By late summer or early fall of 2020, Riverfront Park will have an interactive playground that will be almost an acre in size. The great ice age floods that shaped the Inland Northwest also are shaping the new playground on the North Bank of Riverfront Park.

The playground’s theme is Ice Age Floods, which will allow kids to both play and learn about Spokane’s history at the same time. Designers thought to add this theme since the Ice Age Floods had a significant impact on Spokane’s geology.

“That parcel has always felt like an outlier,” says Dell Hatch, a landscape architect and principal in charge of the North Bank project for Bernardo|Wills Architects (BWA), “so it’s really cool to integrate that north side as another element of the park. Kids are going to be able to discover as they play, in the sand areas and as water moves through the playground, They’re going to be learning without even knowing they’re learning.”

Soon the space will be home to a wheels park for skateboards, inline skates and scooters, new Hoopfest courts, parking served by improved access off Washington Street, and a new operations building to serve the park’s back-of-house needs. The North Bank will also connect with the soon-to-be-built Sportsplex, located on the basalt bluff above. But the centerpiece will be a 1-acre-plus destination playground themed around the Ice Age Floods that carved out the Spokane River Gorge some 15,000 years ago.

“You are going to see some water play features, you’ll see some geology features too, some rocks in different elements the kids can climb around as they learn what the geology of eastern Washington is and why it is so special to our region,” said Fianna Dickson with Spokane Parks and Recreation.

Some playground features will help children learn about nature and geology, like a stream that teaches about currents and damming. A climbing wall, rope suspension bridge, large rocks that children can climb, a splash pad, and a 30-foot tall climbing tower with tube slides, would be play elements in the park.

“We’re working with Nigel Davies [a geologist from EWU], and we’ve held a workshop with the Ice Age Floods Institute,” says Bill LaRue, a landscape architect with BWA and project manager for the North Bank. “We’re working in like five or six different types of basalt, fossils of local flora and fauna — even a petrified forest.”