Weird outdoor & roadside things to do in Spokane
Weird outdoor and roadside things to do in Spokane — 13 of them, from Garbage Goat, The Childhood Express (Giant Red Wagon) and Way Out West Statue Farm. Folk-art environments, unexplained monuments and roadside oddities worth pulling over for, all outdoors and mostly free. They spread across Spokane (Riverfront Park), Spokane (west of city, near Cheney/Medical Lake exits off I-90), Spokane (Garland District), Coeur d'Alene, Idaho and 7 more areas, so two or three can make a whole afternoon. 12 of them cost nothing. Every entry is hand-vetted against real sources — not scraped off a top-ten list or averaged out of crowd ratings.
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Garbage Goat
A roughly 200-pound corten-steel billy goat tucked into a basalt 'Goat Grotto' actually vacuums up litter through its mouth, sucking trash down a 4.5-inch tube into a hidden bin. It was welded in 1974 by Sister Paula Mary Turnbull, a nun-artist known locally as 'the welding nun,' for the ecology-themed Expo '74 world's fair. Decades later it's still sucking, having reportedly 'eaten' over 14,000 cubic yards of garbage. Feeding it a candy wrapper is a beloved Spokane rite of passage.
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The Childhood Express (Giant Red Wagon)
A 27-foot-long, 26-ton steel-and-concrete replica of a classic Radio Flyer wagon sits in Riverfront Park, with a slide running down its raised handle. Local artist Ken Spiering built it over a year of 17-hour days for Washington's 1989 centennial Celebration of Children. The deck is engineered to hold up to 300 people, so adults can clamber aboard alongside kids. USA Today has voted it the top roadside attraction in Washington.
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Way Out West Statue Farm
A 16-foot Tyrannosaurus rex looms over a treehouse in an open field beside I-90, sharing the lot with a giant green brontosaurus, cows arranged in a boat, head-to-head dueling roosters, a London double-decker bus, and retro spaceships guarded by alien figures (sunglasses sold separately, five bucks). The whole sprawling place is the lifelong obsession of Spokane junker Mike Ferguson, who fills shipping containers with oversized statuary from China, Mexico and Indonesia. Everything is for sale, from a three-dollar cast-iron lizard up to a colossal bull, but browsers wander free. A repurposed WWII submarine-net float ball serves as the sign for whether the farm is open.
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Rotary Riverfront Fountain
Designed by Spokane artists Harold Balazs and Bob Perron, this monumental abstract structure functions as a giant interactive sprinkler you can walk into. Water arcs and sheets across the sculptural forms so visitors move through the piece itself rather than viewing it from a distance. On hot days it becomes a soaking, walk-through art environment in the heart of the park.
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Mary Lou's Milk Bottle
A 38-foot-tall white milk bottle towers over the Garland Avenue sidewalk, built in 1935 as a beacon for the Benewah Creamery dairy and now operating as an old-school diner serving burgers and famous huckleberry shakes. It's one of a pair of giant Benewah milk-bottle buildings that became Spokane icons. A 2011 fire heavily damaged the interior, but the iconic bottle survived and it was restored and reopened within about a year, running ever since. You order under the giant bottle and eat in a cozy retro counter space.
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Mudgy Moose Trail
Five life-size bronze statues of Mudgy the Moose are scattered along a 2.25-mile route from the base of Tubbs Hill through downtown Coeur d'Alene to Independence Point. They illustrate a local children's book, "Mudgy & Millie in Coeur d'Alene," and each statue has a placard with the matching storybook page and a trail map, turning the walk into a self-guided story hunt. The bronzes are the work of Coeur d'Alene native sculptor Terry Lee. As you follow Mudgy searching for his playmate Millie the mouse, the twist is that she's been hiding in his antlers the whole time — a reveal saved for the final statue at the lakeshore.
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Sandpoint's Statue of Liberty (Lady Liberty of the Lake)
A roughly human-sized Statue of Liberty stands alone at the end of a short concrete pier jutting into Lake Pend Oreille, with mountains rising behind her. She came to Sandpoint's City Beach in 2003, donated in memory of local businesswoman Louise "Lee" Turner, who had kept the replica in her backyard garden for years. There's no grand plaque, and the little Lady has become a quietly beloved selfie magnet, so beloved that she was pulled for repairs in 2024 after wear-and-tear caused her base to fail, returning to her pier that December.
