Rockwood Bakery has no WiFi. The counter at 315 E. 18th Avenue keeps turning over because people grab a coffee and a ham-and-cheese croissant and head out the door toward Manito Park, not because they settle in with a laptop for the afternoon. That detail says something about how this corner of the South Hill functions. The bakery, the park loop, and the trail network below High Drive all feel like permanent neighborhood fixtures. They are sustained by a mix of local businesses, city services, and volunteer work.
Start with the building itself. It went up in 1912 as a neighborhood grocery, first run by Nicodemus and Rosino Scaley, listed in that year's Spokane City Directory. George Creighton took it over in 1964 and eventually renamed it George's Rockwood Market, running deliveries with his own sons as the neighborhood's errand boys. Supermarkets caught up with him by the late 1990s and the grocery closed. In 1998, Kammy Magnuson, a Lewis and Clark High School graduate who had left a tax consulting job in Seattle, bought the space and spent about nine months renovating it before reopening the following year as a bakery, furnishing it with pieces sourced from antique stores to match the original 1912 feel. A Spokesman-Review item from October 1999 described it as a spot that had "in less than two weeks" become a neighborhood gathering place. It still runs on the same footprint today, open Tuesday through Saturday, 8 a.m. to 2 p.m., closed Monday and Sunday, less than a block from the park.
That history matters because it shows how a neighborhood fixture keeps getting rebuilt over time.
The Park Side of the Loop
From the bakery, the obvious move is Manito Park, 78 acres including Mirror Pond and the Nishinomiya-Tsutakawa Japanese Garden. If it's the right season, the Park Bench Café sits open near Mirror Pond and the Ferris Perennial Garden, a seasonal operation that has been serving visitors to this stretch of the park since 1923. On the way there or back, Rockwood Boulevard itself runs past a string of small triangular parks, part of the original Olmsted Brothers plan for the neighborhood.
None of that requires much explaining to anyone who already lives here. What's less obvious is what happens if you keep walking past the park instead of turning back.
Where the Sidewalk Actually Ends
Below High Drive sits 600 acres of ponderosa pine forest and bunchgrass meadow, laced with more than 20 miles of trail. Most people driving High Drive every day have no idea it's there. Friends of the Bluff, a volunteer nonprofit, works under the authority of the City of Spokane Parks Department and carries out trail work.
One access point sits just south of Rocket Market, near 43rd and Hatch, a 30-foot public right-of-way that's easy to walk past without noticing. It happens to be the closest public entry to Hangman Creek and the southern half of the trail network. It's also been steep and unsafe for years. Friends of the Bluff has been trying to fix it since 2017, working with the city parks department, a landscape architecture firm called AHBL, and the Washington Trails Association on a design for proper stairs. As of spring 2025, the most recent public figure available, the group said it was about $10,000 short of the $58,000 needed to actually build them.
The volunteers aren't waiting around for that number to close before doing other work. In March 2026, more than 50 of them turned out on a Saturday to plant 300 native shrubs, replacing ground cover that had been stripped during winter fire remediation work. That's not a one-time cleanup. It's the same organization showing up again for another round of trail work.
None of this changes whether the trail is worth walking. It changes what "worth walking" is resting on. The loop that feels like settled neighborhood geography, park to bluff to creek, also depends on ongoing volunteer work.
The Loop, Stop by Stop
For anyone mapping this out for the first time, here's how the pieces connect:
| Stop | What it is | Rough distance from Rockwood Bakery |
|---|---|---|
| Rockwood Bakery | 1912 building, former grocery, bakery since 1999, no WiFi | Start |
| Manito Park / Mirror Pond | 78 acres, Japanese Garden, seasonal Park Bench Café | Under half a mile |
| Rockwood Boulevard triangle parks | Olmsted-designed pocket parks along the boulevard | Along the route |
| Rocket Market | Neighborhood market, local producers, Jupiter Bistro fare | About a mile |
| High Drive Bluff access point | Public right-of-way just south of Rocket Market | Same stop |
| Manito Tap House | Craft beer and gastropub just west of the Rockwood boundary | Short detour |
The places on the table are sustained in different ways. The bakery's story includes Magnuson's renovation and reopening. Friends of the Bluff volunteers work on bluff trails, while the city's Parks and Recreation Department is responsible for the park; volunteers also contribute to plantings and trail spurs around its edges.
Other Ways In
Rockwood Bakery isn't the only coffee option on this side of the hill, and the alternatives say something about how the neighborhood has filled in around the original loop. Brew Peddler roasts its own coffee and makes its syrups in-house, working with locally sourced, seasonal ingredients, and sits a few minutes from the bakery with a quieter, more tucked-away feel. Revel 77, opened in 2023 by South Hill residents Mike and Deb Nelson on East 57th, pours from three different roasters, DOMA, Water Avenue Coffee, and Victrola, and has become the pick for people who want a slower, sit-down stop rather than a quick one.
The throughline across all of it, from a 114-year-old building with no WiFi to a volunteer group working on an unfinished staircase, is that Rockwood's walkability takes ongoing work. It gets rebuilt in small pieces, through local businesses, public services, and volunteers.
If you want to see the shrub planting or staircase fundraising for yourself, Friends of the Bluff posts updates and volunteer sign-ups on its own site, and the group's push for safer access near Rocket Market has been covered directly by KXLY. The bakery's own origin story, grocery to bakery, no WiFi, is worth reading in full through Edible Inland Northwest's history of the building.
Chelsey Graves walks this same stretch of the South Hill regularly. If you've found a better connector between the bakery and the bluff, or you want to know the next time Friends of the Bluff is short-handed for a work party, reach out through Graves Re Group.
