Mason County Forest Festival

Saturday on Railroad and Franklin

At six on the Saturday morning of the Mason County Forest Festival, runners check in at the corner of North 2nd Street and Railroad Avenue in Shelton. The seven-mile walkers set off at seven from Shelton Valley Christian School and follow the Shelton Valley loop through a farming community. The seven-mile runners and the two-mile field leave at eight; the shorter course runs straight into downtown Shelton. Every distance finishes on the parade route in front of the Post Office. At 9:15 children aged three to eight run the quarter-mile Junior Jog from 7th Street, and at 9:30 walkers 65 and older cover the same stretch. This is the Goldsborough Creek Run, organized by the Centennial Guild of the Mason Health Foundation. Its proceeds go to the Kristi Armstrong Memorial Scholarship Fund, named for a Mason Health nurse who was a longtime Guild member.

Central Mason Fire serves pancakes from seven to eleven at its station at 122 West Franklin Street. The organizers ask visitors to park and walk, because the streets are closing for the parade.

The festival is “always the weekend after Memorial Day,” in its organizers’ words, and its events run over four days. The 2026 festival ran May 28 to May 31 under the theme “Legends of the Timber.” It was the 82nd. A carnival at 1st and Grove Streets spans two weekends, Memorial Day weekend and festival weekend. Rides take four to seven tickets at a dollar apiece, and riders must be 36 inches tall. In 2026 Memorial Day Monday “was a wash (literally),” the festival posted, so the carnival added a Wednesday evening.

The Paul Bunyan Grand Parade steps off at eleven from 7th and Railroad Avenue. It runs to 2nd Street, turns, and returns to 7th along Franklin. The 2026 parade had more than 90 entries: marching bands from local schools, floats, horses, children, classic cars, Boy and Girl Scouts, Shriners, the American Legion, 4-H, and businesses in shellfish, forestry, insurance, and utilities. Riders may hand out candy but may not throw it. The award plaques are designed and made by local high school students. In 2026 the Grand Sweepstakes went to the visiting Daffodil Festival. The parade goes on rain or shine. A giant statue of Paul and Babe the Blue Ox attends, as it attends most festival events, and stands for photographs.

Chips and spar poles on Loop Field

The logging show starts at one o’clock at Loop Field, 1020 West Franklin Street, and runs until four. Mick Sprouffske, the festival’s president, has said he knows it is Forest Festival “when he has a trailer full of spar poles.” Crews from Mason PUD 3 give their time to help set them up. The 2026 program was an exhibition with five men and five women competing in Jack and Jill events: the springboard chop, stock saw, standing block chop, single buck, and underhand chop. Open events covered speed climbing, tree topping, and axe throwing.

At the 2026 show PNW Axe let spectators try ten throws for ten dollars. The Kristmas Town Kiwanis held its Duck Drop during the show. Ducks cost a dollar each and were sold along the parade route and at a Kiwanis booth, and the grand prize was $1,000. Food vendors sell lunch and sweets. A Northwest Travel & Life writer described families going “from event to event with cotton candy in hand, cheering on the loggers as they scale poles and race the clock.” The same writer noted kettle corn and handmade crafts at the vendors’ booths.

Fireworks, four hundred cars, and a traveling court

At four o’clock the Martha Reed Foundation opens Rockin’ the Forest in the Our Community Credit Union lot at 2948 Olympic Highway North. Admission is free. The 2026 lineup was Lavon Blue, Backlash, and the Lester Crow Band, with food trucks, a beer garden, and a cornhole tournament for those 21 and over. It runs until the fireworks.

The fireworks go up about ten o’clock, as the sun sets, over the fields of Oakland Bay Junior High on Wallace Kneeland Boulevard. KMAS broadcasts a music soundtrack timed to the show on 1030 AM and 103.3 FM. Parking near the school fills early, and the festival points visitors to the Fred Meyer and Walmart lots. For nearly two decades Manke Lumber Company paid for the display. In 2026 Manke paused its funding, and an online fundraiser raised the $20,000 the show costs. Mason County Garbage gave $15,000 of it.

On Sunday the Shelton Car Show-Off fills eight blocks of Olympic Highway North between C and K Streets from ten to three. A car show was first added to the festival in 1990, and since 2010 the Shelton High School Navy Junior ROTC Booster Club has run it. For its 35th anniversary in 2025, more than 460 cars registered from across Washington and some from Oregon and Idaho. Food vendors and raffles line the street, and spectators get in free. Proceeds send cadets to leadership academy and competitions.

The festival’s royalty are crowned in March. The 2026 Coronation Night was March 14 at Shelton High School, and each title carries a scholarship. Francesca, a Shelton High senior finishing an associate degree in welding technology, was Queen of the Forest. “Growing up in Mason County I always looked up to the Forest Festival Court,” she wrote. Lane, Timber the Axe Man in 2025, was the 2026 Paul Bunyan. Trinity, a junior in the drama club, was Princess of Douglas Fir.

After the festival the court and its float travel the regional parade circuit. In 2026 they went to Fathoms O’ Fun in Port Orchard, the Fourth of July boat parade at Mason Lake, the McCleary Bear Festival, Capital Lakefair, and Seafair’s Torchlight Parade in Seattle, where the float won the Workmanship Award for a second year. Before the 2026 Shelton parade, the Fathoms O’ Fun pirate ship “ran into some foul weather,” and Princess Jaymie of that festival rode on the Mason County float instead. The court’s Royalty Tea Party, a garden party for all ages, was held at the Colonial House on July 12, 2026, and sold out. A three-dollar commemorative button is designed each year by a local student. The 2026 design was by Mimi, a senior at Cedar High School.

