Spokane Valley Things to Do This Fall Along the Appleway Trail

For most of the last decade, the Appleway Trail has been the thing Spokane Valley residents used to get somewhere else. A paved rail-to-trail corridor running along the old Milwaukee Railroad right of way, parallel to Sprague Avenue, good for a bike ride or a dog walk, but not really a destination in its own right. This September, those connections come into focus: three restaurants opened along the corridor within the same twelve-month stretch, and the Balfour Park project includes a trail extension designed to meet the park at the door.

If you’ve lived here a while, you already know Sprague Avenue as the commercial spine of the Valley. What you might not have connected yet is that the corridor running just behind it, out of sight of most car traffic, has quietly become the thing tying recent restaurant openings, a rebuilt civic park, and the neighborhood’s biggest annual weekend into one continuous loop.

Recent Restaurant Openings

Start with food, because that’s usually how a neighborhood notices change first.

The Inlander reported that Dodos at the High Spot opened in Spokane Valley’s Greenacres area in early December, in the building that used to house the Stupid Cow cafe at 17416 E. Sprague Ave. Chef Joe Absolor opened it with his childhood friend Todd Zyph, and the two didn’t just pick a spot on Sprague. They partnered with the Spokane Conservation District to install bike racks on the property specifically so customers could ride over on the Appleway Trail, which runs directly behind the restaurant. That’s not incidental landscaping. That’s a restaurant treating the trail as a second front door.

A few miles east, Capitol Bar & Grill opened its doors on Friday, August 7, at 18219 E. Appleway Ave, in the space that used to be Boomers Classic Rock Bar & Grill before it closed earlier this year. The Spokesman-Review reported that it’s the fourth restaurant from longtime restaurateur Raci Erdem, who has now brought his nephew and longtime employee Emre Basar in as a partner. Capitol joins Erdem’s other politically named spots, White House Grill and Oval Office Bistro in Post Falls and the Pentagon Bistro & Martini Bar in Liberty Lake, and it’s open for lunch and dinner seven days a week, with doors opening at 10 a.m. on football weekends for NFL games.

Eddie’s Kitchen & Tavern took a little longer to get moving. The Rat Pack themed comfort food spot announced its Spokane Valley expansion to 12928 E. Mansfield Ave back in the spring, with an April opening target. It’s since settled in, and early reviews point to a full bar, a genuinely thoughtful gluten-free menu, and the trivia nights and shuffleboard that were part of the original pitch.

Three different owners, three different corners of the Valley, and three openings that brought new activity to the corridor.

The Trail Was Built to End Here

The bigger story is what’s happening at Balfour Park, at the corner of Sprague Avenue and Herald Road. This is the block old-timers remember as the site of the city’s first retail mall back in the 1970s and 80s, sitting mostly dormant for years after that. The new Spokane Valley Public Library opened there in June 2023, and the city has been rebuilding the park around it in phases ever since.

Phase one, a roughly $5 million project, wrapped in the fall of 2024. It brought a Sounders FC soccer mini-pitch, a Veterans Memorial dedicated on May 24, 2024 with honors from the Army Honor Guard and University High School’s Jr. ROTC, an events plaza, new lighting and landscaping, restrooms, and expanded parking. Phase two broke ground in early May of this year and is adding a full basketball court, two half courts, four pickleball courts, sports lighting, and an expanded sound system for the plaza.

None of that is the part most residents would guess matters most. The landscape architecture firm AHBL, which designed the park alongside Integrus Architecture and the city, describes the project as functioning as

“the ‘living room’ of Spokane Valley”

and says it deliberately incorporated a strategic extension of the Appleway Trail to create a premier trailhead linking regional transit with local recreation. In plain terms, the trail wasn’t just left alone to pass by the new library and park. It was rerouted and extended on purpose to end there, turning a stretch of pavement that used to just connect Point A to Point B into the on-ramp for the busiest new civic space the Valley has built in years.

That’s the piece that changes how the rest of this fall reads. The trail isn’t a bonus amenity next to the restaurants and the park. It’s the thing that was engineered to connect them.

Same Corridor, One Weekend a Year

The Valley’s biggest annual gathering runs on this exact stretch of road. Valleyfest kicks off with the Hearts of Gold Parade down Sprague Avenue on Friday night, September 25, before the festival itself takes over the weekend of September 26 and 27 at three venues: Mirabeau Point Park, Plantes Ferry Sports Complex, and CenterPlace Regional Event Center. A few things worth knowing if you haven’t been in a couple of years:

• The parade route runs the length of Sprague, the same corridor where the recent restaurants opened.
• The festival itself is run almost entirely by volunteers and funded through donations from local businesses, residents, and the city, not a private promoter.
• CenterPlace, one of the three host venues, sits inside Mirabeau Point Park, a short trip from where the Appleway Trail’s western stretch begins.

None of this means the trail was built with Valleyfest in mind. But it does mean that for one weekend a year, the same corridor that quietly reroutes bike traffic into Balfour Park all September also becomes the parade route residents line up along with their kids. The infrastructure and the tradition happen to share a street.

What This Actually Means If You Live Here

Put it together and the pattern is this. A restaurant in Greenacres installed bike racks because it expected trail traffic, not walk-in traffic from Sprague. A city park was redesigned specifically to give the trail a formal terminus instead of letting it pass by unnoticed. And the Valley’s oldest community festival runs its parade down the same street the trail parallels for its entire 5.8-mile length, from Farr Road on the west end to where it crosses into Liberty Lake near Ridgeline High School.

None of that was coordinated. Erdem didn’t open Capitol Bar & Grill because of Balfour Park’s construction schedule, and the city didn’t design the library-park campus around where Eddie’s Kitchen & Tavern would eventually land. But the timing lines up anyway, and the result is a fall where a resident can genuinely start on the trail near University Road, end up at the new courts and plaza going in at Balfour, grab dinner at a spot that put in bike parking specifically for people doing exactly that, and catch the Hearts of Gold Parade on the same street a week later. That loop didn’t exist two years ago. It exists now because separate decisions by a restaurant owner, a landscape architecture firm, and a city parks department have come together over time.

If you’re the kind of person who’s lived in the Valley long enough to remember when that Balfour Park block was just an empty lot, this fall is worth a second look. Not because anything about the neighborhood changed in some dramatic way, but because the quiet infrastructure connecting the places you already go finally caught up to the neighborhood you were already living in.

Whenever you’re ready to talk about what any of this means for your own plans in the Valley, whether that’s buying, selling, or just understanding what a specific block is worth right now, John LJ Kennedy is glad to walk through it with you. No pressure, just a straight conversation about the neighborhood he knows well.