If you were anywhere near downtown on the morning of April 1, you probably heard it before you understood it. A loud crack, then a boom, then a cloud of dust rising over Sixth Avenue. Crews had just pulled down another recovery boiler at the Georgia-Pacific mill using a controlled fall, the same method they'd used seven weeks earlier on February 19. Traffic on Sixth and Seventh got rerouted for about fifteen minutes each time. Longtime residents stood along the fence line to watch, some of them former mill employees themselves, because watching a building you used to work in come down in ten seconds is the kind of thing you show up for.
Here's what a lot of people in town still get wrong about those booms: they assume it means the mill is closing. It isn't. Georgia-Pacific has said directly that the mill isn't going anywhere and continues to employ about 150 people locally. What's actually happening is a multiyear revitalization project, and understanding the difference matters if you live within earshot of it, because this isn't a story about an ending. It's a story about a 140-year-old industrial site being cleared, piece by piece, to make room for whatever downtown Camas becomes next.
What the Demolitions Are Actually Clearing
The work started in October 2025 with the recovery boiler and bleaching and pulping buildings along Sixth Street, buildings the mill no longer used for papermaking. The two controlled-fall boiler removals this year were the most visible and loudest phase so far. According to Georgia-Pacific, the next stage moves into construction: about $20 million in equipment investment aimed at safety and efficiency for the company's West Coast paper towel business, which still runs out of Camas. The company has also announced close to $12 million in new and upgraded converting equipment. None of this reads like a company winding down. It reads like a company trimming a footprint it no longer needs while keeping the part it does.
Future removals on the list include the dock, a riverside warehouse, the kraft mill, and other structures along Northeast Adams Street, per the company's own project updates. That's the section of the site closest to the water, and it's the section that matters most for how downtown eventually connects to the Columbia and the Camas Slough.
The City Already Told You What It Wants Here
In February 2025, the Camas City Council passed a resolution asking the Washington Department of Ecology to hold the mill site's cleanup to a standard thorough enough to allow uses beyond heavy industry, not just more industrial use down the road. The council's own language is worth reading directly:
"It is imperative to ensure the cleanup efforts are fully protective of human health and the environment."
That's not a hypothetical. It's the city on record, describing the mill's 661-acre downtown footprint as one of the primary gateways into Camas and asking that its cleanup leave the door open for housing, commercial space, or public waterfront access, whichever the community decides it wants once the investigation work finishes. The Ecology-led sampling and analysis work is expected to run through 2026 and 2027, with a feasibility study and cleanup action plan following depending on what that sampling turns up. This is a slow process by design. But the demolitions you're hearing this year are the visible, audible first phase of it.
Downtown Isn't Waiting Around for the Mill to Finish
While all of that plays out on the industrial end of downtown, the Downtown Camas Association hasn't slowed its own calendar one bit. If you want a sense of how much is packed into this specific month, here's what's actually on the books:
- Summer Nights Sips & Bites, Thursday, August 13, 5 to 9 p.m., a ticketed downtown walk with tropical cocktails, live island music, and local bites.
- Camas Wine Walk, Saturday, August 22, 3 to 7 p.m., hosted by the Downtown Camas Merchants.
- Camas Vintage & Art Street Faire, Saturday, August 29, 9 a.m. to 3 p.m., antiques, vintage vendors, and art vendors filling the street.
- First Fridays, held monthly year-round from 5 to 8 p.m., a themed evening of dining, shopping, and activities across downtown merchants.
- Camas Farmers Market, running Wednesdays through the season.
None of these events require the mill site to be finished. Sips & Bites and the Wine Walk both run within a few blocks of the demolition fence line, close enough that anyone who caught the April boiler fall in person knows exactly how loud the same streets can get for a very different reason a few months later.
Where People Are Actually Eating Through All This
Downtown's dining scene hasn't paused for any of it either. Feast at 316 keeps its reputation as the anniversary-dinner, gift-certificate kind of place people return to on purpose. The Hammond Kitchen + Craft Bar draws its own steady crowd for the same reason. Grains of Wrath Brewery, whose master brewers have picked up award recognition, sits close enough to downtown that it functions as a natural stop before or after any of the merchant-run walks. Tommy O's at the Camas Hotel handles the fast-casual end of things, including catering orders large enough to serve fifty people without missing a beat. Birch Street Uptown Lounge has built a following for a cocktail list and live music that regulars will tell you rivals anything across the river in Portland. K&M Drive-In still runs the retro-diner lane for anyone who wants a straightforward burger and fries without a wait for a table.
None of these are new discoveries. What's worth noticing is that they're all within a few blocks of a demolition site that's actively changing what downtown looks like from the sidewalk, and business at all of them appears unaffected by the noise a few streets over.
If You're Planning to Walk the Lake This Month
One practical note for anyone routing a weekend hike around Lacamas Regional Park: as of March 2026, a portion of the route at the upper dam near Round Lake remains closed. The Lake to Lake Trail Loop, the Round Lake and Camas Potholes Falls route, and the Camas Potholes and Waterfall Loop all pass through that section, and the closure means those loops currently only work as out-and-back trails rather than full loops. Clark County's park page has the current status if you're checking before you drive over. The Lacamas Heritage Trail, on the west side of the lake, isn't affected and remains the more reliable choice for a full out-and-back walk this month.
The Two Timelines Meet Right Here
The useful way to think about Camas this August isn't as two separate stories, one about a mill and one about a street festival calendar. It's one story about a downtown that's simultaneously clearing its industrial past and running its summer social calendar on the same handful of blocks, at the same time, with neither one waiting for the other. The mill's demolition and cleanup work will likely stretch past 2027 given how the Ecology sampling timeline reads. The Wine Walk and the Vintage Faire will happen this month regardless. If you live here, you're watching both unfold at once, which is a strange and genuinely rare thing for a city this size to pull off without either story swallowing the other.
That's Camas right now. Not a mill town waiting to become something else, and not a festival calendar pretending the mill isn't there. Both, on the same streets, in the same August.
If you're weighing a move to Camas, or thinking about what a downtown-adjacent property here will look like once the waterfront work resolves, Oxford Street Partners knows this market from the ground up. Book a Consultation with Leigh Calvert and Harvey Coker to talk through what these changes could mean for your next move in Southwest Washington.
