Drive east on I-90 past exit 17 on almost any clear afternoon and you will catch it out of the corner of your eye before you register what you are looking at: a bright wing drifting low and silent over the athletic fields behind Issaquah High School, banking once, then settling toward the grass like it has done this a hundred times before. It has. The pilot launched from a clear-cut knoll on the shoulder of West Tiger Mountain that most towns would treat as a footnote on a trail map. Issaquah treats it as something closer to a commons.
That distinction became official the weekend of August 13 through 16, when the city hosted Aire Craft for the first time, a festival built around paragliding and street performance that organizers modeled on France's Coupe Icare and Festival Des Rias. One description of the event called it "paragliding meets Cirque du Soleil meets Carnival." The festival just wrapped days before this was written, and it is worth asking why a town with a genuinely rebuilt downtown plaza chose a logged-over hillside as the place to stage its biggest new civic experiment.
A Hillside With Its Own Origin Story
Poo Poo Point did not start out scenic. The name comes from the steam whistle sounds that carried through the Tiger Mountain forests during the area's logging era, back when timber crews worked the slopes above what is now Issaquah proper. In the 1970s, Weyerhaeuser logged the area around the point hard enough that crews took the stumps along with the trees, leaving behind a wide, open bench of land with almost nothing standing.
That clearing turned out to be exactly what a paraglider needs: an unobstructed launch face with a steady updraft and a clean sightline down to the valley. Pilots now backpack their gear up the Chirico Trail to reach it, and on a good-weather day, the point functions less like a remote summit and more like a runway with a waiting list. The view from the top takes in Lake Sammamish, downtown Bellevue, Squak and Cougar Mountains, and on a clear day, a hint of Seattle's skyline. Mount Rainier shows up too, especially at sunset, which is part of why the point pulls both hikers and pilots on the same evening.
Two Ways Up, One Argument Locals Keep Having
Ask three Issaquah residents how to get to Poo Poo Point and you will likely get three different answers, because the mountain offers two genuinely different routes that serve different kinds of days.
| Approach | Trailhead | Character |
|---|---|---|
| High School Trail | Second Ave SE, behind Issaquah High School | Old railroad grades and a gradual climb, waymarked by signs the Issaquah Alps Trails Club placed itself, roughly 6.9 miles round trip with about 1,800 feet of elevation gain |
| Chirico Trail | Poo Poo Point Trailhead off Issaquah-Hobart Road | Shorter, steeper, and rockier, the route most paragliding pilots use to carry gear directly to the launch |
The High School Trail is the one most families and casual hikers use, since it starts a few blocks from a residential neighborhood and eases into the climb along old logging grades. The Chirico Trail is the working route, the one pilots use because it gets them to the launch with the least amount of wasted distance. Locals tend to pick a side based on whether they are going up to look at the view or going up to jump off it.
The Festival That Made the Unofficial Official
Aire Craft did not invent Issaquah's relationship with paragliding. It formalized something that was already happening informally every weekend the wind cooperated. By modeling the event on Coupe Icare, the long-running French air sport gathering, and pairing it with street arts programming in the spirit of Festival Des Rias, organizers were betting that Issaquah's paragliding scene had grown large enough and visible enough to support a ticketed, multi-day event rather than remaining a word-of-mouth curiosity for hikers who happened to time their trip right.
That bet says something about how the town sees itself. Issaquah has an official nickname for exactly this reason: the city calls itself Trailhead City, and its own promotional materials point to the ease of hiking access and the paragliding off Poo Poo Point in the same breath they mention the Costco Wholesale headquarters and the salmon hatchery downtown. The mountain is not treated as separate from civic identity. It is part of the pitch.
Down in Town, the City Has Been Building a Different Kind of Square
None of this happened because downtown Issaquah stood still. The Pedestrian Park and Senior Center Plaza revitalization project wrapped in 2025, renewing a stretch of Olde Town that already saw heavy foot traffic and improving access to the destinations around it. Salmon Days 2025, the city's long-running festival tied to the salmon run through Issaquah Creek, was the first large-scale event to use the rebuilt space.
