Opening of new Palisades Park trail marks milestone in decades-long conservation effort by neighbors and one ‘charismatic cowboy’

Craig Volosing knows Palisades Park.

One would hope so, given his extensive experience on the park’s more than 700 acres. He’s lived in the area for years, once leased some of that acreage for his livestock and serves as president of the nonprofit Friends of Palisades – a group he helped found in 1991.

On Thursday, Volosing was joined by the Spokane Tribe, the Inland Northwest Conservancy, Spokane Parks and Recreation and Mayor Lisa Brown to debut a new 1.5-mile trail cutting through the park’s newest swath of public land tucked between Rimrock Drive and the border of Riverside State Park.

The North Palisades Loop Trail at the northwest corner of North Houston Road and North Rimrock Drive was created with assistance from a number of local outdoors groups. The park’s master plan calls for a parking area and proper trailhead.

The city said in a news release promoting the event that funding would be included in Spokane Parks and Recreation’s property tax levy, should voters approve it this fall.

“I know sometimes when people think of parks in Spokane, they think of places like Riverfront and Manito, and they are completely awesome,” Brown said in her remarks. “But what about this? This natural land, this is it, right? This is as valuable and as significant, if not more so.”

With an unmarked start between mounds of basalt signature to the area, the trail winds through grassland and ponderosa pines in a keyhole fashion, providing ample views of the city and the region’s flora and fauna.

The trail starts with compacted dirt, a portion built by the Washington Trail Association to their standards. Volosing said the remaining sections were built by local volunteers with the Friends of Palisades, Evergreen Mountain Bike Alliance and the Inland Northwest Conservancy, just to name a few. That portion was built with the intent that more use would wear the trail in, and while the way is marked, the going is a bit rocky and grassy for the time being.

Volosing said the group hopes to keep the park area as natural as possible, evidenced by the choice in the trail’s path through the land. He gestured toward a large patch of trees off the loop’s right arm on a guided hike before sharing the desire to never build a trail and disturb that particular patch.

“The reason is because, through my life up here, I have known how desperately important this grove of timber and this seclusion and thermal cover is to whitetail, muley-s and moose,” Volosing said. “They habitually hole up here in the dead of winter, in the heat of summer, and they fawn in here, calve. And we’re going to do anything we can to just make sure that they are undisturbed.”

Volosing said the establishment of the trail is a milestone in what’s been a decades-long effort to expand the park and connect it with Riverside State Park. The 123 acres that comprise the “Riverside to Rimrock” property, as it’s been referred to, were first acquired by the Inland Northwest Conservancy before Spokane County used its Conservation Futures fund to purchase the land and transfer it into the care of the city in 2022. Conservation Futures is a voter-supported, property taxed-funded program.

But the effort to preserve the land has roots that stretch back 30 years, when Volosing and Palisades co-founders Vic and Robbi Castleberry convinced local officials to use the fledgling Conservation Futures fund to purchase a little over 8 acres on the park’s south end. That property now hosts the parking area for the Rimrock View Trail.

“What really happened here is that a group of neighbors and friends decided to do more than just complain,” Volosing told The Spokesman-Review at a 1996 cleanup of the park land.

The preservation effort started with 8 acres and grew to swaths in the tens and eventually hundreds over decades, Volosing told a small crowd Thursday.

“Then at that point, the little old Friends of Palisades and me had more on our plate than I thought that we were prepared to handle,” he said.

Volosing went to Inland Northwest Land Conservancy and “explained the predicament,” and director Dave Schaub, then a new hire, agreed to take on the audacious task of bundling together the swath of land spread between 12 properties and 10 owners, then overseeing the land before Conservation Futures could step in.

“Anyone can see that Craig is a convincing fella,” Schaub recalled. “Our charismatic cowboy, we call him.”

Schaub said there is a dire need for local conservation efforts like the one that made the expansion of Palisades Park, and by extension the North Palisades Loop Trail, possible. Spokane County residents have less public lands available to them than elsewhere in the state and the broader West. Around 10% of Spokane County is public land, behind the Western average of 30%, and King County’s whopping 51%, as previously reported by The Spokesman-Review.

“We’ve got a lot of room to go in terms of providing more publicly accessible conservation lands to our community,” Schaub said. “People love to get out, and we all benefit from more conservation lands.”

Volosing looks forward to seeing the public make use of the trail and appreciate the land, but said they need to be mindful of the fact it is a prime wildlife habitat, while also paying respect to its heritage. He said the land was enjoyed for centuries by the Spokane Tribe well before he and the rest of the city arrived, and that the Friends of Palisades and Spokane Parks has partnered with the tribe to guide its preservation.

“It needs to be used accordingly, and with that kind of respect,” he said.

When asked about the origin of his passion for conservation, evidenced by years of advocacy work, Volosing responded with, “I’ve just always been crazy for natural things.”

He was “a born horseman,” the rancher and horse trainer mused, whose “passion for outdoors and wildlife just kept growing.”

Like every good cowboy, he also has an inclination toward justice, “cultural justice, historical justice and environmental justice.”

“I think it needs to be justice for not only aggrieved citizens who are the victims of environmental misjustice and misdeeds, but it’s also an opportunity for the justice that’s due the wildlife that we’re all forever kind of affecting in one way or another,” Volosing said. “Let’s try and affect it as positively as we can.”