Cascade Days

On the Friday evening of Cascade Days, the Concrete Fire Department works the grill at Veterans Memorial Park. Burgers come off between 5 and 6 o’clock, and the vendors’ booths have been open since 3. An adult mushball game follows until 8, with informal games for the children alongside. In Town Center, The Hub and Act One Ice Cream Parlor keep their doors open. The festival falls on the third weekend of August in Concrete, a former cement and logging town in eastern Skagit County, 18 miles above Sedro-Woolley on the North Cascades Highway. The Concrete Chamber of Commerce runs it. The 2026 festival was held August 14 and 15.

A plane on Main Street

Saturday opens at 9 a.m. with the vendor fair in the park. At 11 the parade lines up at Grassmere Road and moves west to east along Main Street, past the judge’s stand near Bear Square, where the announcements are made. In 2026 Jarrod Lee gave the national anthem, and the grand marshal was Jason Miller. Floats come from sports teams, churches, and class reunions. The Chamber’s account of the 2026 parade lists volunteers running free water to spectators, a group of Harley owners, representatives of Skagit Pflag, and “a slightly deranged nurse from a nearby escape room.” Mike Werner’s entry, an airplane rolling down Main Street, won best Novelty. Community Bible Church took best nonprofit entry with a float that carried vocalists and handed out bottled water. The North Cascades Harley Owners Group, which helps with Christmas baskets for local families each year, won People’s Choice. CYSA Youth Cheer, which the Chamber calls a highlight of every parade, marched again.

Behind the last float come the cars. Entrants gather in front of the big silos at the edge of town and follow a pilot car into Town Center, where the show runs from noon to 3. The classes go by decade, from Best 1929 and older through Best 1970 and newer, then Best Truck and Overall Best of Show. The Chamber says the show is there “to remind us of the days when American automobiles dominated the world market and Concrete’s mainstay industries of cement manufacturing and logging were still alive.”

Afternoon in the park, night at the silos

After the parade the program returns to Veterans Memorial Park, with announcements from the Cascade Days Stage. Puget Sound Energy stocks a trout pond. There are watermelon and pie eating contests, a tire push and spray play run by the volunteer fire department, and kids’ games from the Concrete Resource Coalition, whose 2026 booth held oversized versions of Tetris and Guess Who. A putt-putt course first set up in 2025 came back in 2026 with Jurassic obstacles, from raptors to T-Rex, and a sound track of jungle noise and dinosaur roars. At 1:30 the fire department’s duck race runs down Main Street Hill.

Next to the Concrete Community Center on Railroad Avenue, the people who stage the Concrete Haunt each October set up an escape room in 2026 called the Cement Mental Asylum, at a $5 donation per “patient.” A softball competition also ran that year. The town’s Historic Preservation & Landmarks Commission kept a free photo booth where visitors posed in front of Concrete High School and the silos. “We are in the process of creating a historic registry for the town of Concrete,” Commissioner Suzanne Summa told the Skagit Valley Herald, “so that we can get a lot of our buildings that are not recognized as historic marked that way, and hopefully help bring funding to the town.”

The silos stand in Silo Park, on the site of the Superior Portland Cement Co. plant, built in 1908 and closed in 1967. At 1 o’clock Saturday the all-class reunion meets there for a social hour and potluck, open to anyone who ever attended or taught school in Concrete. In 2026 Concrete High’s class of 1976 marked its fiftieth year there, and the class of 1986 its fortieth.

At 9 p.m. the park fills again for Flight from Mordor, a game for ages 12 and up. Teams carry flashlights and work through challenges on their way across town to Veterans Memorial Park. The Resource Coalition shapes its free events from the advice of local youth. “Our youth have decided to build on (Flight from Mordor) and offer their own events for our preteens and teenagers who tend to get left out in a lot of the community events,” said the coalition’s Tabitha Walter. Ashlyn Morgareidge, a recent Concrete High graduate working the coalition’s booth, called the 2026 festival the busiest she had seen since before the COVID-19 pandemic.

A dinner meeting for a highway

The festival takes its name from a road. Concrete began in 1890 as Baker, Magnus Miller’s settlement where the Baker River enters the Skagit. When the lime quarry and cement plant came, the town was renamed Cement City and later Concrete.

Chuck Dwelley wrote the town’s history, So They Called the Town “Concrete.” By his account the place “had a flair for celebrations and special events” from the days when Baker and Cement City were rival communities. Elections were fought out in the saloons, and special railroad cars brought visitors for the Fourth of July. Tales are told, Dwelley wrote, that the Superior group carried the incorporation vote that made the town Concrete by furnishing a free barrel of whiskey to the assembled voters.

