Huckleberry Festival

The 2026 Huckleberry Festival opened at 5 p.m. on Friday, September 11, with a remembrance and a moment of silence in Daubenspeck Park. Then the music started: Harmony of the Gorge at a quarter past five, Carl Schwitzer and CFS 120 at six, Cascade High at eight.

The park sits on the main stretch of road that winds through downtown Bingen. The City of Bingen Public Works Department maintains it. In 2023 it gained a new play structure for small children, a merry-go-round and new swings. A 6,000-square-foot skate park was finished at the end of April 2014. Each year on the weekend after Labor Day, the Huckleberry Festival Committee fills the park with craft and food vendors, bouncy houses, classic cars and free concerts. Admission is free. Locals call it Huck Fest.

On that same Friday evening the Rattle Can Art Contest gave painters 90 minutes with spray cans. Children aged 8 to 16 competed in one category and adults in another. Voting began at 6:30, and winners were named at 7:15.

Three days in Daubenspeck Park

Saturday begins away from the park. The Bingen Fire Department serves a pancake breakfast from 7 to 10 a.m. The Huckleberry Parade steps off at 11. In 2025 it started on Steuben Street. Clubs, churches, businesses and anyone else may join, and the 2025 registration was free. The festival’s invitation to marchers reads: “Walk, Bike, Ride…. we want you to be a part of our Huckleberry Parade. Pretend you are a berry and wear purple head to toe!” At the 2024 parade, the Columbia High School marching band played for hundreds of onlookers.

From 1 to 4 in the afternoon the children’s games run in sequence:

• pie in the face
• a three-legged race
• a coin dig
• a watermelon-eating contest
• a hula hoop challenge
• an egg race

All but the pie in the face take place north of the playground. At 2 p.m. the beer garden hosts a cornhole tournament for those 21 and over. The 2026 tournament was the third, played double elimination for a cash prize.

On the 2026 Saturday stage, Gorge Winds played at noon. Gretta Seabird, Scot and Rebecca and the Wasco Bros followed through the afternoon. Paradise of Samoa played at seven and California Soul Review at eight. Jordan Reptiles also appeared on Saturday evening. The festival’s own site lists the show at 6 p.m. and the town’s tourism site lists it at 7. In 2025 it was billed as Jordan Vicars’ reptile show at 7. The festival site explains the hour: “A crowd favorite! (most of the crowd, anyways) We realize this is late, BUT reptiles do not do well in the heat of the day.”

Sunday opens with a church service in the park at 10 a.m. In 2026, Super Escandalo, which the Columbia Gorge News called a Latin fusion band in 2025, played at one. Chic Preston and Kerry Williams played at three, and the grounds closed at five. For the 2025 festival, chairperson Denise Stewart counted more than 40 vendors in the park. She called the program “over the top entertainment.”

Pie, brats and the Berry Tap House

Stewart has named the fixed points of the menu herself: “And of course, we have fresh-baked huckleberry pie, our famous brat, along with our beer garden.”

The pie comes from the festival’s huckleberry pie and ice cream stand. The Brats Booth offers three bratwursts: spicy, classic and a huckleberry brat. They come on buns baked by Rosauers, including a spicy bun made for the spicy brat. A meal deal adds chips and a drink.

The beer garden is called the Berry Tap House. Its draft list includes Budweiser and Stella Artois and a Portland Cider Co. Huckleberry Lemonade. It also pours two beers from Everybody’s Brewing in White Salmon, the Country Boy IPA and the Local Logger Lager. Wine and non-alcoholic craft beers are poured as well.

The berry also comes in jars at Huckleberry Haven, the festival’s huckleberry-products stand. Its list includes:

• wild huckleberry jam in three sizes
• sugar-free syrup
• BBQ sauce and vinaigrette
• salt water taffy and Wild Huckleberry Gummy Grizzlies
• hand cream
• pancake and waffle mix
• a four-ounce item sold as Bigfoot Poop

The program book, called Olallie, is posted online as a slideshow. It covers the bands, the brats, the contests and the year’s co-grand marshals, and it includes a crossword visitors may print.

From the Timber Carnival to the park

The festival began in 1962 as a small-town celebration of the wild huckleberry harvest. It honored the berries found on nearby Mt. Adams and the area’s farming past. Among the legacy farms the festival names is Dickey Farms, established in 1867.

Within two years the gathering had grown. In August 1964 the White Salmon Enterprise reported that the White Salmon-Bingen JC’s had put up a sign opposite the T&C Restaurant “Welcoming All” to “the big two day weekend of fun.” The same item said “Practically everything is ‘FREE’ for the now three day celebration” and that rodeo events ran over to Sunday. According to Mrs. Howard Benjamin, there was still “plenty of time yet to enter the parade.” A Huckleberry Hound contest offered a big prize for the children.

Denise Stewart joined in the mid-1980s, when a friend encouraged her. “At that time, it was held at the port of Bingen, and it was called the Huckleberry Festival and Timber Carnival,” she recalled in 2025. “Long rolling ax-throwing, tree climbing and tug of war.”

By the late 1980s the festival had moved to Daubenspeck Park. “It was a different era, a fresh start,” Stewart said. “I felt it was going to be more of a family-oriented festival. And so we have many activities for every age group now.”

Stewart was chairwoman in 2020, when the committee cancelled the festival. The committee could not wait to learn what Washington’s reopening phases would allow by September, and the vendors weighed in. “We were talking with vendors from east of here, and with 200 or more new cases in the Yakima area and new cases happening each week, we knew it was not a good idea to continue,” Stewart said.

Where the berries come from

In late March 2025 the U.S. Forest Service announced that it would issue no permits that season for commercial huckleberry harvest in the Gifford Pinchot National Forest. According to the Columbia Gorge News, it is the only national forest that allows large-scale huckleberry harvest. The Forest Service put the commercial harvest there at 50,000 to 70,000 gallons a year.

The Ḱamíłpa Band of the Yakama Nation has urged the agency to rein in picking since the 1930s. The band holds that commercial harvest violates gathering rights secured by the Treaty of 1855. Elaine Harvey, a Ḱamíłpa gatherer, said she had picked just eight gallons the year before. “Huckleberries are just as important as salmon to us,” she said. The pause was not made permanent. The Forest Service said it would decide after consulting tribes and stakeholders.

In Bingen, Dickey’s Farm Store usually buys its fresh huckleberries from the Gifford Pinchot. Laurie Walker, of the family’s fifth generation, said of the pause: “It’s kind of a concern because it does bring people and business into our store. But I also understand, too, that some of the practices haven’t been real good here lately.”

That spring Stewart was on the phone with her berry buyer, looking for fresh huckleberries from other places, such as Idaho. “I don’t think anything’s going to be different, but I always look for the glass half full,” she said. “The festival will be there, and we’re going to have a great time.”