Anyone who has lived in the Highlands for more than a season knows the drill. You turn off Hill Road, catch the flag on the hillside above Cartwright, and keep climbing past the same curving streets named for Scotland that have marked this pocket of Boise since the 1950s. For generations, that hillside has been private. A mansion sat up there once. Kids slid down it on blocks of ice in the winter because that is simply what the hill was for.
That is about to change, and not in the way most neighborhood news changes things. The Simplot family is turning 200 acres of that private hillside into a public park, and the plan on file with the City of Boise means the Highlands is trading its identity as a drive-through neighborhood for something closer to a front porch.
What's Actually Being Built on the Hill Above You
The project has a name now: Jack's Park, after J.R. "Jack" Simplot, whose family home once stood on the hilltop before the state used it as a governor's residence and the structure was eventually removed. The City of Boise approved the master plan, and the Boise-based design firm Cushing Terrell is handling the landscape architecture. The Simplot Family Foundation is funding every phase of design, construction, and long-term upkeep, and the foundation will retain ownership of the land rather than handing it to the city.
The build-out is not a single ribbon-cutting. Foundation officials have put the full timeline at ten to fifteen years, which means most of what changes for the Highlands will arrive gradually, one phase at a time.
For years, families have used the slope for ice blocking and sunset watching.
That line comes from Scott Simplot, part of the family's planning team, and it explains the logic behind the design. The plan does not try to replace what people already do on the hill. It tries to build around it.
Phase one, already funded and moving forward, includes:
- An interactive Tractor Shed museum built around more than 100 vintage tractors the family bought at a 1998 auction, some already on display downtown at Jack's Urban Meeting Place
- Entry road improvements, a tiered outdoor picnic area, water features, and expanded parking
Later phases, spread across the coming decade, are planned to include:
- A hilltop pavilion with valley views, a "Grand Staircase," winding paths, and what the master plan calls "secret ponds"
- A geothermal wading feature fed by an existing well on the property, plus off-leash dog areas and a dedicated kids' zone
The flag stays. That detail matters more than it sounds. It is the one fixed point in a project that will otherwise reshape the hillside residents have looked at their whole lives.
The Businesses That Already Do This Job
Here is the part of the story that most coverage of Jack's Park misses. The Highlands has already been managing a two-audience problem for decades, just at a smaller scale, at the bottom of the same hill.
The intersection of Bogus Basin, Harrison, and Hill roads is the closest thing this neighborhood has to a town square, and it has spent thirty-plus years serving both the people who live here and the people just passing through on their way to the mountain. Highlands Hollow Brewhouse anchors that corner. Established in 1992, it is Boise's oldest microbrewery, and when ownership changed hands a few years back, the new owners kept the same staff and the same feel rather than starting over. That continuity is the point. A brewery that survives thirty years on a corner like this one does it by being useful to locals on a Tuesday and to skiers coming down off Bogus on a Saturday, at the same time, without either group noticing the other was the priority.
The rest of the cluster works the same way. O'Michael's Pub & Grill and Lulu's Fine Pizza & Sushi handle the dinner crowd. Hawkins Pac-Out has been the neighborhood's drive-thru breakfast stop for longer than most residents can remember. Java Hyde Park and Mountain Timber Coffee cover the mornings. On the outdoor gear side, Alpenglow Mountainsport, Greenwood's Ski Haus, and McCu Sports sit within a few blocks of each other, which only makes sense in a neighborhood that functions as the last stop before nineteen miles of mountain road. Car Tub Car Wash rounds out the practical end of things.
None of this is new information to anyone who lives here. What is worth noticing is that this small commercial cluster has effectively been rehearsing, in miniature, what the whole neighborhood is about to do at scale once Jack's Park starts pulling visitors up the hill for reasons that have nothing to do with skiing.
Crane Creek Country Club sits at the geographic center of the Highlands, a private golf course wrapped by the Highlands Nine and El Pelar Estates subdivisions. It is not part of the Jack's Park story, and nothing in the foundation's plans touches it. It is worth naming here because it is the one fixture in this neighborhood that the coming decade of construction and visitor growth will not reach.
One Day a Year Already Shows What's Coming
If you want a preview of higher visitor traffic without waiting a decade, you already got one this July.
The Bogus Basin Hill Climb has run since 1972, which makes 2026 its fifty-fourth year and one of the oldest continuously running hill climbs in the country. This year's ride rolled out on July 13 from Greenwood's, right at the Harrison Hollow Lane cluster, with a Boise Police escort and a partial closure of Bogus Basin Road. Riders had a rolling start at the intersection of Curling, a street inside the Highlands proper, before climbing more than 4,300 feet over eighteen and a half miles to finish at Pioneer Lodge.
For one morning, Bogus Basin Road through the Highlands becomes something closer to a parade route than a residential street. Cars reroute. Cyclists fill the shoulder. The businesses at the bottom of the hill do their busiest morning of the summer. It is a single day, and it has been a single day every July for over five decades, which is exactly why it works as a preview rather than a warning. The neighborhood already knows how to host a crowd. It just does it once a year instead of continuously.
What This Means If You Live Here
None of this happens on a timeline that changes anything about next month, or even next year. Phase one of Jack's Park is still in the entry-road-and-tractor-shed stage, and the foundation's own estimate puts full build-out a decade or more out. The flag on the hill will look the same for a long while yet.
What is worth paying attention to, if you already call this neighborhood home, is the direction. The Highlands has spent seventy years being the place people drive through on the way to somewhere else. Jack's Park is the first project in the neighborhood's history designed to make people stop instead of pass through, and it is being funded entirely outside city budgets by a family with a hundred-year history in this valley. That combination, private money, a multi-decade timeline, and a stated intent to keep the hill doing what residents already love it for, is not the usual shape of neighborhood change. It is worth watching for exactly that reason.
If you have questions about how any of this touches your specific street, or you are simply trying to keep track of what is changing in the Highlands as the phases roll out, Tina Richards Real Estate has been following Boise's foothills neighborhoods closely for years. Let's connect.
