By Justin Short
Cover photo courtesy of Keegan Webber
Spring is in the air, snow is melting, and you’re probably looking for some ridiculous thing to do on your bike. Why not haul it up 25 staircases on a 20-mile route through some of Spokane’s most spectacular and seedy spaces? Yes, up. There are 1,000 some-odd steps waiting for you and the bike you decide to lug along. Plenty of goofballs show up with whatever legs they can knock together during ski season to tackle the Spokane Stair Master.
Like many of the absurdist Spokane bike events I write about in this column, the Stair Master is the brainchild of Dan Webber. According to Josh Hess of Mojo Cyclery, Dan had been talking about the Great Spokane Shop Ride, the Donut Roll, this one, and other whack-a-doodle ride ideas for decades. But a few years back, the time had come to subject Spokane bike culture to Dan’s twisted imagination.
2026 will be the fourth edition of the Stair Master. You’ll show up at the Riverfront Fountain ready to roll (because I can tell by the way you’re reading this that you’re definitely going) on Saturday, April 4, at 4:30 p.m. If you’re feeling extra gluttonous for punishment, you can start at 4 p.m. at the bottom of the Huntington Park stairs on the south side of the lower falls, where the gondola turns around. Follow these stairs all the way up to the patio on Post Street next to Mobius Discovery Center for a 200-step bonus. The falls will be raging; it’s totally worth it! Leave yourself enough time to mingle with other riders before the start and pair up with someone who has the route loaded on a GPS device, because this thing is tricky. I led my group astray last year while running GPS navigation, and I had ridden it the two previous years. Tricky, I tell ya.
Once upon a time, the ride kicked off with the three small steps in front of REI onto Monroe Street. It’s like herding cats to move a large throng of riders across a high-traffic-volume street like Monroe, and the group got immediately strung out. It was easy enough to keep a group together when it was barely a dozen riders. Last year, I performed a social media experiment to promote this thing, and more than 40 riders showed up. It was complete mayhem. Every staircase looked like a line of army ants hauling bikes back to the colony. But now that the Stair Master has hit the big time, the start has moved to the fountain, and other adjustments were made to avoid some of the seedier staircases and their associated health and safety hazards.
This grand tour of our fair city’s staircases ranges from well-maintained to seriously neglected steps, including several of the most well-known and pristine ascents by the falls in Riverfront Park. Heading east, a few stairs are knocked off on the way to a small yet steep two-flight staircase on the Ben Burr Trail near Altamont Boulevard. Heading west, the longest stretch of the route connects a number of doozies, including the legendary Perry Street Stairs and the much lesser-known Tiger Trail, a horror show of a staircase from Corbin Art Center up to Cliff Drive on the South Hill.
My personal favorite is a relatively short staircase in the neighborhood west of High Bridge. It’s closed off by a cable at the bottom and top, and its rather narrow width makes it a particularly tedious obstacle. But the best part is the house across the street with a big picture window. On the night of the inaugural Stair Master, a family was in there having dinner when our group queued up at the stairs. They gathered around the window, and you could tell from their expressions they were saying, “Those idiots! What are they doing?!” (Read that in your best Napoleon Dynamite voice.) Anyone could see that there was an intersection barely 50 feet away that we could use to connect to the upper street.
The next year, a bigger group arrived at these stairs, and the family was there having dinner once again. “Those idiots, they’re baaack!” Just then, my young friend Gable recognized them as family friends, so he broke ranks, speeding toward their window to say hello. The rest of us watched with great mirth as the horrified expressions of this entire family seemed to scream, “Those idiots, we know one of them!”
Next up are the backcountry stairs, covered with moss and a fallen tree in the middle. All that remains is Peaceful Valley. Hopefully, you will be at peace knowing this is your life now, lugging your bike up endless flights of stairs into the inky black void of night. The only stairs we climb down take you to the Maple Street Bridge, crossing to the final gut punch up to the afterparty at Uprise Brewing in the West Central Neighborhood. I know this is a hard sell, but the Spokane Stair Master is the best time you will ever have hauling your bike up way too many stairs with a bunch of lunatics. Bring a helmet, lights and a strong sense of irony. See you Out There!
OTO writer Justin Short is completely insane if he thinks you will actually go to the Spokane Stair Master…but he thinks you will actually go to the Spokane Stair Master.
