The Ten Mile off-ramp is shut all weekend, a resale shop turns one with everything half off, and 25 warbirds land in Nampa

Mid-80s and pleasant today, and then Sunday drops the floor out — the live read has us a full ten degrees cooler tomorrow. Enjoy the last properly warm Saturday of the month while it's here.

Before you go anywhere west on the interstate: the westbound Ten Mile off-ramp is closed until Monday morning. It shut at 9 last night. Plan on Meridian Road instead, and don't take it personally.

Elsewhere today: a little resale shop on North Meridian turns one year old and is marking everything down by half, Meridian police used a license plate reader to close a case near The Village, twenty-five vintage warbirds are flying out at the Warhawk, and we finally answer why Ustick Road is called Ustick Road. (Short version: a man moved a streetcar line to run past his own apple trees.)

Let's get into it.

🧠 Trivia: Ustick Road runs clean across Meridian, but in 1920 Ustick was not a road at all — it was a town, with its own bank, school, mercantile and cider distillery. The doctor who founded it made sure the valley's electric streetcar line ran right past his own farm. What was he growing out there?

(Answer at the bottom.)

Six, all in Meridian, all new to this newsletter. The big Saturday regulars — Art Spark at Kleiner, Main Street Market, Celebrate Hope, the Meridian Lanes concert, The Princess Bride at Victory Gardens — have all run here already, and they are all still worth your time. Go anyway.

Rejected on geography again this week: the West Bench Farmers Market and the Boise Fall Festival are both Boise, whatever the Meridian Chamber's calendar implies. And as ever — if something good is happening in Meridian and it isn't on any calendar, hit reply and tell us. That's how the best listings in here get found.

Today: Sunny, high in the mid-80s, overnight low around 56. Light wind. A good day to be outside and a better one to be outside before about 3 p.m.

Sunday: Here's the actual story — the live forecast has Sunday running roughly ten degrees cooler than today, upper 70s. If you've been waiting for the summer to break, tomorrow is the first real sign of it. Plan the yard work accordingly.

Fine print, because we'd rather tell you than not: the National Weather Service's Meridian data file has been frozen at the same August 23 timestamp for eleven straight days now, and it still says 88 today and 87 tomorrow. The live Boise readings we checked four separate times this evening say 84 today and 77 tomorrow — and Boise normally runs warmer than us, not cooler. When the stale file runs hot in the wrong direction, we go with the live number. We're publishing mid-80s and a cool Sunday. If you'd rather plan for 88, you won't be far wrong on the daytime end.

The Idaho Transportation Department is repaving the westbound off-ramp at the Ten Mile Interchange (Exit 42), and it closed at 9 p.m. Friday. It reopens at 5 a.m. Monday, Aug. 31 — so the whole weekend. The signed detour sends you on to the Meridian Road Interchange (Exit 44) and back.

ITD is doing the same thing at the Garrity Interchange (Exit 38) in Nampa, where it's the westbound on-ramp that's shut, with a detour to Franklin Boulevard (Exit 36). Same hours, same weekend.

Yes, we know — the Ten Mile ramps have been in this newsletter more than once this month. This is a different ramp on a longer closure, and unlike the overnight ones in mid-August, this one will still be there when you drive home from dinner tomorrow.

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Meridian police have arrested a 58-year-old Boise man on one count of rape after an alleged assault involving a teenage girl in a vehicle parked near The Village at Meridian. Officers took the report at about 4:30 p.m. on Aug. 21. Police say the two had recently met, were not previously known to one another, and that the man identified himself under a different name.

The detail that will interest a lot of you is how detectives found him. The girl gave officers a description of the vehicle; detectives worked out the plate and then used Automated License Plate Recognition to place that vehicle in the area, which is what led them to a name. He was interviewed, arrested without incident and booked into the Ada County Jail. The case remains an active investigation, and an arrest is not a conviction.

Meridian's expanding network of plate-reader cameras has been a live local argument for a while now. This is the first time this year it's turned up in a Meridian case this serious, and it's worth knowing that's what the cameras did here.

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Our one out-of-town item, and it earns the slot: the annual Warbird Roundup is at the Warhawk Air Museum in Nampa today and tomorrow, Aug. 29–30. More than 25 flying aircraft are in — Mustangs, Warhawks, a P-38 Lightning, a Bearcat, Texans and an F-15 Strike Eagle — plus guest speaker Kim "KC" Campbell.

Gates at 8 a.m., flying from around 10. Food trucks, a kid zone, vendors and full museum access. Kids get in free with a paid adult. Park at the Ford Idaho Center and take the shuttle to the field — don't try to park at the museum.

It's about a half-hour from most of Meridian, and it's the one weekend a year you can watch a P-38 fly over the Treasure Valley.

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Brought to you by Meridian Local Scoop. What's faster than word of mouth? The Meridian Local Business Spotlight! Keeps you up to speed on what's happening around town — and connects local businesses to our community.

Apples. Dr. Harlan P. Ustick came to Boise from Ohio around 1892, set up a medical practice, and built one of the largest orchards in the Boise Valley — apples above all, along with plums for prunes.

Here's the part that makes it a good story. Ustick also invested in the Boise Valley Railway Company, and he used that seat at the table to make sure the new electric interurban line running from Boise out to Caldwell was routed directly past his own orchards. Then he platted a town along it and sold the lots.

It worked, for a while. By 1920 the community of Ustick had a mercantile, a church, a school, vinegar and cider distilleries, a women's civic club called the Apple Blossoms, and — for a few years around 1910 — its own bank. Boiseans rode the streetcar out on Sunday afternoons to buy apples and cider and get away from town. Ustick himself died in 1917. Streetcar service ended in 1928, the automobile did the rest, and Boise finally annexed the townsite in 1995.

The bones are still there if you know where to look: the former First Bank of Ustick still stands at Ustick Road and Mumbarto Avenue, across from the old mercantile building, and the Ustick School — now somebody's house — is just down the block. The road you drive across Meridian every day is named after a man's apple trees.

Source: Boise State Public Radio, "America 250: Short Histories of Boise — Ustick Road," Samantha Wright, June 1, 2026, citing the Idaho State Historical Society, Boise City Archives and the City of Boise Department of Arts & History.