The Deschutes County Fair & Rodeo closed out its 106th year on August 2 with a demolition derby, and the crowd got a title fight nobody saw coming. A driver from Canyonville named Jonathan Lee Deatherage rolled his beat-up 2002 Crown Victoria through the last-car-standing bracket and drove away with $5,000, the car barely recognizable but still running. The announcer, reading the entry list before the first heat, stopped cold on the driver's nickname: "His name is 'Death Ridge?'" Down at the other end of the arena, Redmond Fire and Redmond Police ran their annual grudge match. Last year Jimmy Hurley's airbag deployed mid-derby. This year he got his redemption, meeting the defending champ's minivan head-on right as the champ's car quietly blew a CV axle in reverse.
That is the fair. Loud, five days, over almost as fast as it starts. What I want to talk about is what happens the week after, because that's when the rest of Redmond actually turns back on.
For fifteen months, a chunk of the city's most-used trail corridor has been fenced off. For roughly the same stretch, downtown has been filling in storefront by storefront, fast enough that the city has now posted three straight years of occupancy above 90 percent. Those two things were not supposed to line up this cleanly, but they did, and late summer 2026 is the moment both come back online at once.
A Trail That Was Down Longer Than the Fair Was Up
The Central Dry Canyon Improvement Project started in May 2025, with crews tearing into water mains and stormwater lines along the stretch of Dry Canyon Trail that cuts through Sam Johnson Park, separating the tennis and pickleball courts from Hope Playground. The goal, according to the Redmond Spokesman, was a safer connection between Sam Johnson Park and the Weigand Family Dog Park, with a new lighted crosswalk and a protected walking path replacing what used to be an awkward crossing at Antler Avenue.
The city told residents in January the work would wrap by the end of June. By July, the trail's own conditions page was still flagging a partial closure between 15th Street and Rimrock Way. That gap between the announced timeline and the actual fence line is the kind of thing you only notice if you walk the canyon regularly, and it's worth saying plainly: if you haven't been down there since spring, don't assume it's clear. Check before you plan a loop.
Assistant city engineer Lindsey Cromsigt put it simply while the work dragged on: "We appreciate the public's patience as we work through the project." Fair. But the patience has a payoff, because a fifteen-month construction window is finally closing at the exact moment downtown, on the other side of town, has never had more reasons to walk to it.
What Moved In While the Trail Was Out
Downtown Redmond's occupancy streak isn't a fluke of a slow year. The city counted nine new businesses opening in the retail, restaurant, and service sectors over the course of 2025, and put actual money behind the momentum: roughly $110,000 in Urban Renewal grants and loans went to eleven small businesses that year, work the city says leveraged nearly $1 million in private investment. That's close to nine private dollars for every public one, which is a different story than a city subsidizing empty storefronts. It's private capital that decided downtown Redmond was worth betting on before the trail even reopened.
A few of the businesses that filled in that window, according to reporting from the Redmond Spokesman:
- Kook'i, a bakery and cafe at 235 SW Sixth Street, where Heather Goss hand-paints custom cookies instead of just flooding them with icing
- Don Gabino's Mexican Grill, 530 SW Sixth Street
- Dry Canyon Arts Gallery, 405 SW Sixth Street
- Mǎna Folly, a game room and store at 439 SW Sixth Street that's offered free game play for 21 years, now standing on its own after longtime co-tenant Redmond Computers Plus relocated to Rimrock Way
- Little & Luxe, a women's and children's boutique at 239 SW Sixth Street
The Dry Canyon Community Art Center also opened its doors downtown on December 5, 2025, adding a second Dry Canyon-branded arts space to the mix inside of a year. Not everything survived the churn. Smith Rock Tattoo left its longtime spot at 633 SW Deschutes Avenue for 11th Street in Terrebonne, a reminder that downtown's momentum is real but not automatic for every tenant.
The most talked-about opening didn't even make the city's official 2025 list, because it landed a few weeks into 2026. Bacon Bar N Brunch took over the building that had been Christie's Kitchen for fifteen years, at 614 NW Cedar Avenue, with a grand opening on February 5. Owners Cue and Wendy Chatley kept the building's bones and built a menu around, unsurprisingly, bacon: applewood smoked, candied, folded into a jam double-smash burger. The dish nobody predicted would take off, according to the Source Weekly, is the Smothered Tots, crispy tots buried in house-made sausage gravy and chopped bacon. The back patio sits under trees old enough to actually shade it, and Chatley has said he wants to use that space for baby showers and small events once the season settles in.
Put those two threads side by side and the picture is less "Redmond added some shops" and more specific than that: the exact stretch of months when the canyon was hardest to walk was also the stretch when downtown had the most new reasons to walk to it instead. The trail reopening doesn't restore something that was static. It reconnects to a downtown that changed while it was gone.
The Rotation Doesn't Stop at the Fairgrounds
The fair's five nights of free concerts are done for the year, but Redmond's live music calendar doesn't go quiet, it just moves across town to General Duffy's Waterhole on SW Forest Avenue. Niko Moon plays there August 29, and George Birge follows on September 5. Both dates land inside the same few weeks the trail is expected to fully clear and downtown's newest storefronts hit their first full season.
That's the actual shape of a Redmond summer, once you track the dates instead of treating each headline as its own story. The fair owns five days spanning the turn of July into August. The trail spent fifteen months rebuilding itself underground before it could reopen above ground. Downtown used that same window to add nine storefronts and change hands on a tenth. None of it happened on the same schedule, but all of it lands in the same six weeks, which means late August in Redmond doesn't feel like the summer winding down. It feels like the town handing the baton from one loud thing to the next.
If you've been away from downtown or off the canyon trail for a while, this is the season to go back and actually look. The storefronts on Sixth Street aren't the ones you remember from two years ago, and the crosswalk connecting Sam Johnson Park to the dog park wasn't there before the derby drivers even signed up this year.
I track this stuff because I live and work in it, and because a town's daily rhythm tends to show up in property values before it shows up in a headline. If you're curious what all this downtown momentum has actually done to home values in your part of Redmond, Kenzie Carlstrom puts together free, no-pressure home valuations any time you want a real number instead of a guess.
