Saturday morning at Dry Creek Ranch now has a rhythm. The pool at the new clubhouse fills up by mid-morning, the coffee bar inside does a steady business, and somewhere on a porch a CSA box of kale, chard, and lettuce mix is waiting to be brought inside. What still doesn't happen on a Saturday morning: a kid grabbing a mountain bike and riding straight from a Dry Creek Ranch driveway to the jump lines at the nearby Ada/Eagle Bike Park. That connection has been part of the neighborhood's development agreement since it was first approved, and it is still missing. The reason has less to do with how fast Boise Hunter Homes builds things and everything to do with whose land the trail has to cross.
What Actually Opened
The clubhouse is real, and it is finished. Boise Hunter Homes announced the community center's opening on a 5-acre site anchored by an 8,840-square-foot building with a fitness center, kids' playroom, catering kitchen, coffee bar, lounge, conference room, and HOA office, plus a 100-by-45-foot pool, fire pit lounge, and grilling areas. Just outside, residents now have a regulation soccer field, basketball court, sand volleyball, a playground, and pickleball courts. Ada County commissioners attended the groundbreaking in December 2023, and the building opened to residents within about a year and a half of that ceremony.
The neighborhood farm has been running even longer. It launched in 2019 under manager Dan Meyer, who had previously run Morning Owl Farm in Boise, with a first Community Supported Agriculture delivery of nine items: lettuce mix, bok choy, chard, lettuce, kale, spinach, arugula, mizuna, and radishes. Meyer described the arrangement plainly at the time: a developer actually funding a working farm as a subdivision amenity was unusual enough that local growers wanted to see it prove itself before taking the "farm to table" branding seriously. The farm is still active heading into this year, still running as a working operation with no-till methods and no synthetic pesticides or herbicides, still offering a CSA program and on-farm markets to residents and the surrounding community.
The equestrian side is finished too. The Dry Creek Ranch Arena and Stables operates under a full-time manager, offering horse boarding and equestrian events, with riding lessons expected to follow. None of this required anyone outside Boise Hunter Homes to sign off. The company owns the land, the company built the amenity, the company opened it. That pattern matters, because it's exactly what breaks down once you look at the one piece of infrastructure that sits on the boundary between private and public land.
The Trail That's Been "Almost Done" Since 2023
The gap is a mile and a half of gravel path that would connect Dry Creek Ranch to the Ada/Eagle Bike Park, a free, county-and-city-managed facility with jump lines, a pump track, and connections into the Ridge to Rivers trail system. Right now, getting from a Dry Creek Ranch driveway to that park means driving, or riding a stretch of Idaho Highway 55's shoulder.
The timeline tells its own story:
| Date | What happened |
|---|---|
| October 2022 | 14-year-old cyclist Rylan Hoob is struck and killed on Highway 55 at Beacon Light Road while riding from Avimor toward the bike park, on the stretch of highway riders use because the planned trail isn't finished |
| July 2023 | Boise Hunter Homes tells Ada County commissioners the project is in its "final stages" of approval |
| May 2024 | Nine months later, construction still hasn't started; the county says it hopes to have the trail ready that year |
| August 2025 | A temporary trail Boise Hunter Homes built on its own property, at a cost of $30,000, is ordered removed by Ada County for violating hillside grading rules |
The removal is the part worth sitting with. Ada County Parks and Waterways Director Scott Koberg told BoiseDev the grading cut through the hillside at roughly 12 to 16 feet wide, with cuts up to seven feet high in places, well past the county's exemption threshold of five feet wide and three feet of cut. Boise Hunter Homes co-owner Travis Hunter's position was straightforward: the land is private, and if the county wouldn't accept an easement, residents could use the trail anyway. The county's position was that an unpermitted cut into hillside terrain creates erosion risk regardless of who owns the ground underneath it. Both things can be true, which is why the project remains stalled three years after Boise Hunter Homes first told commissioners it was close to done.
Ryan Davidson, one of the Ada County commissioners, floated naming part of the eventual trail after Rylan Hoob back in 2023. That conversation happened because the underlying problem hadn't changed: riders were still using the highway shoulder because no legal, permitted alternative existed.
Why the Clubhouse Finished and the Trail Didn't
The distinction is jurisdiction, not effort. The clubhouse, the farm, and the equestrian arena all sit entirely within land Boise Hunter Homes owns and controls. The company decides the budget, the timeline, and the finish date, and nobody else has to agree. The trail is different. It has to cross from private development land into county-managed hillside, which means it needs a signed easement, a grading plan that satisfies Ada County's Hillside Overlay District rules, and agreement on who maintains it once it's built. That's three separate approvals instead of one internal decision.
Koberg made the underlying dynamic explicit in an earlier round of BoiseDev's reporting, telling a reporter that "there has not been much incentive on their end to prioritize regional trail development." Whether or not that's a fair characterization of intent, it captures the structural reality: Dry Creek Ranch's development agreement only requires trail segments to be built out as each phase of the subdivision is finalized and platted, and the far end of the property, where this trail needs to go, is scheduled for later phases. Boise Hunter Homes is under no legal obligation to finish it until the broader project is closer to complete.
That's the piece worth understanding if you already live here. The amenities that feel finished, the pool, the farm boxes, the stables, are the ones the developer could deliver on its own schedule. The one amenity residents keep asking about is the one that depends on an outside party with a different set of priorities, and that kind of dependency doesn't resolve on a predictable timeline just because enough people want it to.
What This Means for a Saturday Ride Right Now
If you're mountain biking from Dry Creek Ranch this fall, the practical route is still by car: load up, drive down to the Ada/Eagle Bike Park, and park free in the lot off Old Horseshoe Bend Road. The park itself is worth the short drive. It covers more than 200 acres, is jointly managed by Ada County Parks & Waterways and the City of Eagle, and connects into the wider Ridge to Rivers network. Late summer and fall are the better months to ride it, since the trails get muddy in wet weather.
Within the neighborhood, the creekside trail through the Creekside section still offers a solid walk or ride for anyone not trying to reach the bike park specifically, and the equestrian trails around the arena are open to residents who board horses on site. None of that replaces the direct connection people have been waiting on since 2022, but it's what's actually usable today.
There's no new signed agreement as of this writing, and BoiseDev's most recent reporting from August 2025 describes negotiations as stalled with no resumed talks since the temporary trail was removed. If that changes, it will likely show up first in Ada County Parks and Waterways Advisory Committee meeting minutes before it shows up anywhere else, since that's where the easement discussions have played out for the last three years.
Dry Creek Ranch has built a real neighborhood farm, a genuinely well-equipped clubhouse, and a working equestrian program faster than most master-planned communities manage any one of those things. The trail is the exception that shows why: some amenities only need a developer's checkbook, and some need two governments and a homebuilder to agree on where a fence line goes.
If you're weighing a move to Dry Creek Ranch, or you already live here and have questions about what's coming next in the neighborhood, Heather Ferguson and the team know this stretch of the Treasure Valley in detail, including which amenities are finished, which are still in progress, and what that distinction actually means for day to day life here. Contact us any time you want a straight answer about this community or another one in the valley.