Harry Clark’s fire season

In 1942 Harry Clark came to Mason County as assistant to Fire Warden George Frisk. According to the Shelton-Mason County Journal, the county then had one of the highest forest-fire ratings in Washington. Stump ranchers and loggers burned slash, brush, and stumps without much concern if a fire got away, because burned-over land made for good grazing and hunting. A newspaper of the day reported that from spring to fall the Olympic Mountains were rarely visible through the smoke.

Clark began with boys. Starting at Lower Skokomish School, he organized Junior Forest Wardens, who learned where to build a campfire and how to put it out. Each signed a pledge to carry the message home. The program spread through the county’s schools to some 700 wardens. They wore gray sweatshirts for land laid waste by fire and red crusher hats for the flames.

The statewide effort had begun in February 1940. That month Governor Clarence Martin called federal and state forestry agencies and timber companies together, and the meeting produced the Keep Washington Green Association. Clark’s wardens drew the association’s notice, and Mason County became the first county in the state with its own Keep Washington Green committee.

At that committee’s December 1944 meeting, Clark proposed a festival at the opening of fire season, then April 15, to teach people to respect trees as living things. The members were not enthusiastic. They cited the war, gas rationing, and a public in no mood to celebrate. Clark persisted, and the American Legion agreed to sponsor a “Keep Washington Green Festival.”

The first festival, in the spring of 1945, had a Queen’s Banquet, Coronation, and Ball, and Lois Gibler was crowned queen. On Saturday a pet and hobby parade went ahead of the main parade, in which logging trucks hauled fir, hemlock, and cedar. Gus Anderson, as Paul Bunyan, stood atop one of the biggest single logs. He carried a nine-foot ax made by the high school manual training department. A concert followed on the grounds of the Memorial Hall, then a loggers’ show of sawing-equipment demonstrations. That night, in Lincoln Gym, schoolchildren played flowers, insects, and stumps in a pageant called “Voice of the Spirits.”

The Chamber of Commerce sponsored the festival in 1946, but expenses outran income in both of its first two years. In 1947 Rudy Werberger, a local vineyard owner and winemaker, incorporated the Mason County Forest Festival Association and kept it going. In a 1964 interview, Clark said Mason County had been “the hot spot of the state” and had since reduced incendiaries “perhaps more than any other county in the state.”

A log sign, a potlatch, and a fiberglass Paul

The Forest History Society’s photographs follow the next decades. In 1947 Queen Bernadine Winiecki watched the state tree being planted. In 1949 the Simpson Clowns gathered around a “Robot Tree Planter.” In 1953 the ninth festival marked a century since Michael T. Simmons built Mason County’s first sawmill on Mill Creek. Artist Clarence Beauchamp carved a large sign into a piece of Douglas fir, and it was dedicated overlooking Oakland Bay. The festival’s history page says it can still be seen at Outlook Park near the giant Paul Bunyan. On the final day of that festival, 30,000 people, about six times the town’s population, came to watch the Paul Bunyan Parade. An advertisement for the 12th festival promised “exciting contests in which loggers demonstrate their skills at falling, bucking, tree topping and truck driving.” In 1956 Paul Searls and his son Max competed in tree falling.

The Journal of May 29, 1958, was printed on green paper. It reported 25,000 to 40,000 visitors and a traffic count of more than 55,000 vehicles. At Loop Field, Queen Janet Hinton watched about 100 junior high students perform The Good Potlatch, a pageant by their principal, Bruce Schwarck, about the history of the Skokomish people. James Stevens had written every Shelton pageant from 1947 through 1957. “It was a great show,” he told the paper.

The paper also described the Kiddies Parade that year: “One little fellow had to battle his goat every step of the way, but rode from start to finish.” On the Tahuya float, Smokey Bear peered from a peeler log under the slogan “Forest Fires Are Not Fairy Tales.” The Middle Skokomish School float, “Peace Through World Trade,” drew a letter from Eleanor Roosevelt. At the logging show Hap Johnson, Mal Harper, and Stan Lyon raced up and down 90-foot trees. Swante Kyllonen had been climbing in Northwest woods since 1912. He chopped for almost an hour from a springboard with no safety equipment. On Sunday morning Roy Kimbel’s committee raked the chips from Loop Field, pulled the spar poles, filled the holes, and left it fit for baseball.

The festival’s fiberglass Paul is 20 feet tall. He arrived in Shelton in 1957 as an advertisement for the Binger Brothers’ gas stations and came to rest at their station on 1st Street. In the 1960s he passed with the station to Gull. When the Gull station closed in 1991, he was deeded to the city and spent a year at the wastewater treatment plant. From 1992 he stood guard at the high school. There, students from Tumwater High took his ax, and the windstorm of 1993 knocked him down. In 1996 wood craftsman Lloyd Prouty and fellow businessmen set out to restore him, paid for with donations from the county. They mounted him on a hydraulic trailer that lowered him beneath power lines. In 2001 he appeared in an AT&T Wireless commercial. Anyone who attended the parade during Paul’s reign, the festival writes, will remember him doing the “limbo” under the power lines on Railroad Avenue.