That investment sits alongside businesses that have anchored the town for decades. Gilman Village started in the 1970s when the Mohl family set out to help small business owners, mostly women, get established at affordable lease rates. The family's third generation still runs it today. Boehm's Candies and Chocolates carries its own layer of local history: founder Julius Boehm carried the Olympic torch for Austria's track team in 1936, and the torch is still part of the store's tours. A fourteen-foot public art troll named Jakob Two Trees, built from recycled wood, has become enough of a fixture that locals point newcomers toward it without needing to explain why.
Downtown Issaquah, in other words, has real gravitational pull. It just is not pulling harder than the mountain.
Commerce Still Talks About the Mountain
The clearest evidence that Poo Poo Point functions as civic shorthand rather than a hiking footnote comes from how the city itself talks about business news. Issaquah's economic development office runs a podcast called Buzz, hosted by Autumn Monahan alongside Alexis Fitzsimmons, the city's Economic Development Manager. In one recent episode built around new restaurant openings and closures, the hosts spent time on paragliding off Poo Poo Point in the same conversation, treating it as part of the same local texture as the storefronts changing hands downtown.
That pairing is not incidental. A few things that landed in Issaquah this year:
- Uniqlo opened its Issaquah Commons location on August 14, kicking off with a traditional Japanese Taiko drum performance at 9:50 in the morning ahead of the 10 a.m. opening, and offering the first 200 customers each day of the weekend a special edition tote bag and early access to a limited apparel collection.
- Burgermaster opened a new location the Tuesday after Memorial Day, May 26, giving the west side of town a second outpost of a regional chain that has been a fixture in the Seattle area for decades.
- Mountain bikers continue to route through Duthie Hill Mountain Bike Park, one of the region's better-known trail networks, tucked a short drive from the same trailheads that lead up toward Poo Poo Point.
None of these openings competes with the mountain for attention. They coexist with it, which is the point. A town that can hold a Taiko drum ceremony for a clothing retailer and a paragliding-inspired arts festival in the same summer is a town where the mountain and Main Street are treated as parts of one identity rather than rivals for it.
What the Mountain Says About the Town
The Issaquah Alps Trails Club keeps a running calendar that makes this plain. Members lead invasive species removal days on Squak Mountain, maintenance work on the city's first Miyawaki Forest, guided hikes to the site of the Lake Tradition Fire that burned nearly two acres of city-managed forestland in August 2025, and family-friendly outings led by park rangers and Washington State Parks staff. One recent event paired an Issaquah Alps board member with a representative from Birds Connect for an early morning bird walk up to Poo Poo Point itself, treating the climb as a shared civic activity rather than a solo athletic pursuit.
That is the real thesis hiding inside all of this. Issaquah rebuilt its Pedestrian Park. It landed a new Uniqlo with enough fanfare to include a drum performance. It kept Gilman Village and Boehm's running across generations. All of that is a town investing in its own downtown square. But when the city needed a stage large enough for something genuinely new, something built for the first time this August, it looked up the hill instead of down the block. Aire Craft did not happen in the plaza the city just spent years rebuilding. It happened on a stump field a logging company stripped bare fifty years ago, because that is where the town's biggest crowds already knew to look.
If you already live here, none of this requires an explanation. You have driven past exit 17 and clocked the wing overhead without slowing down. But it is worth naming out loud what the last few weeks confirmed: the mountain is not a side attraction to Issaquah's civic life. It is the civic life, with a view of Rainier thrown in for free.
If you are weighing what it actually means to put down roots in a town that treats a hillside like a town square, Brian Hopper has spent two decades reading the Eastside at exactly this level of detail. Request a private market strategy when you are ready to talk specifics.
