Silverwood's New Owners and Farragut's Last Trail Closures Land in the Same Two Weeks

Scarywood opens October 2. Everyone in Athol already knows that. What most people driving past the Silverwood gates this month don't know is that the park behind them changed hands this year, and the biggest thing it's showing off this October was actually finished under the old owners.

Seven miles up the road, something quieter is also winding down for the season. Farragut State Park is closing pieces of itself off, one event at a time, in the same stretch of September that Silverwood is ramping up. If you live in Athol and treat these as separate stories, one about a theme park and one about a state park, you'll miss the part that actually matters for how you plan the next few weekends.

The haunt that predates the sale

Silverwood sold this year. The new parent company is Herschend Family Entertainment, the same corporation behind Dollywood. This is the park's first Scarywood season under that ownership, which makes it tempting to read every change on the 2026 calendar as a new-owner decision.

The park's headline addition doesn't support that read. Nightmares, the new 14-room haunt built around 13 different phobias, is being billed as the largest haunted attraction Silverwood has ever built, and it was reportedly four years in development. A project on that timeline was already under construction, likely already funded, before the sale closed. Two new scare zones, The Wharf and Doom Town, are rounding out the 2026 lineup alongside it.

None of that is evidence the new ownership hasn't changed anything. It's evidence that the one thing everyone will actually see and talk about this month was set in motion long before the current owners had a say in it. If you're looking for the real signal of what's different under Herschend, the marquee haunt isn't where to find it. It's baked into a four-year build cycle that started under the previous regime.

Here's how the rest of the fall calendar lines up on the Silverwood side:

What actually closes down the road

While Silverwood ramps toward October, Farragut State Park is doing the opposite. The Museum at the Brig, which runs summer hours from Memorial Day through Labor Day, closed for the season on September 6. That's not a delay or a soft wind-down. The building goes dark until next year, right as the park's other fall events are just getting started.

Two events follow in quick succession, and both involve real access restrictions, not just extra traffic:

• September 11 to 12, the Timberlake Cross Country Invite starts and ends at the Scott Group Area and uses the trail network on the park's north side. Runners get a course preview on the afternoon of September 11 before the main event the next day.
• September 17 to 20, the Farragut Open Disc Golf Tournament closes the park's disc golf courses entirely for the run of the tournament.

That's ten days in mid-September where a chunk of the park most people treat as always-open, always-available acreage is functionally off-limits to its usual uses. If your regular walk, ride, or disc golf round runs through the north side trails or any of the courses, this is the window to plan around rather than discover on arrival.

Where the park is still yours

Farragut's trail system is split by Highway 54 in a way that's useful to know if you're trying to avoid the closures rather than find them. Trails south of the highway stay open for hiking and biking. North of the highway, where the cross country meet is running, the trails are shared with horse traffic and hikers, and that's the section tied up September 11 through 12.

If you're headed out for a walk during that stretch, staying south of Hwy 54 keeps you clear of the meet entirely. The disc golf closure the following week is more absolute since it covers the courses themselves, not a general trail corridor, so if disc golf is the plan for September 17 through 20, it's worth having a backup that weekend.

Not everything at the park scales back for the season. Caribou Creek Outfitters keeps running trail rides year round, and Wet Willy's still handles kayak, paddleboard, and float rentals out of the Beaver Bay Beach area. Neither of those depends on the museum's summer hours or the trail closures tied to the two September events.

Reading the two stories together

The reason these two threads matter side by side isn't that they're both happening in Athol in September. It's that they're both examples of the same thing: the version of local news that gets repeated everywhere (Scarywood is back, the park has a scary new maze) skips the operational detail that actually changes your weekend. A new haunt opening is a headline. A cross country meet closing the north side trails for two days is a scheduling fact that only matters if you're the one who runs there.

The ownership change at Silverwood is real, seven miles from a state park that's shutting its own doors on a completely different schedule, and worth knowing if you've lived here long enough to remember the park under its previous owners. But the thing that shows up on your actual calendar this month isn't a corporate transition. It's ten days at Farragut where the trails and courses you're used to having aren't fully available, sandwiched between a car show that already happened and a haunt that's about to open under new ownership that inherited the attraction rather than building it.

Athol in September is smaller than its headlines suggest, and that's usually where the useful information lives, in the gap between what everyone's saying and what's actually closed.

If you're the kind of person who tracks details like this because you're thinking about a move within North Idaho, not just planning a weekend, that same instinct for the specifics behind the headline is worth applying to a home search too. Stephen Vachon works with buyers and sellers across Athol and the surrounding North Idaho communities, and if you're curious what your property is actually worth in today's market, you can request a free home valuation or take a closer look at the Athol neighborhood guide to see how the area fits your plans.