The Intersection That Finally Caught Up With Colbert

For most of the last two decades, the corner of Hatch Road and Highway 395 in Colbert was the kind of place you drove past without looking. It sat between a dairy farm the Cordill family had worked since 1948 and the highway that eventually cut straight through their land, leaving a stretch of frontage that never quite became anything. That changed on July 25, when Midway Market soft-opened at 16221 N. Hatch Road, followed by a grand opening celebration on August 5. For the first time in Colbert's history, that intersection is somewhere people stop instead of somewhere they pass through.

The timing matters more than it might seem. Two miles east, Green Bluff is in the thick of its own busiest stretch of the year, with peach season in full swing and a calendar of farm events running almost every weekend through Labor Day. Colbert has always had the harvest economy. What it hasn't had, until this summer, is a reason to stop at its own crossroads for a gallon of milk. Both things are true at once right now, and that overlap is worth understanding if you live anywhere along the Hatch Road corridor.

What Actually Opened On Hatch Road

Midway Market is an 18,000-square-foot grocery store built around ten departments rather than the aisle-and-endcap layout of a conventional chain. The lineup includes a full-service butcher counter with dry-aged beef, an artisan bakery, a bistro serving made-in-house sandwiches and hot entrees, and an espresso bar where the beans are roasted on site under the PURE Coffee label. There's a Sinclair gas station on the same lot, positioned for commuters and for the boat traffic that already runs up Highway 395 toward Loon Lake and Deer Lake most summer weekends.

The store sits inside the larger Village at Midway development, a project owned by Cary Snow that also includes the existing Ridge at Midway apartments. Snow has described the land as his family's own homestead property, the same ground the Cordills farmed before the highway split it in the 1990s. That detail changes how the opening reads. This isn't a national chain parachuting into a growth corridor. It's a fourth-generation Colbert family converting a farm that had already lost its purpose once before, back when the road took the land that made dairy farming workable in the first place.

Not everyone along Hatch Road is unreserved about what comes next. Diane Morgan, who lives across the street from the site, watched the construction for months before the store opened.

"But it's a dirt pit so it's kind of nice to see something nice going there."

That's the tone of most of the reaction so far. Relief that an empty lot became something functional, mixed with the ordinary wariness that comes with watching your road get busier. Other neighbors have raised concerns about traffic on a stretch of Hatch Road that carries kids walking to Midway Elementary, and about whether the surrounding apartment growth outpaces the schools and services meant to support it. Those are legitimate questions for a corridor that's still filling in. They don't cancel out what the store itself represents for daily errands in Colbert, which is the first real grocery option that doesn't require a drive into Mead or further into Spokane.

The Loop Two Miles East Hasn't Slowed Down

While Hatch Road was under construction, Green Bluff kept doing what it's done every August for generations. Green Bluff Growers, the cooperative that represents the area's independent farms, describes its members as packed into roughly 12 square miles, which the association calls the largest concentration of family farms in that small an area anywhere in the country. Whether or not that claim holds up against every farming region in the country, the density is real enough to feel when you're driving the West and East loops in a single afternoon.

August is peach month at Beck's Harvest House, where Peach Party Weekends run through the end of the month with fresh-picked fruit, a peach tasting table, and U-pick access that depends on how the crop is ripening week to week. Peach season at Beck's typically starts in mid-July and runs until the trees are picked clean, which means the exact window shifts year to year. Beck's has been in the same family since 1987, long enough that it's now the longest continuously family-run farm on the Bluff.

The rest of the August calendar has been just as active. Green Bluff's Cherry Pickers Trot and Pit Spit contest returned in July, drawing roughly 800 runners and 1,500 total attendees to a 4-mile road run through orchard country, an event race director Brandy Sears has organized since 2010 as a fundraiser for the Green Bluff Grange. A week later, the Green Bluff Carriage Crawl let riders hop between four participating farms on a horse-drawn carriage, sampling drinks from New Maitland Brewing Co., which set up in the orchard of Priddy Good Fruit back in 2022, alongside pours from Barrel Springs Winery at Sears' own Mountain View Venue.

Here's what's still on the books for the rest of the season:

None of this is new behavior for the Bluff. It's the same rhythm the farms have kept for years, weekends built around whatever's ripe and whichever grower is hosting.

Two Economies, One Zip Code

What's actually new is that Colbert now has two functioning economies running in the same few square miles at the same time, and that hasn't been true before. Green Bluff has always operated as a destination loop, a place Spokane drives to on a Saturday for peaches or a corn maze and then drives home from. Colbert itself, the stretch of Hatch Road and the highway corridor around it, has functioned mostly as a pass-through, a place with houses and a school but no center of its own gravity.

Midway Market doesn't compete with Green Bluff. It solves a different problem. It means a Colbert resident can pick up dinner on the way home from work without merging onto 395 toward Mead, in the same week they drive two miles the other direction for peaches and a dahlia festival. That's a genuinely different pattern than the one this neighborhood has run on for years, where recreation was close but daily errands weren't.

It's early enough that the long-term effects are still unsettled. The traffic concerns neighbors raised during construction are worth watching as the surrounding apartment phases get built out. But for this particular August, the corner that sat empty behind a highway cut for three decades is doing something it never did before, and the orchards two miles over are doing exactly what they always have. Living in Colbert right now means having both at once.

If you're weighing what a neighborhood like this actually offers day to day, beyond what shows up on a map, that's the kind of local detail worth knowing before anything else. Chelsey Graves and the Graves Re Group work this corridor closely enough to track it as it changes, and we're always glad to talk through what a specific block or road actually feels like to live on. Reach out anytime you want that kind of ground-level read on Colbert or the surrounding North Spokane County communities.