Though it isn’t summer quite yet, our latest issue of Health & Home is here to help with the transition. Inside, explore a beautiful home on the shores of Liberty Lake, try a rhubarb pie recipe from pie expert Kate Lebo, get your hands dirty in a fossil dig and much more!
Online, and on stands, now!
Cover photo by @patrickmartinezphoto
It’s the moment you’ve all been waiting for! Our annual Best of the Inland Northwest Readers Poll results are out! Who did our readers vote best chef? What is Spokane’s favorite place to buy vintage clothing? Find out online, and on stands, now!
✏️ Cover illustration by Kate Swann (@bykateswann )
The 2025 edition of the Annual Manual is on stands around the Inland Northwest now! Inside you'll find guides to everything the Inland Northwest has to offer, from where to find the best gifts, how to support local artists, to the best venues for local music. Pick one up around town or check out our digital edition. Link in bio.
Cover photo by @erickdoxey
To be perfectly blunt, you’re not going to find a band with a sadder origin story than Millergold (@millergold.music ).
In May 2023, Bailey and Nate Elliott’s 3½-year-old son, Miller, tragically died in an accident. Emotionally shattered, Bailey found refuge in the darkness through music.
“I had been a musician forever, but with having kids and college and all that stuff, I wasn’t doing music very much,” Bailey says. “But after my son passed away, I found it to be a very healing, healthy grieving method. So I started writing songs.”
Bailey began by writing heartbreakingly super direct songs about losing Miller on her acoustic guitar (“Missing You”). The songs were just written for herself, but she also knew that dealing with the grief solitarily was isolating. She soon looped in Nate to play bass and her brother Tucker to play drums. Thus, the grief rock band Millergold was founded.
Read more and listen to this year’s four Bands to Watch at the link in our bio.
Story by Seth Sommerfeld
Photos by Alicia Hauff (@ahpconcerts )
Flowers are for everyone.
Katie Lila fully embodies this belief, so she’s spreading nature’s joyful gift around Spokane and beyond through various efforts like giving away fresh bouquets to random strangers on “Flower Friday” and filming her TV series, Follow the Blooms. It’s all part of her flower-centric creative brand, Flowers for People (@flowers.for.people ).
While Lila’s 10-episode behind-the-scenes-style series first premiered regionally last spring on KSPS PBS (@ksps_pbs ), Follow the Blooms will be distributed nationally via American Public Television starting this June. The series will be available both via scheduled on-air broadcasts (including on KSPS) and on demand via the PBS Passport streaming platform.
Read more at the link in our bio.
Story by Chey Scott
Photos by Emily Star Poole (@emilystarpoole )
As three people arrested after a Spokane protest against Immigration and Customs Enforcement activity last summer head to trial on Monday, May 18, it’s likely to be a busy morning at the Thomas S. Foley U.S. Courthouse.
U.S. District Judge Rebecca Pennell has declined to reserve space in the courtroom for anyone aside from the legal representatives and the defendants: Bajun Mavalwalla II, Justice Forral and Jac Archer, aka the Spokane Three.
Seats at the trial will be coveted, in part because the defendants have wide-ranging local connections. But, if any of the defendants are convicted of federal conspiracy charges stemming from a June 11, 2025, protest, it could possibly trigger nationwide repercussions.
All three defendants showed up to protest last June when two Venezuelan asylum seekers learned that they would be transported to an immigration detention center in Tacoma. Former Spokane City Council President Ben Stuckart, who was the legal guardian for one of the men, posted on Facebook encouraging community members to join him in peacefully protesting.
Protesters filled the area as people from a planned protest at Riverfront Park that day marched over to join the group outside of 411 W. Cataldo Ave. Spokane police declared the protest an unlawful assembly and ordered people to leave, with multiple law enforcement agencies deploying smoke and pepper balls at those who didn’t.
Stuckart and eight others were later arrested by the FBI and U.S. Marshal Service and federally charged with conspiracy to “impede or injure officers.” Six of those protesters took plea deals.
Those 12 jurors will be confronted with the challenge of determining whether Mavalwalla II, Forral and Archer agreed ahead of time to injure or impede immigration officials at a protest that ultimately involved more than 1,000 people.
Read more at the link in our bio.
Photo by @youngkwak
This week is all about the local musicians who still strive to put on killer live shows and craft songs that find a place in our hearts in the face of an unfair music industry.
For this year’s Bands to Watch issue, we profiled four groups that are keeping the Spokane music scene fresh. That includes Millergold’s (@millergold.music ) emotionally heavy grief rock, the collegiate-rooted indie rock of Pancho (@pancho_band ), the instant genre-blending rager starter that is BLXCKPUNKS (@blxckpunks ) and Jumbotron’s (@jumbotronband ) community-building alt-rock sound.
Online, and on stands, now!
Cover photo of BLXCKPUNKS by Alicia Hauff (@ahpconcerts )
On May 18, the Spokane City Council is scheduled to vote on a preferred alternative growth map, potentially cementing an important milestone in the city’s current overhaul of its comprehensive plan, a multiyear process that’s been dubbed PlanSpokane 2046.
