Costantini Team | Bay Area, CA Real Estate Experts

A thread on Nextdoor last year turned into a small argument about geography. One neighbor mentioned the "Little Store." Another corrected her: she must mean the Devonshire Canyon Little Store, not the Little Store Restaurant on Woodside Road, about a quarter mile west of Roberts Market. The exchange went back and forth three times before anyone agreed on which little store they were even talking about.

That confusion is the whole neighborhood in miniature. Kings Mountain does not have a downtown in the way Woodside Plaza or Redwood Oaks do. There is no strip of storefronts, no central intersection with a stoplight and a coffee shop on each corner. What the neighborhood has instead is a handful of old, single-purpose places scattered along Skyline Boulevard and Kings Mountain Road, and one long weekend every September that keeps most of them funded. Understand those four things and you understand how Kings Mountain actually runs.

The Store That's Open Four Days a Week

The Woodside Store sits at the corner of Kings Mountain Road and Tripp Road, and it has been there since 1854, built originally as a general store, post office, and dental office during the height of the local logging trade. It is a National Register landmark now, restored and operated as a museum by the San Mateo County Historical Association on behalf of the county parks department, stocked with the kind of goods a wagon maker or blacksmith would have bought in the 1800s.

It keeps a schedule that would be impossible for an actual grocery store: open Tuesday and Thursday from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m., and Saturday and Sunday from noon to 4 p.m., closed the rest of the week and on holidays. Nobody in Kings Mountain treats this as an inconvenience, because nobody expects a general store here to double as a Trader Joe's. The Woodside Store isn't commercial infrastructure. It's the neighborhood's memory of what commercial infrastructure used to look like, kept open by volunteers a few afternoons a week.

The Park That Doubles as Everyone's Backyard

If the store is the neighborhood's history, Huddart Park is its daily use case. The park covers 973 acres directly off Kings Mountain Road, with 24 miles of trail running between 550 and 2,000 feet of elevation. It opens at 8 a.m. every day of the year, parking runs six dollars a vehicle, and the terrain shifts from redwood gulch to open chaparral within a couple of miles.

Some of that trail network still follows routes cut for the timber industry. Richard's Road Trail traces the path of a sawmill road built in 1853, the one wagons loaded with lumber once used to reach Redwood City before the wood was barged to San Francisco. The park exists at all because James Huddart, a wealthy San Francisco lumberman who grew up in an orphanage, wanted his land holdings in the county to do something useful for local kids. Crystal Springs Trail and Summit Springs Fire Road connect deeper into the park's northern section, and Canyon Trail stays open to hikers and runners year round but closes to horses during the rainy season, since equestrians make up a real share of the traffic here. One AllTrails reviewer summed up the appeal simply: "Well marked, great conditions, 100% shaded."

That last detail, the seasonal equestrian closure, is the kind of thing that matters if you keep a horse on the mountain and plan your rides around it, and matters less if you're a runner who never checks which trails allow horses in the first place. Either way, it's worth confirming current conditions on the county's Huddart Park trail page before heading out, since the park itself has been rebuilding its trail map to reflect recent changes.

Four Buildings, One Weekend

Place	Where	When It's Open	What It Actually Does
Woodside Store	Kings Mountain Rd & Tripp Rd	Tue & Thu 10-4, Sat & Sun 12-4	County-run 1854 general store, now a museum
Huddart Park	1100 Kings Mountain Rd	Daily from 8 a.m., $6/vehicle	973 acres and 24 miles of trail, the default hike or ride
Alice's Restaurant	17288 Skyline Blvd	Daily from 8 a.m.	The one sit-down gathering spot on this stretch of Skyline
Kings Mountain Art Fair	13889 Skyline Blvd	Labor Day weekend, Sept 5-7, 2026	Funds the volunteer fire brigade and the elementary school

The Restaurant at the Crossroads

Where Kings Mountain Road meets Skyline Boulevard, and a bit further north where Skyline meets La Honda Road, the mountain corridor narrows down to a handful of buildings. Alice's Restaurant, at 17288 Skyline Blvd, sits at that second junction and functions as something closer to a town square than a diner. Tripadvisor ranks it the top restaurant in Woodside, and the crowd on any given Saturday tells you why: hikers coming off Huddart or Purisima Creek, equestrians, a cluster of motorcyclists who treat the winding drive up Highway 84 as a destination in itself, and enough classic cars parked outside that one reviewer called them "always there."

The building's own backstory adds to the pull. As one Tripadvisor reviewer put it, "the real Alice did buy this place after Arlo Guthrie's song made her famous," a detail regulars repeat often enough that it has become part of the neighborhood's shorthand. Functionally, though, what matters more than the story is the fact that there is nowhere else nearby to get a meal. If you live on Kings Mountain and want to sit down for breakfast without driving into Woodside proper, Alice's is the option, not one of several.

The Weekend That Pays for Everything Else

The single biggest thing tying this neighborhood together happens three days a year. The Kings Mountain Art Fair runs every Labor Day weekend at the Kings Mountain Community Center and Firehouse, 13889 Skyline Blvd, roughly 2,000 feet up in the Coastal Range. In 2026 it lands on September 5 through 7, its 63rd year since founding in 1963. Admission is free. Breakfast runs 8 to 10:30 a.m., lunch 11:30 a.m. to 4:30 p.m., and juried artist booths, fewer than 130 of them by design, stay open from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. each day. Parking fills up along Skyline itself, which is why the fair runs shuttle stops 0.8 miles north and 0.6 miles south of the grounds and asks visitors to park and walk in when they can.

Here is the part that turns a craft fair into genuine civic infrastructure. Every dollar the fair raises, and it takes no public tax money and accepts no corporate sponsors, goes to exactly three things: the Kings Mountain Volunteer Fire Brigade's vehicles, supplies, and equipment, the upkeep of the Community Center building itself, and special programs for the students at Kings Mountain Elementary, the smallest public school in the Cabrillo Unified School District and, by extension, the smallest public school in San Mateo County. The fire brigade's own firehouse was originally built with art fair revenue.

The brigade covers the entire Skyline corridor between Highway 92 and Bear Gulch West, and because it is an all-risk department its volunteers train to the same standard as paid firefighters, structure fires, wildland fires, vehicle fires, rope rescues, hazardous spills, all of it. They respond to more than 300 emergency calls a year. In most Peninsula neighborhoods, emergency response is a line item in a municipal budget nobody thinks much about. On Kings Mountain, it depends in real terms on how many people show up to buy pottery and eat pancakes on Labor Day weekend.

What This Actually Means Week to Week

Put those four pieces together and the shape of a Kings Mountain week becomes clearer. There's no daily commercial rhythm to plan around, so residents build their calendars around access windows instead: whether the store happens to be open on the day you're driving past, whether Canyon Trail is closed to horses this month, whether the parking lot at Alice's is already full of motorcycles by nine on a Saturday morning. And once a year, for three days in early September, the whole corridor along Skyline reorganizes itself around a fair that quietly functions as the neighborhood's tax base for fire protection and school extras.

That's not a story most people would guess from the outside. A neighborhood this quiet, this forested, this short on visible commerce, turns out to be running some fairly serious civic machinery through a handful of volunteer-staffed buildings and one weekend of pottery and burgers. It works because everyone up here has learned the schedule, even if they occasionally argue about which little store they mean.

If you're weighing what it actually takes to live well in a place like Kings Mountain, or comparing it against other pockets of the Woodside hills, The Costantini Team spends its days in these exact corridors and can walk you through what daily life here really involves. Schedule a consultation when you're ready to talk specifics.