- 01Museum family of four is $30; the door quietly shuts at 4:15.
- 02Seventy today reads like a dead weekend; Saturday's 73 and sunny.
- 03A 113-year blueprint counter reopens in 2027 pouring cocktails from a candy dish.
- 04McCall weighs 30 subsidized apartments against a 722-home new city this fall.
- 05The Egyptian goes free 2–9 Friday, but nobody's published who plays.
Seventeen degrees is the number today, and it's the wrong thing to read. The valley wakes up to a Pacific plume and a high near 70, and the honest reading of that isn't a dead weekend — it's a front that clears out before Saturday, which is 73 and sunny, and Sunday, which is warmer still. The weekend is fine. The two days in front of it are the story.
So this issue is built for the person deciding what to do with rain on the glass. The Forecast has the correction the sky won't give you itself. The rest fills the wet afternoons: a museum that costs a family of four thirty dollars, an Egyptian Theatre that goes free for seven hours, a downtown bar being built in a room that sold blueprints for 113 years, and a Valley County fight over what McCall is even for.
Plan for the sun that's coming, not the clouds you woke up to.
Thirty dollars, indoors, and the door shuts at 4:15
Two straight days of rain just erased the river, the Foothills, and your own backyard, and now it's 10 a.m. Saturday and you've got two kids and a ceiling. Enter the Idaho State Museum, the one in Julia Davis Park you drive past every time you're headed somewhere else.
The math is the whole pitch. Adults are $10, kids 6 to 17 are $5, and anyone 5 and under walks in free, so two grown-ups and two school-age kids get in for $30. Four blocks away the Discovery Center of Idaho runs $27 an adult and $18 a youth, which is $90 for the exact same four humans. Both are good, different rooms for different ages. The money is not close.
The clock is what wrecks a rainy Saturday. Doors close at 5, but last admission is 4:15, because they want you to actually get through the place. Take a slow lunch first and you'll be standing at a locked door with two kids who were promised a museum. And here's the number almost nobody clocks: EBT cardholders pay $3 a head for up to four people. That's the cheapest indoor afternoon in this city, full stop.
Same four kids, four blocks apart: thirty dollars one way, ninety the other. 610 Julia Davis Dr. Give it a solid two hours, and be through the door before that 4:15 cutoff. If the weather ate your weekend and you've got thirty dollars, go before lunch, not after.
Seventy today, and the weekend is better than it looks
MOOD OF THE SKY: UNSETTLED. Seventy degrees on September 3 is a different month showing up early, and it packs light. A large upper-level low off the Pacific Northwest coast is holding moist southwest flow over southwest Idaho, and the National Weather Service Boise says it plainly: “a plume of Pacific moisture interacting with synoptic forcing and upper level energy will keep a broad band of stratiform rain with periods of embedded convection ongoing across the region through Friday night.” High near 70 today, 60 percent rain chance, thunderstorms possible after noon. Tonight sags to 51 on a 90 percent chance, a tenth to a quarter-inch stacking up in town.
Everybody's going to feel seventeen below normal and cross the whole weekend off the calendar. That's the mistake. Friday clears to 69, Saturday runs 73 and sunny once the morning fog lifts, Sunday hits 75 and mostly sunny. The next rain holds off until late Sunday into Monday, when the low pivots inland and reaches for more Pacific moisture. And all this water scrubbed a summer of smoke clean out of the air, right when you can finally use it. Take the gift.
Two places the good news lies to you. The Foothills will look dry enough Saturday and they won't be — Ridge to Rivers trails run clay-heavy, and a rut cut in wet ground is still sitting there next spring. Then the Boise River: a picture-perfect 728 cubic feet per second at Glenwood Bridge, dead center of the 500-to-1,500 float window. The number says float; the 51-degree water says absolutely not. Sunrise 7:11, sunset 8:16. Let the clay dry before you touch a trail.
The blueprint counter is becoming a candy-dish bar
For 113 years, if you needed a blueprint downtown, you walked into 619 W. Main Street and Idaho Blueprint & Supply printed it. That counter outlasted every neighbor on the block, then went dark in December 2022. What finally takes the room is June's, a neighborhood bar owner Lydia Sakolsky-Basquill describes as Old Hollywood meets your swanky New York grandmother's living room, built out of vintage-inspired pieces and collected furniture. A building that sold half of downtown its plans lands as a place that sells nostalgia. Somebody in that story has a sense of humor.