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Turnbull National Wildlife Refuge Mima Mounds
About four miles south of Cheney, the prairie here is studded with hundreds of low, oval domes of earth called Mima mounds, regularly spaced like something planted by giants. Geologists have argued for over a century about how they formed, blaming everything from pocket gophers to ancient earthquakes, and still have no consensus. The refuge sits inside the Channeled Scablands, scoured down to bare basalt by Ice Age megafloods, so the mounds rise from a landscape of pothole wetlands and rugged volcanic rock. A 5.5-mile one-way scenic auto tour route and miles of trails let you get out and walk among them.
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Palouse Falls State Park
A 198-foot waterfall thunders into a deep plunge pool ringed by columnar basalt cliffs, the last surviving relic of one of Earth's most violent landscapes. The canyon was carved when Ice Age megafloods, carrying half the volume of Lake Michigan, tore across eastern Washington at up to 65 mph and rerouted the entire Palouse River into a new channel. It is Washington's official state waterfall, dropping through raw scabland rock in the middle of empty wheat country. The trails to the canyon floor are permanently closed after fatal accidents, so the overlooks are the only legal vantage.
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Dishman Hills Natural Area - Enchanted Ravine
Minutes from the strip malls of Spokane Valley, the Enchanted Ravine trail squeezes between exposed 1.5-billion-year-old metamorphic bedrock, among the oldest rock in Washington. The walls press closer the farther up you go until the path dissolves into a staircase of natural rock steps. Younger granite rises out of the basalt that floods the valley floor, and the whole ravine was scoured deeper by Ice Age floods less than 20,000 years ago. Locals have blazed a tangle of unmarked side paths through the boulders, with small caves and hidden pockets to find.
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Deep Creek Canyon, Riverside State Park
At the northern end of Riverside State Park, a dry side canyon drops through a jumble of 16-million-year-old basalt lava beds toward the Spokane River. Tucked along Deep Creek are a pair of ancient lava tubes and a massive cliff of bulbous 'pillow' basalt streaked with colorful palagonite, formed where molten lava hit an ancient lake or stream in violent flashes of steam. The trail threads a surreal corridor of eroded volcanic rock; the overhanging basalt walls are also one of the region's best sport-climbing crags. It feels far wilder than its short distance from downtown suggests.
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Gardner Cave at Crawford State Park
In the far northeast corner of Washington, almost on the Canadian border, Gardner Cave is the longest limestone cave in the state, dripping with stalactites, flowstone, and a two-foot-thick column of stone. Legend holds a bootlegger named Ed Gardner found it in 1899 when the ground collapsed under him and his horse. Ranger-led tours descend a staircase into the 40-degree dark on the only days the cave is open.
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Dry Falls
Dry Falls is the ghost of the largest waterfall that ever existed: a 3.5-mile-wide, 400-foot cliff carved by Ice Age megafloods, once roughly four times the size of Niagara, now bone dry and overlooking a chain of plunge-pool lakes. Standing at the overlook in the Channeled Scablands, you are staring at a cataract that hasn't flowed in over 13,000 years. It is one of the strangest geological scenes in the Pacific Northwest.
Weird outdoor & roadside things to do in Spokane — FAQ
Which weird outdoor & roadside oddities in Spokane are the strangest?
Ranked by how strange they actually are: Garbage Goat, The Childhood Express (Giant Red Wagon) and Dry Falls. Garbage Goat — A roughly 200-pound corten-steel billy goat tucked into a basalt 'Goat Grotto' actually vacuums up litter through its mouth, sucking trash down a 4.5-inch tube into a hidden bin.
Where in Spokane are they?
Across Spokane (Riverfront Park), Spokane (west of city, near Cheney/Medical Lake exits off I-90), Spokane (Garland District), Coeur d'Alene, Idaho and Sandpoint, Idaho and 6 more. Each listing gives the neighborhood and address so you can cluster a couple into one outing.
Are any of the weird outdoor & roadside oddities in Spokane free?
Yes — 12 are free to visit, including Garbage Goat, The Childhood Express (Giant Red Wagon) and Way Out West Statue Farm. The rest are mostly low-cost.
Is this a good weird date in Spokane?
That's what the list is built for. Every entry has a specific move rather than a vague recommendation — at Garbage Goat, for instance: Take turns feeding the goat scraps of paper and listen for the satisfying whoosh, then ride the historic Looff Carrousel a few steps away.
How were these weird outdoor & roadside oddities chosen?
An agentic research system digs for the genuinely obscure — the spots even locals miss — and every one is verified against real sources before it makes the list. We deliberately skip the landmarks already on every Spokane guide.