Outside of the city charter, the comprehensive plan itself is arguably one of the most consequential and far-reaching documents at City Hall. It will ultimately influence everything that gets built, altered or razed within the city limits for the next 20 years — and with it, citywide characteristics like housing density, traffic patterns, walkability, green spaces and shopping areas.
Washington’s Growth Management Act requires the revised plan to be completed by the end of this year.
Read more at the link in our bio.
Story by E.J. Iannelli
Nearly five years ago, Kyle Renz and his childhood friend Jerod Harwood sat atop a 14-foot-tall pile of used tires on an otherwise empty lot and contemplated sweeping views of Liberty Lake.
Renz was considering buying the lot, perched on a hillside just above the lake’s shore. As teenagers growing up in Spokane Valley, Renz and Harwood regularly visited friends and spent happy hours recreating at the lake. Renz’s wife, Ashley, who spent part of her childhood in San Diego, loved the neighborhood’s coastal vibe, with its “tiny, little tight roads and no space between you and your neighbors,” Renz says.
Sitting on the tire pile, Harwood, now an architect, was immediately inspired. He drew a little sketch right there and then. “I’m definitely a pretty strict modernist, so I try to keep simple forms... I kind of set up this diagram where we had two bars with a glass connector” — as you can see on the front cover image — “and then everything else infilled from there,” he says. “I was looking at the plans the other day, and we pretty much nailed it the first time.”
For Harwood, the house was a stepping stone toward founding his own firm, a confidence-builder after the Washington State University-trained architect had quit his Seattle job, “kind of without a plan,” he says. “I drew on this a little bit and then got another couple projects and then decided I could just do it on my own.” His firm, hoist., has since designed multiple single family, multifamily, commercial and mixed-use projects in Seattle, Spokane, Post Falls, Liberty Lake and Coeur d’Alene. But the house he plotted with his friend was the start of it all.
Read more at the link in our bio.
Story by Anne McGregor
Photos by Patrick Martinez (@patrickmartinezphoto )
Walking around your neighborhood, you’ve likely happened upon a Little Free Library, the book-sharing boxes that encourage community and reading.
The first Little Free Library was constructed in 2009 outside Todd Bol’s home in Hudson, Wisconsin, according to the organization that registers the trademark lending sites. Bol partnered in 2012 with Rick Brooks to turn the model into a nonprofit. Now, there are over 200,000 Little Free Libraries around the world, with over 100 of them found in the Inland Northwest.
In recent years, the trend has evolved beyond books. Instead, in a few boxes across the Spokane area, you’ll find spaces to exchange everything from art, seeds, trinkets and mugs to keychains and more.
Take a look at Spokane’s cache of Little Free Libraries. Time to freshen up those bookshelves and collections — let’s go searching!
Read more at the link in our bio.
Story by Dora Scott
Photos by Dora Scott @erickdoxey and @youngkwak
On May 24, 1976, in the midst of America’s bicentennial celebration, the results of a judging organized by a British wine merchant in Paris shocked the wine world.
In blind tastings — meaning the identities of the specific bottles were not revealed — of French and American cabernet sauvignon and chardonnay, two wines from California’s Napa Valley earned the highest ratings: the 1973 Stag’s Leap Wine Cellars cabernet and the 1973 Chateau Montelena chardonnay. The true shock value came from the fact that all nine of the judges were French. The tasting came to be known as the “Judgment of Paris” and served to put Napa Valley on the world wine map.
On May 18, 2026, in the heart of America’s semiquincentennial and 50 years almost to the day after the Judgment of Paris, the Spokane Enological Society is tipping its vinous chapeau to that epoch event with its own blind tasting of four French and four American wines. Club members and guests will taste and compare two sauvignon blancs, two pinot noirs, two cabernet francs and two Bordeaux-style red blends. The only thing participants will know is that one wine in each category is from France and one is from America (not even the states of origin will be revealed).
Read more at the link in our bio.
Story by Bob Johnson
Photos by @youngkwak
Washington. 1994. The fictional town of Viktorville. Here, two co-workers, Status (Wayne Kyle Spitzer) and AK (Andy Kumpon), are about to have a frightening series of shifts while working as lowly security guards for the mysterious Viktor corporation.
On the first odd evening, their characters talk for what feels like an eternity in their car, monitoring the radio as they do so, get out to make their rounds, unexpectedly make out with a woman you can barely hear, get in a fight with a seemingly random man, encounter the paranormal, and then reunite back at their car. Their shifts will only get more chaotic from there as they face down increasingly strange beings and get up to various sci-fi shenanigans along the way. Yet no matter how much this wacky little world throws at them, the duo keep clocking in and clocking out.
This is the premise of the series Dead of Night, the locally shot and set sci-fi series created by actual security guards Spitzer and Kumpon in the 1990s, which aired on Spokane cable-access. Little did the duo know, they were making something that would endure for decades. Though the show’s production was more than a little scrappy and its storytelling freewheeling, it remains a strange curiosity you won’t soon forget, like a Twin Peaks-esque homage that time very nearly forgot.
Read more at the link in our bio.
Story by Chase Hutchinson
Courtesy photos