In the 1930s the town held meetings to win a highway over Cascade Pass to eastern Washington, and state and national figures attended. The Chamber describes the road as connecting Skagit County to Okanogan County. It was first called the North Cross State Highway and is now State Route 20. Dwelley wrote that one of those dinner meetings “turned into sort of a celebration with a parade,” and Cascade Days was born. A 2004 Skagit Valley Herald article dates the name to 1934, when it was given both to the town’s “good home fun” festival and to the highway campaign. The Washington Trust for Historic Preservation’s Revisiting Washington tour calls the event a carnival celebration begun to publicize the projected Cascade Cross-State Highway.

In 1935 the town marshal, C. E. Tumelson, ran for county sheriff. He roasted a whole steer over a pit in the uptown parking lot and drew a huge crowd for a day of political speeches. He lost. The next year the Eagles and the American Legion took over the Booster Club’s planned highway meeting and enlarged it into a loggers’ contest show. A carnival, parade, dances, a queen contest, and sports became standard.

Dwelley also listed what the most ambitious years added:

• the first parachute jump in Concrete, by a local boy, Archie Griffiths
• a full-scale rodeo in which one performer was killed
• wrestling and professional acts
• airplane rides, and parachute jumps in which a woman took part
• a Skagit River canoe race
• a horse show with drill teams
• a hot-rod contest
• a Canadian cricket team
• a barbecued-bear eating contest open to all, for which the committee paid a fine because the bear had been taken out of season

A bridge, a queen, and two plaques

The festival also gave the town a stage for its occasions. The Dalles Bridge carries 300 feet of steel across the Skagit, replacing ferries that Dwelley, as editor of the Concrete Herald, had argued against in his editorials for years. Skagit County voters approved a $700,000 bond for it in November 1948. The bridge was formally dedicated during the 1952 Cascade Days. Dwelley was master of ceremonies, and the Cascade Queen, Dolores Keller, cut the ribbon. Sedro-Woolley attorney Arthur J. Ward gave the address, telling, the Herald reported, “of the many years of working and hoping that preceded the building of the bridge.”

On August 19, 2006, during Cascade Days, Dwelley’s granddaughters unveiled plaques in his honor for the bridge. Sid Hammond played “Amazing Grace” on the bagpipes, and granddaughter Judy Dawe addressed the crowd. Dave Reid of Puget Sound Energy, with Mayor Jack Billman at his side, said, “It is a great honor to be associated with the dedication of this plaque.” County Commissioner Ted Anderson remembered a friend who used to buy the Herald for Dwelley’s editorial page when visiting Concrete. Dwelley had died in 1993. A message from his wife, Helen M. Dwelley, was read aloud: “As long as this very substantial bridge stands, so will the name of Charles Dwelley on the plaques at either end.”

The Chamber takes the weekend

Dwelley wrote his book in 1980 on commission from the Chamber. In it he recorded that completion of the highway ended the promotion. He also wrote that the yearly event “brought in the wrong type of crowd and more trouble than local law enforcement officers could handle, so the ‘big’ celebration has been discontinued.” The 2004 Herald story ran under the headline “Concrete festival goes back to Cascade Days.”

After the 2022 event, the festival’s organizers announced they would dissolve their nonprofit, and its future went uncertain. In 2023 the Chamber took it on, with board member Cheryl Weston as chair. “We didn’t want to see this popular community event go away,” she said, noting that most Concrete High School class reunions are scheduled for that weekend. “The parade, car show and class reunions will remain the centerpieces of this event.”

The current logo is the work of local artist Don Smith, who drew on elements of past logos: logging, the cement plant, and the mountains with the highway running through them. After the 2026 festival the Chamber presented its first Bonnie and Ray Drake Award, named for a couple who supported and volunteered at the event for decades. It went to Jarrod Lee for “outstanding volunteerism at Cascade Days 2026.”

The 2026 grand marshal came out of Dwelley’s newspaper. The Concrete Herald began publishing in the early 1900s and was dissolved in 1991. Jason Miller moved to Concrete in 2005 with a master’s degree in creative writing and revived the paper with the issue of May 6, 2009, serving as its publisher, editor, and only full-time reporter. He led the parade, the Chamber wrote, “in recognition of all the stories he wrote (and maybe those he kept to himself?!) about our little town.”