TJ Meenach Re-Opening for the Summer Season
The Forum is excited to share that the main gate for our Water Trail site at TJ Meenach is open and ready to enjoy for the summer! Fresh gravel laid last fall and a brand-new Redband Ribby boat etiquette sign installed recently makes the put-in and take-out experience much more friendly for our angling and rafting friends.
These improvements allow community members to have easy access driving into the site with a few helpful tips from Ribby the Redband Trout on how to make getting in and out run smoothly for all. As the new season kicks off these first few weeks, river goers will see the City of Spokane finishing repair work of the Cochran Basin stormwater management system where the breach occurred last fall.
Before and after pictures showing the breach in the fall, to the construction currently underway this spring.
After heavy rain in early November, stormwater had flowed into a concrete catchment on the hillside where a gap in the fabric on an uneven pond caused the hillside to erode where sediment filled stormwater was able to flow into the river. City Parks and Recreation closed the gates to the TJ Meenach parking area as part of the recreation season closing, and visitors to the area were asked to avoid the hillside, as the land was unstable.
Carefully planning the reconstruction process to repair the damage, “the City’s Design Engineer team studied the breach of the overflow weir and redesigned the Downriver Park site over the winter. Work began in March to grade the hillside and construct a new settling basin at the bottom of the slope. This work is expected to be completed in the next few weeks,” said Kirstin Davis. Now that the City’s work is close to complete, the gate to the parking area has been reopened.
We are thrilled to have the site ready for the 2025 season. TJ Meenach and the whole Water Trail are a much loved and valuable recreational resource for residents and visitors alike. On any given summer day, hundreds of people enjoy a myriad of paddling, rafting, angling, and swimming activities on the Spokane River Water Trail, founded by the Forum in 2012. Since then, the Forum and its partners have developed and restored 19 river access points. With this comes building an ever growing and committed river constituency dedicated to on-going protection, restoration and cleanup efforts. Thank you FLOW Adventures, Spokane Indians Baseball, and City of Spokane for helping to make all this possible at TJ Meenach!