Salmon Creek's Retail Gap Just Closed. Nothing Else Here Changed.

In April 2020, the developer building out the empty lot at NE 10th Avenue and NE 139th Street told The Columbian why he wanted the project: Salmon Creek was "notoriously underserved by retail," and he saw an opening. Six years, one pandemic delay, and several rounds of construction later, that lot is Skyview Station, and the neighborhood finally has somewhere to walk to that isn't a fast-food drive-thru on Highway 99.

What's interesting is what didn't need any of this. The trail was already finished. The pond was already stocked. The thing Salmon Creek has been quietly good at for decades kept running while the commercial side of the neighborhood spent six years catching up.

The Six-Year Wait Behind the Parking Lot

Skyview Station sat as a concept rendering for longer than most residents probably remember. The 8.26-acre western half broke ground after DeWitt Construction relocated its yard to Northeast 72nd Avenue, freeing up the site Hurley Development had been eyeing. By 2023, construction was visibly underway, and Commercial Realty Advisors Northwest confirmed the anchor tenants: iQ Credit Union, Chipotle, Chase Bank, and MOD Pizza, with Trader Joe's still unconfirmed and widely rumored. The Reflector tracked the rumor through Trader Joe's own license filings before the company made it official. Trader Joe's opened in 2024, giving Clark County its second location and the first one north of the Mill Plain corridor, where the only prior store sat near Interstate 205.

The finished center now runs 75,063 square feet across eight buildings on land the developer once called underserved. That word choice matters more than it sounds. A shopping center built to fill a gap tends to fill it with the same four or five predictable tenants everywhere else has: a bank, a sandwich chain, a pharmacy, a grocery store. Skyview Station got most of that. What it also got, in its last two rounds of leasing, was something with more personality.

What Actually Moved In

The two most recent additions to Skyview Station aren't the kind of tenants a 2020 site plan would have projected.

Crispy Cones held its grand opening on Friday, March 20, 2026, running noon to midnight at 14003 NE 10th Avenue, steps from the Trader Joe's entrance. The chain started as a roadside stand in Rexburg, Idaho in 2018, inspired by a founder's church mission to the Czech Republic, where street vendors sold ice cream tucked into pastry cones. It stayed regional until 2023, when founders Jeremy and Kaitlyn Carlson pitched it on Shark Tank and landed funding from Barbara Corcoran. The Vancouver location is the chain's 26th nationally and its only Washington location outside Pasco. There isn't one in Oregon yet, which The Columbian noted is "a rare example of Vancouver beating Portland to the post."

Wild Birds Unlimited opened December 1, 2025, in the Fred Meyer shopping center on the other side of Salmon Creek, and it's the first location of its kind in Southwest Washington. It's owned by Darren and Denise Ullmann, both Castle Rock residents in their late fifties. Darren spent years in law enforcement, rising to Cowlitz County undersheriff, before retiring in 2021 after the 2019 line-of-duty death of a close friend and fellow officer left him managing PTSD. Bird-watching became the coping tool therapy didn't fully replace. He studied wildlife biology before switching to criminal justice, and at one point worked as a spotted owl surveyor for the Department of Natural Resources.

Ullmann told The Columbian he wants the shop to be

"a community hub for people to find peace and a little bit of serenity"

which reads less like a retail pitch and more like someone building the store he needed a few years earlier. He's said he hopes it's the first of several Wild Birds Unlimited locations across the region.

Neither of these businesses shows up in a 2020 leasing brochure. A Shark Tank dessert chain and a specialty bird supply store run by a retired undersheriff are not the tenants a developer plans for when the goal is just filling square footage. They're the tenants that show up once a neighborhood has enough daily foot traffic to support something more specific than a bank branch.

None of This Touches the Trail

While Skyview Station was working through leasing rounds, the Salmon Creek Greenway Trail kept doing exactly what it has done for years. The paved, shared-use trail traces roughly three miles along the creek itself, running past wildlife interpretive areas, native salmon runs, and restored wetland habitat where herons and nesting ducks are common. It's open to walkers, joggers, cyclists, and equestrians, and it terminates at Klineline Pond.

The pond is small, just under 12 acres according to the Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife, but it's stocked with rainbow trout, brown trout, and coastal cutthroat, with a modest population of largemouth bass. Floating devices are restricted, so it's a bank-fishing spot by design, not a place to launch a kayak. Grass carp have also been stocked there for vegetation control, and keeping one is against the rules if you happen to hook one.

Just northeast of the trail, WSU Vancouver's campus adds its own network, the Cougar Trails, which wind through several miles of forested paths around campus with sightlines toward Mount Hood and Mount St. Helens on a clear day.

This is the part of Salmon Creek's identity that predates Skyview Station by years and doesn't depend on it. The pond and the trail were never underserved. The retail was.

What the Calendar Already Ran This Year

Salmon Creek's rhythm shows up on the calendar too, and most of 2026's marquee dates have already come and gone by the time you're reading this in August. The Klineline Kids Fishing Derby, organized by the Klineline Kids Fishing nonprofit, ran its two-day spring event at Klineline Pond in April, an event now in its fourth decade that regularly draws around 3,000 kids and roughly 10,000 people total when you count families and volunteers. It's frequently described as the largest event of its kind in the state.

The 10th Annual Muscle Car Mania filled the park on Saturday, July 11. The Hazel Dell Parade of Bands marched through on May 16. Those dates are behind us now, but they tell you something about what late summer in Salmon Creek looks like heading into fall: the big communal gatherings cluster in spring and early summer, and August tends to be quieter, more about routine than events.

One thing did quietly disappear this year. Salmon Creek Indoor Sports Arena discontinued its drop-in pickleball sessions as of July 2, 2026, after testing a new turf surface that didn't hold up for the sport. The facility is still running its Lil' Kickers and Skills Institute programs, with a free open house scheduled for Sunday, August 16, and fall league registration closing August 30 ahead of a September 8 season start. If pickleball at that address was part of your weekly routine, it isn't anymore, and the alternative isn't obvious yet.

The Actual Week

Put it together and Salmon Creek in August 2026 looks like this: a walk or a ride down the Greenway Trail toward Klineline Pond, still exactly as quiet and specific as it's been for years, followed by a stop at Skyview Station on the way home, where the newest options are a bird supply shop run by a former undersheriff and an ice cream chain that started as a roadside stand in Idaho. The neighborhood didn't trade one identity for the other. It just finally has both at the same time, which is a different thing than most retail buildouts manage.

If you're already living here, none of this requires you to do anything. If you're weighing whether a neighborhood like Salmon Creek fits how you actually want to spend a weekend, that combination, trail and pond on one side, a slowly filling retail corridor on the other, is worth knowing about before you compare it to somewhere else in Clark County.

Dawn Jensen-Beaudoin works with buyers and sellers across Salmon Creek and the rest of Southwest Washington, bringing a contractor's eye to every property she shows. If you're curious what your home could be worth in today's market, reach out for a free home valuation.