"Join the City of Camas Parks and Recreation for our first FUN RUN event." That's how the city describes the Zombie Dash, a run happening on Main Street this October 17. Not "our annual." Not "our beloved." First. A city that already has Springfest, Turkey Bingo and Hometown Holidays on its Parks and Recreation calendar is trying something brand new in the exact week most people assume the town goes quiet.
That assumption is worth checking. The Camas Farmer's Market, the one recurring fixture most residents build their Wednesday errands around, runs from June through September and then stops. Lacamas Lake's boat traffic thins as the weather turns. On paper, October looks like the empty stretch between lake season and the holiday lights the Downtown Camas Association strings along Main Street every winter. In practice, it's the month the city and its business district use to test what sticks.
The market closes, the calendar doesn't
The Farmer's Market wrapping up in September isn't a sign that downtown Camas slows down. It's a hand-off. The market covers the warm months when people want an outdoor errand. What replaces it isn't another outdoor market, it's an indoor and evening calendar that runs through fall regardless of weather: First Friday art walks, live shows at neighborhood bars, movie nights at a nearly century-old theater.
First Friday is the through-line. Every month, downtown's galleries, including Attic Gallery, open their doors after hours for a free, self-guided walk that doubles as an excuse to be out on a weeknight. It doesn't pause for October. If anything, it's the one piece of the calendar that makes the shift from summer to fall feel uneventful in the best way. You don't lose your Friday night just because the market's gone.
A city testing something on its own residents
The Zombie Dash is the more interesting data point, because it's not a tradition being repeated, it's an experiment being run. Camas Parks and Recreation is asking for pre-registered runners on October 17 and, separately, asking for volunteers willing to spend the morning as an actual zombie on the course. That's two different asks for one new event, which suggests the department is trying to build both a running event and a spectacle in the same afternoon, and seeing which part draws the bigger crowd.
Programs like this tend to reveal themselves in year two. If Zombie Dash returns in 2027 with a bigger course or a title sponsor, that's the tell that October in Camas has a new fixture. If it quietly disappears, that's useful information too. Either way, the fact that a city with an already-packed events calendar chose October to pilot something new says the month has room the summer calendar doesn't.
Halloween arrives in two different registers
Camas doesn't run one Halloween event, it runs two, aimed at two different audiences on two different dates. The Pumpkin Party at Boo Bash lands on October 28, a Parks and Recreation event built around costumes and candy for families with small kids. Earlier in the month, the Haunted History Walking Tour on October 24 is a different kind of evening entirely, a guided walk through the parts of downtown with actual stories attached to them rather than plastic decorations.
Running both in the same month, spaced a few days apart, means the city isn't trying to make one event serve every age group. It's building two smaller, more specific nights instead of one crowded one. For a town that also finds room for a Zombie Dash the same month, October is clearly the point in the calendar where Camas leans hardest into the theme, then moves on.
A show built around a songwriter, not a season
Not everything downtown does in October is calendar-driven. On October 10, A Beer at a Time hosts "Illegal Smile: Celebrating 80 Years of John Prine," a tribute show timed to the songwriter's birth year rather than to Halloween or harvest or anything civic. It's the kind of booking that has nothing to do with autumn and everything to do with the fact that A Beer at a Time books music on its own schedule, Halloween season or not. The same room runs a standing Monday bingo night year-round. Between the two, it's less a seasonal venue than a bar that treats every week the same, which is its own kind of reliability for anyone who lives close enough to walk there.
The lights are already on the calendar
None of this is happening in a vacuum before the holidays. The Downtown Camas Association already has its November Holiday Sip & Shop listed for after Halloween wraps, meaning the transition from Zombie Dash to string lights isn't a cold stop, it's a handoff timed almost as tightly as the one from the Farmer's Market to First Friday. Camas doesn't really have an off-season downtown. It has a rotation, and October is where the rotation turns fastest, adding new events on top of decades-old ones instead of coasting on the ones already in place.
That's the part worth sitting with if you've lived here long enough to assume you already know what fall looks like. The Liberty Theatre still runs its regular film slate. Birch Street Uptown Lounge still pours the same cocktails. Cookie decorating already happened out at Lacamas Lake Lodge on September 18, a small early sign that the city's recreation calendar doesn't wait for October 1 to start layering in seasonal programming. What's different this year is the Zombie Dash sitting in the middle of all of it, a new event dropped into a month that already had plenty going on, as if the city wanted to see what October could hold if it tried one more thing.
Whether that experiment becomes the next Camas Days or fades quietly by next fall, the bigger point holds either way. The month between the lake and the lights isn't empty. It's where this town tries things out.
If you're the kind of person who tracks what's new in Camas before it shows up on anyone else's calendar, that instinct tends to carry over well when the conversation turns to the neighborhood itself. Louise James has spent enough Octobers in this town to know which new events stick and which ones quietly disappear, and she's always glad to talk through what that means for the neighborhoods she works in.
