For years, the Washougal summer calendar effectively had one circle drawn on it. Late July. Washougal MX Park. Everything else was scattered around the edges of that weekend or pushed out to the waterfront.
That math changed this spring. The Washougal Towncenter Revitalization Project reached substantial completion right as the weather warmed up, and a downtown block that had been a construction fence for most of 2025 turned into the city's first off-leash dog park, a splash pad, a pocket park, a playground, and roughly a hundred new parking spaces. Downtown is now the thing the summer schedule organizes around, not the place residents drive through on the way to Steamboat Landing.
The Thesis, in One Sentence
The new Town Center park, the second season of the Washougal Community Market at Reflection Plaza, and the city's three-month Second Saturday Summer Series have stitched together a downtown summer Saturday that didn't exist a year ago. The Washougal National is still the loudest weekend of the season, but it is no longer the only one residents plan around.
What Actually Opened Downtown
The Towncenter Revitalization Project was named Top Project of the Year by the Vancouver Business Journal, and on the ground that designation translates to a specific list of amenities residents can now use:
- The city's first off-leash dog park, split into separate runs for large and small dogs
- A splash pad sized for the Pacific Northwest summer, with stones designed for year-round climbing when the water is off
- A pocket park and playground adjacent to the Washougal Community Center
- Expanded public parking sized to serve the planned Fort Vancouver Regional Library branch and downtown events
For context on how much new park space this represents, the city already operates 14 parks, one public cemetery, one community garden, and several acres of undeveloped open space, but until this spring only one of those 26 parks existed in the towncenter itself. The Towncenter project doubles downtown's park count in a single ribbon cutting.
Two things follow from that, and they are the reason the rest of the summer schedule reads differently this year.
Reflection Plaza Is the Saturday Morning Anchor Now
The Washougal Community Market returns for its second season at Reflection Plaza, and the city spent the spring accepting vendor applications for a longer roster than last year. Last summer the market read as an experiment. This summer it reads as the warm-up.
Why the upgrade? Because Reflection Plaza now sits two short blocks from a working splash pad. A family that used to do "market, then drive to Captain William Clark Park" can do market, then walk. That is a small change in distance and a large change in how the morning works.
"We've been working hard to create a place where people want to spend time, whether they live here, work here, or are just visiting," Mayor David Stuebe said when the Towncenter project was named VBJ's Top Project of the Year.
The downtown business case is in the numbers the city has been tracking. Washougal currently has 852 licensed and active businesses, an increase of 5.4 percent over the past year, and median household income has reached an all-time high of $100,916, up 3.7 percent. A second-year market with a denser vendor field is what that growth looks like at street level.
Second Saturdays Push the Action Out of Downtown on Purpose
The city's new Second Saturday Summer Series is a three-month lineup of free, family-friendly events designed to rotate residents through parks they may not visit during a normal week. The series opens June 13 with Second Saturday at Hathaway Park, 10:00 a.m. to 2:00 p.m., the park at 799 25th Street that the Hathaway family originally donated to the city in 1901.
The pairing is deliberate. Saturday morning at the Community Market downtown, late morning at Hathaway Park along the Washougal River, back to the splash pad in the afternoon. The June 13 weekend also includes the Two Rivers Heritage Museum Annual Plant Fair on Sunday and an Impact C-W Food Drive and Boxing Event at Parker's Landing Historical Park at noon. None of those existed as a connected sequence before this year.
August Belongs to the Arts Festival, and the Arts Festival Has Grown Up
The Washougal Arts Festival lands on the second Saturday in August, an outdoor event with local artists, arts activities for children and adults, and music provided by Washougal Songcraft Festival. What is new this year is the public art that surrounds it.
This year's festival poster features a fused glass piece by Sharon Agnor titled Steigerwald Lake Wildlife Refuge, which will also be incorporated into the design of the Campanile sculpture Agnor has been commissioned to create for downtown Washougal. The Campanile is one of several downtown aesthetic improvements the city has been rolling out alongside the Towncenter park, and it gives the August festival a permanent visual anchor that the prior versions of the event did not have.
If you want a quieter way to engage with the same artists between events, the Washougal Studio Artists Tour opens local studios for behind-the-scenes visits, and Two Rivers Heritage Museum runs community programming all summer.
The Loudest Weekend Is Still in July
None of this displaces the Washougal National. Round eight of the 2026 Pro Motocross Championship returns to Washougal MX Park, which opened in April of 1972 and has hosted a round of the AMA Pro Motocross Championship every year but once since 1980, and is known as one of the most scenic circuits in the sport. The track runs through elevation changes including the famous Dunlop Horsepower Hill and Scott Ski Jump, and brings the largest single-weekend population surge of the year.
What is different in 2026 is that the National no longer has to do the work of being the only marquee weekend. The Saturday before, the Saturday after, and the Saturdays in June and August now carry weight of their own. For residents, that means the choice on race weekend is genuinely a choice: lean in, or lean out and use the downtown park while the crowds are at the track.
A Downtown Saturday, Sequenced
If you want a working template for how the new pieces fit together on a typical June or July Saturday:
- 8:30 a.m. Coffee, then a walk along the Columbia at the Port of Camas-Washougal Waterfront Park. The Port has installed a pollinator garden that supports local biodiversity and helps the community thrive, and it is a quiet way to start the day before downtown wakes up.
- 10:00 a.m. Washougal Community Market at Reflection Plaza. Walk, do not drive.
- 11:30 a.m. Splash pad and playground at the new Town Center park. Kids run, adults sit. The pocket park has shade.
- 1:00 p.m. Lunch downtown. The 5.4 percent jump in licensed active businesses is most visible on the C Street corridor.
- 3:00 p.m. Off-leash dog park, or the Second Saturday rotation if it is the 13th of the month.
- 6:30 p.m. Dinner, then a sunset walk back to the waterfront. On Arts Festival weekend in August, swap dinner for the festival itself.
What's Still Taking Shape
A few projects are visibly in motion and worth tracking if you live nearby. The city held an open house on June 3 for the 32nd Street Rail Crossing Project, a vital connection between Washougal and SR-14, with a design that would route travelers across a bridge over the railroad tracks. The Fire Station 43 replacement and Police Station remodel are in design. The Fort Vancouver Regional Library District's new Washougal branch is still pending construction on the same block as the Towncenter park, which means downtown will be a working site for another season or two even as residents start using the finished pieces.
The Port of Camas-Washougal also received $450,000 in federal funding from the FAA to launch a Master Plan Study for Grove Field Airport, a 20-year planning horizon that will not change anyone's summer but is worth knowing about if you live near the airfield.
A Note for Residents Quietly Watching All of This
Civic investment of this kind tends to show up in two places at once: in the way a Saturday feels, and in the way the housing market reads the neighborhood a year or two later. The Towncenter park is a quality-of-life amenity first, but it is also the kind of permanent infrastructure that buyers underwrite when they look at downtown Washougal versus the surrounding county. If you are weighing what your home is worth now that the splash pad is running and the market has a permanent home at Reflection Plaza, Rebecca Lee Real Estate would be glad to walk through it with you.
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