Half of Camp Sekani Reopened This Weekend. Here's Which Half.

Drive up Upriver Drive on a Saturday morning this fall and the gravel lot at 6707 East Upriver Drive, the trailhead most Beacon Hill regulars have used for years, is still fenced off. Construction equipment sits where cars used to park. A sign points riders and hikers toward Boulder Beach, John H. Shields Park, or Minnehaha Park instead. That's the part the "Camp Sekani reopened" headlines from this week didn't quite capture.

The City of Spokane announced on September 25 that Camp Sekani's trails and disc golf course would reopen the next day, three months after the Upriver Fire tore through the park in June. It's true. It's also only part of the picture, and the missing part matters if you live anywhere near Beacon Hill.

What Actually Reopened on September 26

The Upriver Fire ignited on June 16, 2026, and according to Spokane Parks Director Garrett Jones, it burned through more of the upper park than any fire he could recall hitting city land, catching most of the mountain bike trail network in its path. For weeks afterward, the whole area sat closed while the Washington Department of Natural Resources brought in crews to fell hazard trees, more than two dozen of them along the trails alone, and Evergreen East Mountain Bike Alliance volunteers worked in behind them to rebuild what burned, including the Leap of Faith Ramp and long stretches of trail marking that turned to ash.

The math on the damage turned out better than the early reports suggested. Evergreen East President Melinda DuPree told the Spokesman-Review in July that Beacon Hill and Camp Sekani together carry roughly 49 miles of trail, and only nine or ten of those miles were actually touched by the fire. That's why hikers and bikers never lost access to the west side of the system, the Minnehaha and Shields Park trails, even while Camp Sekani itself stayed closed through the summer.

What changed on September 26 is that Camp Sekani's own core trail network and its Jamboree disc golf course came back online too, with volunteers having filled in burned stump holes and replaced what signage they could ahead of the date. Hole 1 on the disc golf course is still out, caught up in a separate construction footprint. Everything else on the course is playable.

The Piece Still Waiting on a Timeline

Here's the part that didn't make most of the reopening coverage. According to Spokane Parks and Recreation Communications Manager Fianna Dickson, the area east of the top of Beacon Hill, past the summit and closer to where the fire did its worst damage, still has no reopening date. DNR's hazard mitigation work there was still underway as of early September, and until that's finished, Spokane Parks can't send Evergreen East in to do the trail restoration that would actually make it safe to ride or hike.

So "Camp Sekani reopened" is accurate for the trails most people use on a weekday evening loop. It's not the same as saying the whole burned footprint is back.

A Second Closure That Has Nothing to Do With the Fire

The parking lot closure at Camp Sekani's main trailhead isn't a fire story at all. It's construction, and it's going to outlast the fire recovery by most of a year.

The project is called Make Beacon Hill Public Phase II, a joint effort between the City of Spokane and Spokane County to expand the Camp Sekani lot and add a three-stall restroom building, lighting, fencing, and trailhead cameras. Work there is scheduled to run from this September through summer 2027, and only after that wraps will crews shift over to do the matching work at John H. Shields Park, the county-owned climbing and trail-access site better known locally as Minnehaha Rocks.

Shields Park has its own backstory that's worth knowing if you use that trailhead. The western half was acquired back in 1987 with funding and legwork from the Spokane Mountaineers, and park improvements followed in the 1990s. In 2022, a $1.5 million grant from the state's Recreation and Conservation Office funded the purchase of 160 more acres, with the Inland Northwest Land Conservancy and Avista adding conservation easements on another 87 acres to legally connect Shields Park to the rest of the Beacon Hill trail system. Spokane County's own project page still lists spring 2026 as the anticipated start for Shields Park construction. The more recent reporting makes clear that date has slipped: Camp Sekani's lot comes first, and Shields Park won't see crews until after that finishes, sometime past summer 2027.

Here's the practical version. If your routine has been to park at the Camp Sekani lot, plan on that not being an option for roughly the next year, regardless of how the fire recovery unfolds. The lot's closure is a construction schedule, not a damage assessment, and it's not going to reopen just because the trails do.

Where People Are Actually Parking This Fall

With the main lot out of rotation, the city is directing traffic to three alternates:

• Boulder Beach, a short distance down Upriver Drive
• John H. Shields Park, at 5625 E Upriver Drive, which also gives direct access to the Minnehaha Rocks climbing area
• Minnehaha Park, which has its own expanded dirt lot on the east side, built ahead of schedule specifically to absorb the overflow while Camp Sekani's lot is torn up

None of these add meaningfully to the walk for most of the network. The tradeoff is a slightly longer approach on a couple of routes, not a different park experience.

The Calendar Filling In Around the Closure

The reopening lands right before two events that will put more people on these trails than most weekends do. The Sekani Trail Run happens October 4 at Minnehaha Park, a volunteer-run 5k and 10k with a free 1k kids' run, roughly 1,000 feet of elevation gain on the 10k course, and proceeds going to Franklin Elementary School's APPLE Program. A week later, Evergreen East holds Eastoberfest on October 11, its annual multi-stage enduro race, based out of Minnehaha Park rather than the Camp Sekani lot this year for the obvious reason.

When the city announced the reopening, it framed the whole effort as a partnership rather than a simple return to normal:

"Thank you for your patience while crews and volunteers completed important work to safely reopen the area."

That's a fair summary of what actually happened this summer. It wasn't one closure and one reopening. It was a fire, a tree-removal contract, hundreds of volunteer hours from Evergreen East, and a construction project that had already been on the books before any of it started, all overlapping on the same 49 miles of hillside.

What This Looks Like If You Live Near Beacon Hill

If your daily loop is on the west side, at Minnehaha or Shields Park, nothing about your routine changes this fall beyond a few new faces on the trail for the October races. If you're used to looping through Camp Sekani itself, you get that back starting this weekend, minus hole 1 on the disc golf course and minus your usual parking spot. If your route has ever pushed past the summit toward the eastern reaches of the park, that piece stays off limits with no date attached, and checking back with Evergreen East at [email protected] or the city's parks department is the only way to know when that changes.

The trail signs may look a little different for a while, and some of them are still going up as Evergreen East works through the season. Staying on marked trails matters more than usual right now, since the ground underneath some of those burned sections has shifted in ways that aren't always obvious at a glance.

If you're weighing what it actually feels like to live near a trail system that's rebuilding itself in phases, or you're comparing Beacon Hill's access against other parts of northeast Spokane, the team at Bill Richard Group spends enough time in this part of the county to talk through it honestly, no fire recovery update required.