management, the Idaho Department of Lands, and Kootenai County FireSmart.
Trails Coordinator Shane O'Shea has been the public face of the project. He has told residents there will be signs and barriers reminding people about the temporary closures, and framed the work as being about the safety of the general public, focused on removing small-diameter forest fuels that don't take much to ignite and carry the fire.
If you have been on the hill in the last few weeks and thought parts of it looked thinner or smelled like fresh-cut pine, that is what you were seeing.
A quick map of what you can and cannot use
The east trailhead at the south end of 10th Street is open. The main perimeter route around the hill is largely open. It is the south face where the picture keeps shifting. As of early June 2026, part of the route on the south side of Tubbs Hill was temporarily inaccessible per the trail's active advisories, with other sections of the trail still usable.
Two anchors to keep in mind, both within walking distance of Sanders Beach:
| Access point | Where it is | Why you'd use it this summer |
|---|---|---|
| East trailhead | South end of 10th Street | Closest to Sanders Beach; still the fastest way onto the perimeter loop |
| East Tubbs Hill Park | 982 East Lakeshore Drive | Two-acre site with restrooms and a parking lot, a practical entry when the south segment is signed off |
| West trailhead | Southwest corner of McEuen Park | The long-way-around option; open and unaffected by south-side work |
The city maintains East Tubbs Hill Park as a two-acre site at 982 East Lakeshore Drive with open space, restrooms, a parking lot trailhead, and trail access, giving the east side of the preserve a practical entry point for families, swimmers, and anyone looking for a shorter visit. If you host anyone this summer who assumes Coeur d'Alene hiking means a car trip, this is where you take them to prove otherwise.
The seedlings you're walking past
Before Phase 2 started, the city did the quieter half of the work. In April, contractors planted a mix of native trees on the ground the first phase had cleared. If you have noticed short plastic sleeves and wire stake flags along the trail, this is what they are protecting.
- All seedlings are native to Tubbs Hill and include a mix of 65% larch, 20% white pine, and 15% Ponderosa pine, with contractors planting a total of 500 seedlings, 300 protected by Vexar tubes and 200 treated with Trico deer repellent.
- Each tree has been marked with tubes and wire stake flags to make it easier to locate during survival inspections and a release spray application planned for later this spring following green-up.
There is a reason the city keeps asking neighbors, in every press release, to leave the flagging alone. Over recent months flagging has continually been removed by members of the public, and the city notes this only causes a waste of public funds as staff have to redo the flagging. If you see pink or orange plastic on the ground near a young tree and it looks like litter, it is not. It is how the parks staff finds that tree again in October.
What the visitor numbers actually tell you
A statistic that changes how you think about your own front yard: according to the Tubbs Hill Foundation's annual report, the east trail entrance saw around 160,000 visitors in 2025. That is the entrance closest to Sanders Beach. It is a number that helps explain why Dave Yadon, a Friends of Tubbs Hill board member, has been blunt in the local press. Yadon has said Tubbs Hill is being loved to death, and that the group is committed to keeping the trails sustainable.
A useful way to read the fuel mitigation project is against that visitor count. A working forest inside a downtown, absorbing that many footfalls a year, is not going to maintain itself. The Phase 2 closures and the seedling flags are the cost of keeping the hill in the shape you moved here for.
The volunteer half of the equation
The city and Friends of Tubbs Hill have been running a parallel track of small-scale trail work that most neighbors never see. Earlier this spring, twenty Friends of Tubbs Hill volunteers joined Coeur d'Alene Trails Coordinator Shane O'Shea to complete sixty hours of trail work that included closing a steep, user-created trail near the Mountain Avenue and 10th Street connector. That is the kind of detail a resident notices. If a shortcut you used to take between Mountain and the perimeter loop has been deliberately blocked with logs and duff, that is why.
Work tasks on these volunteer days include moving rocks and soil, raking and compacting trail surfaces, light pruning, and repositioning downed logs to discourage trail shortcuts, with experienced volunteers and parks staff operating a jackhammer. If you have ever wanted a reason to meet more of your neighbors than you do at the mailbox, this is a low-stakes way.
Friends of Tubbs Hill also organizes a July cleanup that reads almost like a neighborhood ritual at this point. The group meets the Saturday after July 4th at the 3rd Street Trailhead from 8:30 a.m. to noon to help clean up after the celebrations, asking participants to bring gloves while bags are provided.
A season on the hill, from a Sanders Beach front door
Here is how a resident's calendar looks with all of this in the frame:
Now through late summer. Assume the south-side segment near the 10th Street connector may be signed closed on any given day. Default to the east trailhead onto the perimeter loop clockwise, or start at East Tubbs Hill Park and walk in toward the shoreline. The full loop covers 2.1 miles with an elevation gain of 301 feet, taking about half an hour to an hour to complete.
Next spring. O'Shea has said the city will plant native conifer species on Tubbs Hill next spring, and that the fuel reduction work will improve planting sites by eliminating competition and promoting overall forest health. Expect another round of flagged sections. Same rules: leave the ribbons where they are.
New Year's Day. Sanders Beach's own set-piece event does not run out of Tubbs Hill, but out of the water at its foot. The Polar Bear Plunge is held annually on New Year's Day, and brave souls jump into the frigid lake water. Watching from the hill's south slope is the underrated seat.
What this changes about living here
There is a quieter point buried in all of this that matters if you own on 10th, Mountain, or Lakeshore. Tubbs Hill's status as a working, managed public preserve is one of the few things about this stretch of downtown that is not negotiable. The hill endures because Coeur d'Alene treated a prime lakefront landscape as a public trust instead of a private prize. The 2026 fuel mitigation work is that decision playing out fifty years later in real time.
For Sanders Beach specifically, that public-trust status is part of what shapes the neighborhood on the water side too. The area has an unusual constraint that keeps its character intact: private docks off the beach are not permitted, which is why residents who want a boat generally take a slip at the 11th Street Marina rather than build off their own frontage. The hill in front of the neighborhood is preserved forest. The beach beside it is preserved shoreline. That is not an amenity list. That is a durable set of rules other blocks in North Idaho would give a lot to have.
The practical takeaway for this summer is smaller and closer to the ground. Walk the loop counterclockwise for a change. Take the guests to the east trailhead instead of driving them to McEuen. Leave the flags alone. When you see a work crew, wave. You are looking at the maintenance schedule for the next generation of the hill you already love.
If you are weighing what a home in Sanders Beach is worth to you in 2026, or thinking about what it would take to sell yours, Griffin Signature Living is here for the longer conversation. Sarah Griffin's fourth-generation roots in Coeur d'Alene mean the market read comes with the neighborhood context, not the other way around. Reach out when you are ready.
