Carson WA Logtoberfest: Why the Festival Changes Location

Ask someone who just moved to Carson where the fall festival is held, and you'll probably get a confident answer. Elk Ridge Golf Course, most likely, since that's the address that shows up when the event trends on local Facebook groups. It's also wrong more often than it's right.

Logtoberfest, the Wind River Business Association's October celebration of Skamania County's logging history and Sasquatch lore, has spent the last several years bouncing between at least three different towns. It started at Elk Ridge in Carson. It has run at Wind Mountain Ranch in Home Valley more than once. Last October it turned up nine miles north, at the Historic Wind River Nursery in Stabler, paired with a native plant sale. If you live here and you're only checking one venue's calendar, you're going to miss it.

Three Towns, One Business Association, No Fixed Address

The pattern makes more sense once you know how the valley is actually organized. The Wind River Business Association doesn't represent Carson alone. It represents Carson, Home Valley, and Stabler together, three small communities strung along Wind River Highway that function more like one long neighborhood than three separate towns. Logtoberfest, as far as anyone can tell from the record, has simply rotated through that same footprint.

Here's what that rotation has looked like in the years with a clear public record:

Three documented years, three different addresses, none of them repeated back to back. That's not a festival with an occasional venue change. That's a festival whose home is the whole valley, not any one town in it. If you're new here and still thinking of Carson as a fixed downtown with a fixed calendar of events, this is the first sign that the mental map needs adjusting. The businesses and organizations that run community life here, from the Chamber of Commerce booth to the local trail groups, treat Carson, Home Valley, and Stabler as one operating unit. Logtoberfest just makes that visible once a year.

What Shows Up Most Years, Wherever It Lands

The venue moves. A core of programming tends to travel with it. Across the documented years, a few things show up regardless of address:

• Chainsaw art and blacksmithing demonstrations, alongside vintage logging equipment on display
• Sasquatch-themed vendors and craft booths, a nod to the county's other defining piece of folklore
• Games, crafts, and face painting for kids
• Live sets from local acts, different every year, that open the afternoon

What changes more than the venue is the specific lineup around those constants. In 2022, when the festival ran at Wind Mountain Ranch in Home Valley, the beer garden featured Backwoods Brewing alongside Walking Man, Thunder Island, Everybody's, and Freebridge, with The Strange Tones and The Sonny Hess Band opening the day. In 2024, back at Elk Ridge in Carson, organizers added a Hairiest Leg Contest and a Dress Like a Logger Contest, and structured entry as a flat twenty dollar ticket that included a drink and a commemorative Mason jar. Then in 2025, at the Historic Wind River Nursery in Stabler, the event picked up a native plant sale run in partnership with the Wind River Trust and the Underwood Conservation District, plus guided walks through the Wind River Arboretum and crosscut saw demonstrations from the BackCountry Horsemen of Washington.

The event traces back to 2016, when Kevin Waters of Backwoods Brewing pitched the idea to a handful of Carson-area businesses and the Skamania County Chamber of Commerce. Every documented year since has changed shape almost as much as it's changed address.

The Corridor Around It Doesn't Move

What doesn't rotate is the handful of places that carry the rest of the year in Carson, regardless of where October's festival lands.

Backwoods Brewing Company's original pub sits on Wind River Highway, the spot where the Waters family first built a one-barrel system by hand before expanding to locations in Portland and Hillsboro. The Carson pub is still the one with the weekend breakfast menu and the house-smoked brisket, and it's still where the Logyard IPA and seasonal releases like the S'mores Golden Milk Stout show up first.

A few minutes away, Crosscut Espresso and Deli functions as the town's default living room, the place where locals land for a coffee regardless of the season. Next to Carson Art Garage, Two Fish Wine Bar is newer to the corridor but has already settled into that same category, a low-key spot for a glass of something and a look at whatever local art is up that month.

And up the hill, Carson Hot Springs keeps running its mineral bathhouse through the shoulder season, with fall rate discounts on rooms that come with in-tub mineral water on the balcony. The bathhouse itself dates to 1923, the hotel to 1901, and the whole complex has operated under the Carson Hot Springs name since the early 1970s. None of that changes whether Logtoberfest is in Carson, Home Valley, or Stabler that particular October.

Check Before You Drive

If you're planning to go this year, the practical move is simple: don't assume the venue from last year, or the year before that. The Wind River Business Association's Facebook page posts the current year's location and date as soon as it's confirmed, and the Skamania County Chamber of Commerce events calendar tends to carry the same listing shortly after. Both are faster and more reliable than searching last year's news coverage, which is easy to find and easy to mistake for this year's answer.

That habit, checking the current source instead of trusting the address you remember, is a small thing. But it's a pretty good description of what it takes to actually live here rather than just visit. The Wind River Valley doesn't advertise itself as three towns pretending to be one. It just runs that way, and the festival calendar is one of the few places where you can watch it happen in real time.

If you're already settled into life along Wind River Highway, none of this changes much for you beyond knowing where to point the car in October. But if you're the kind of person who reads a post like this because you're weighing a move to Carson, Home Valley, or somewhere else in this stretch of the Gorge, the same local details apply to real estate decisions here as they do to festival logistics. Property lines, well and septic questions, and access along this corridor all work a little differently than they do in a conventional subdivision, and knowing the actual local pattern matters more than knowing the median price.

Gorge Homes & Land works this exact stretch of the Columbia River Gorge, and Brock and Chrissy Wood bring both the local footing and the financial rigor to help you make sense of it. If you're curious what your current Carson-area property is worth, or you're ready to talk through a move into the Wind River Valley, get your instant home valuation or schedule a complimentary consultation whenever you're ready.