Volunteers Bring a Beloved Washington Horse Arena Back to Life

For decades, the riding arena at Fall City Community Park was a fixture of life in the small Washington town east of Seattle. Built in 1983, it hosted lessons, shows and the easy camaraderie of an equestrian community gathered along the Snoqualmie River. But after the local riding club, the Raging River Riders, disbanded around 2020 during the pandemic, the arena fell into neglect. Repeated flooding left its surface caked with silt — rock hard when dry and dangerously slippery when wet. As the Snoqualmie Valley Record reported in May 2026, a group of neighbours decided that was not how the story should end.

They formed Friends of Fall City Arena, a volunteer nonprofit led by founder and president Jim Hutchins, with a clear goal: rescue the arena and return it to the community. The group partnered with King County's Department of Natural Resources and Parks under a community partnership arrangement, combining local sweat equity with public support. The most urgent task was the footing itself. Volunteers cleared away the hazardous flood silt and replaced it with clean sand, maintained at a safe depth of two to three inches so horses and riders could use it without risk of injury.

“Built in 1983, it hosted lessons, shows and the easy camaraderie of an equestrian community gathered along the Snoqualmie River.”

In May, the group held an open house to celebrate the work, complete with equestrian demonstrations, family activities and a ribbon-cutting alongside the local chamber of commerce. The event marked more than the reopening of a sandy ring — it signalled the revival of a shared space that had quietly slipped away. Hutchins framed the mission simply: "We want to bring it back to its former glory, so to speak."

What makes the Fall City effort quietly inspiring is its ordinariness. There was no celebrity benefactor and no dramatic windfall — just residents who looked at a deteriorating piece of their town and decided to fix it themselves, in partnership with their county. Public parks and amenities often decline not from any single disaster but from slow inattention. Fall City's volunteers reversed that drift the old-fashioned way, with shovels, sand and the conviction that a place worth loving is a place worth maintaining.