Woodland's Been Fishing That Riverbank for Decades. It's Finally Getting a Parking Lot.

Friday night, August 23, the last movie of the season played at Horseshoe Lake Park. Families staked out blankets and lawn chairs on the grass while the band 26-7 played before the show, and the Veterans of Foreign Wars sold their usual five-dollar hot dog plates to anyone who didn't feel like packing a cooler. "Paw Patrol: The Mighty Movie" lit up the screen around dusk, closing out a run that started back in July with "The Super Mario Bros. Movie" and worked its way through "Finding Dory" and "Trolls Band Together" on Fridays through the summer. It's the kind of evening Woodland has built a rhythm around, and by Saturday morning the same instinct sends people three blocks over to First Street, where the Woodland Farmers Market is running its 30th season across from the public library.

None of that is news, exactly. It's just what a late-August week in Woodland looks like. But there's a bigger shift happening this year, and it's not at Horseshoe Lake Park at all. It's happening on a stretch of riverbank most residents have already stood on without ever seeing it marked on a map.

The beach everyone already knows about

Drive out toward Dike Road, past the edge of town, and you'll find a gravel access road leading to a wide, quiet shoreline where the Lewis River empties into the Columbia. Anglers have worked that bank for years. So have people who just want to park, watch the barges, and let their kids throw rocks into the current. There's no restroom out there. No paved lot. No signage beyond what the Port of Woodland has posted to mark where public access ends and industrial land begins. It's public property, but it's the kind of public property you find out about from a neighbor, not a brochure.

That's Austin Point, and the Port of Woodland has owned the 200 acres it sits on since 1963. For most of that history, the plan for the land had nothing to do with picnic tables. Port commissioners spent decades chasing the idea of a deep-water marine terminal there, one capable of handling Panamax-sized ocean shipping. There was a serious push in 1978, stalled by legal challenges through the 1980s. The idea resurfaced again in 2019, when commissioners voted to restart feasibility studies. As recently as last year, that industrial vision was still the headline goal, with the recreational piece treated as something to work around rather than build toward.

That industrial ambition is currently on hold, according to Columbia Riverkeeper's tracking of the project, which cites habitat concerns tied to the site's role as home to one of the lower Columbia's largest heron rookeries and a documented lamprey population at the river confluence. Meanwhile, the recreational half of the same 90 acres just got fully funded.

What $1.8 million actually buys

In July 2025, the Port of Woodland announced it had secured $1.8 million in grants from the Washington State Recreation and Conservation Office to formalize public access at Austin Point. The money covers the unglamorous infrastructure that turns an informal fishing spot into an actual public park:

• Paved access roads and a real parking lot, replacing the current gravel approach
• Restrooms
• Trails, including sections wide enough for both walkers and horses
• Fish cleaning stations
• River lookouts
• A primitive boat launch on the Columbia side

Port of Woodland Executive Director Jennifer Wray-Keene told The Reflector that construction is expected to take about two and a half years once the project team resumes active work, and that the port is now focused on planning milestones before setting a groundbreaking date. Commission President Bob Wile framed the funding as something the community had been asking for over a long stretch of years, and Commissioner Rob Rich pointed to the specific mix of uses the site is built to support: walking, biking, boating, picnicking, and fishing along a shoreline that will keep its natural, undeveloped feel even after the upgrades.

That last part matters if you've spent any time out there already. The plan isn't to turn Austin Point into a manicured waterfront promenade. It's to give the version people already use some basic infrastructure, so the same beach that's currently accessed by bouncing down a gravel road gets a place to park, a place to use the bathroom, and a place to clean your catch before you head home.

Two visions for the same ground, and which one has the money

Here's the part worth sitting with. For most of Austin Point's history as port property, the industrial version of the site was the ambitious one, the one with feasibility studies and rail-loop land purchases and decades of institutional attention behind it. The recreational use was the thing that happened anyway, informally, without funding or planning, because people wanted river access and the port never got around to stopping them.

Right now, that order has flipped. The industrial marine terminal is on hold. The public access plan has a funding source, a construction estimate, and named commissioners speaking on the record about timelines. It's not that Woodland decided against industrial development forever. Port properties can and do serve both functions elsewhere on the lower Columbia. But for this particular parcel, in this particular year, the version of the waterfront that's actually moving forward is the one residents built by showing up with fishing poles and folding chairs for years before anyone paved a road for them.

If you've fished that bank or hauled a kayak down the gravel this summer, nothing changes for you today. The road is still gravel. There's still no bathroom. But the trajectory is set, and sometime in the 2027 to 2028 window, the place you've been going informally becomes the place the port built on purpose.

The rest of the summer didn't wait for permits

While Austin Point works through its planning phase, the parts of Woodland that don't need a state grant have kept doing what they do. Rosie's Restaurant on Lewis River Road has been serving breakfast, lunch, and dinner since 1985, the kind of family-run spot that doesn't need to reinvent itself to stay full most mornings. Matt and Mandy's Family Diner on North Goerig Street has been working through a new menu this year, still built around from-scratch cooking. If you wanted something with a beer list attached, Woodland North Bound Taphouse and Sports Bar on Atlantic Avenue has been the default answer.

Horseshoe Lake Park, meanwhile, keeps doing what it's always done as the largest developed city park in town: hosting Planters Days each June, the annual Fish Derby, the Easter Egg Hunt run by the Moose Lodge, and now the closing weeks of Hot Summer Nights. None of that required a grant application. It's just the standing infrastructure of a small river town that already knows how to fill a summer calendar.

The Austin Point story sits next to all of that as the one piece of Woodland's public life that's about to change shape rather than repeat itself. It's a slower story than a new restaurant opening or a festival announcement, the kind that unfolds over grant cycles and construction timelines instead of a single weekend. But for a town that's spent sixty years deciding, on and off, what its own riverfront is for, watching the answer finally lean toward public access over industrial ambition is worth paying attention to, even if you're not planning to launch a boat there until 2028.

If you're the kind of Woodland resident who tracks changes like this because you like knowing what's coming, that instinct tends to be useful the day you decide to buy, sell, or just figure out what your own property near the river is worth. Jacob Sanchez works Clark County and the surrounding Portland-metro suburbs day to day, and keeping an eye on projects like Austin Point is part of what makes that local knowledge worth something when you're ready to use it.