Coeur d'Alene plants 500 seedlings on Tubbs Hill to cut fire risk

Tubbs Hill got 500 new native seedlings this week, a small but visible step in Coeur d'Alene’s effort to keep one of the city’s most heavily used outdoor spaces from becoming a wildfire liability.

Contractors planted larch, white pine and ponderosa pine across the 165-acre hill on the shores of Lake Coeur d'Alene. The city said 300 of the seedlings were protected by Vexar tubes, while the other 200 were treated with deer repellent. All of the trees were marked with tubes and wire-stake flags so crews can find them during survival inspections.

The new plantings are part of a broader fuel mitigation project that city officials say is meant to reduce fire risk and improve forest health. The work was developed with the Kootenai County Office of Emergency Management and the Idaho Department of Lands and is tied to a $240,000 grant for contract work on the hill. City officials said that grant will fund nearly $600,000 worth of fuel reduction work.

The seedling phase follows a larger round of mitigation work that the city said was mostly completed in the summer and fall of 2025. That earlier work focused on removing dead branches and brush, along with some dead trees and snags, to create fuel breaks near abutting properties such as McEuen Park and along high-use trails. Additional fuel mitigation is planned for the southeast side of Tubbs Hill in spring 2026, and phase two of the project is expected to begin this summer.

Visitors and residents will start seeing more of that work as the season turns. The city said a release-spray application is planned later this spring, and it warned people not to pull up the tubing or remove the flags protecting the seedlings. Those markers are meant to stay in place while crews monitor whether the young trees survive.

Friends of Tubbs Hill said the city has been planning the grant-funded project since 2023, underscoring how long officials have viewed the hill as both a public asset and a fire concern. For Coeur d'Alene, the calculation is straightforward: keep Tubbs Hill green, healthy and accessible now, while lowering the odds that a future fire turns a daily trail destination into a hazard.