Straight with you: this is an announcement, not a table you can book. Early 2027 is sixteen months out, one more future-opening I keep filing. What earns the space is the address and the concept — a drink program that marries nostalgic candy to classic cocktails. Werther's Originals set beside an Old Fashioned. Strawberry-wrapped candies scattered down the bar. A sugar cube handed over with a hot toddy, the kind of small ceremony that slows a Tuesday down. It's a room being built to read older than it is, in a counter this old already.
What this tells you, at this stage: • If you love a downtown address with a past: 619 W. Main, in the historic Empire Theatre building between 6th and Capitol. • If you want the concept: Old Hollywood by way of grandma's living room, per Sakolsky-Basquill to BoiseDev. • If you want the honest timeline: early 2027, so file it, don't plan around it.
Bring: nobody yet. File it under save-the-date.
📍 619 W. Main Street, downtown Boise 🕒 Not yet open; targeted early 2027 💰 TBD — cocktail bar ★ Best value call: the free part, which is walking past and picturing it
The owner's whole thesis, in one line she gave BoiseDev: “I've always loved hosting people and creating cozy get-togethers where everyone ends up staying longer than they planned.” Werther's next to an Old Fashioned is exactly the trap that keeps you in a chair past midnight.
— Nina's Table: the room that sold Boise its plans is about to sell it a slower evening.
One dollar a year. That's the rent the McCall City Council just set on a half-acre of its downtown campus along First Street, a 75-year lease to Boise nonprofit LEAP Housing — enough land for 30 to 40 apartments with rent caps, aimed at households earning about $64,000 or less. Ninety minutes north of us, the same fall, Texas brothers Dan and Farris Wilks want to drop 722 homes across 2,250 acres. Same county. Opposite theories of what Valley County is for.
A Dollar for Thirty Doors LEAP's project isn't across the finish line yet — it hangs on federal low-income housing tax credits it has to land by a 2027 deadline, run through HUD and the Idaho Housing and Finance Association. Thirty to forty apartments is a rounding error against the demand up there, and everybody involved knows it. But it's a nonprofit paying a buck so the people who work in McCall can afford to sleep in McCall. That's the whole pitch, and it's a clean one.
The Decade Nobody Wants to Cover Red Ridge Village is the other wager: 722 homes, apartments and condos, anchored by 50,000 square feet of retail and restaurants off West Mountain Road. An independent study found it would throw off about $2.5 million a year in property taxes at full buildout. It would also take nearly a decade for those dollars to fully fund the EMS, fire, and schools the place needs. Somebody covers that gap for ten years, and that somebody is whoever already lives there. The project would bump the county's housing stock about 5 percent.
The neighbors are not being subtle. “There is no way that this city, a new city of this size, will do anything but devalue our properties,” Jean Odmark told Valley Lookout at a Planning and Zoning hearing. “It does not increase our quality of life; it ruins it.” Brent Thayer, who lives across West Mountain Road from the site, put it plainer to the same outlet: “I'll be looking at the side of apartment buildings.”
Our stake here is honest and limited: thousands of us in the Treasure Valley treat Valley County as the second home, the weekend, the cabin — and this is the fall somebody decides what it becomes. Neither project has broken ground. Watch the September 24 Planning and Zoning work session on DF Development's outstanding information — that's where Red Ridge either keeps moving or stalls. Which theory of Valley County do you want winning? Reply and tell us.
> The Egyptian goes free for seven hours Friday
The Egyptian normally charges to sit down — the touring acts, the comedians, the candlelit classical shows you've priced a hundred times from the sidewalk and skipped. Friday afternoon the arithmetic flips. Enter the 2026 Battle of the Bands, which puts local musicians on that stage from 2 p.m. to 9 p.m. and charges you exactly nothing to watch.
Why the Math Wins Seven hours, no ticket, all ages, indoors, downtown, on a Friday the sky is falling out of. The Idaho National Guard MWR and the 25th Army Band are running it, and the bands skip the entry fee too — they're playing a judging panel for grand prizes the announcement never bothered to name. The pitch, in the organizers' own words: “Whether you're a fan looking for a great show or a band ready to take the stage.”
The One Honest Caveat Nobody has published who's playing. No roster, no headliner, no set times. You're buying the room and the price, not a name. On a normal Friday that's a hard sell. On this one, with rain on the glass and the Egyptian's usual cover erased, it's the easiest indoor plan in town.
The trap is parking. It starts at 2 and runs straight through the downtown commuter exodus, so roll in between four and six and you'll circle for street spots that won't exist — aim for a garage instead. It's at the Egyptian Theatre, 700 W Main St, Friday, September 4, 2 to 9 p.m., free, all ages. Go for an hour, stay for three if a band earns it, and bring the kids you couldn't take to the park.
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