Lincoln City, on Oregon’s central coast, hosts two kite festivals each year, a summer festival in late June or July and a fall festival in late September or October. The festivals feature dozens of kites, some truly huge, kite flying demonstrations and competitions, kite making workshops, and more. The 2025 events will be held on June 21-22 and September 20-21. Mark your calendars because these are great events, fun for the whole family.
Kite festivals are always weather dependent, but when the sun shines and the winds cooperate, the Lincoln City Summer and Fall Kite Festivals are glorious events and great fun for all.
I’ve been lucky enough to experience Lincoln City’s kite festivals when the weather was perfect for kite flying. And my wife and I even got the last available parking spot at the D River Wayside, where the festivals are held, one year. Luck really was with us. There was a brisk, but not cold, breeze on the beach that time – perfect kite flying weather and a pretty near perfect day for just hanging out on the beach.
The festivals typically feature a lot of very big kites, and quite a few performance kite fliers demonstrating their talents. One of the all time highlights for me was a flier named Spence Watson flying two quad strings kites. Normally it takes two hands to fly a single quad string. Flying one one-handed is a feat in itself, but he was flying one right-handed and one left-handed, and controlling each one perfectly. Pretty amazing.
Another highlight was a performance featuring 13 quad string kites being flown at the same time (one by an eleven year old boy) in a pretty well coordinated routine that I think was improvised on the spot. That was also pretty amazing.
Watching the kite flyers is often as entertaining as watching the kites. It’s really a very physical dance that they’re doing. Their movements are perfectly coordinated with the music, but everyone’s moves are a little bit different. If you watch long enough you begin to see the different styles of the flyers. It’s really quite interesting.
There’s plenty to do at the festivals for the whole family. Kids can take part in kite making classes, get their faces painted, learn about ocean conservation, fly their own kites, and, of course, just play in the sand.
I lived in Lincoln city for most of the 1980s, so I sometimes take a walking tour of the downtown area when I visit Lincoln City. The whole town has changed a great deal since I lived there, including the house that I lived in for a time. It’s been extensively remodeled and added on to, so it’s nothing like it was when I lived there. And that’s a fitting description of the whole city.
Pier 101, a seafood restaurant only half a block from my old residence, hasn’t changed much in the last 40 years, making it an outlier in a city of change and about 50 years past due for a makeover. But has its own kind of nostalgic charm, and the food is still good. It may not the best place to eat in town, but it’s worth a visit, and it’s only a few blocks south of the site of the kite festivals.
There are numerous other kite fests up and down the Oregon and Washington coasts in addition to the Lincoln City festivals, including the Southern Oregon Kite Festival in Brookings in July, and the Washington State International Kite Festival in Long Beach in August and the Rockaway Beach Kite Festival, in September.
If you’re interested in learning more about kites and kite flying, check out Winddriven in Lincoln City, or The Kite Company in Newport, both good sources for kites, supplies, and instructions on the Oregon Coast. Other good online sources are Into the Wind , Prism Kites , Kitty Hawk Kites, and Pro Kites USA .
The Lincoln City Kite Festivals are good fun for all, even if the weather isn’t perfect. And if you’re truly lucky, Mother Nature may provide a gorgeous sunset to top off the day. Can’t ask for much more.
Originally posted by Alan K. Lee October 15, 2018. Most recently updated June 5, 2025.
All photos © Alan K. Lee
The OCF is a remnant of the 1960s counterculture, for sure, but it is anything but stuck in the 60s. Over its 54-year history the Oregon Country Fair has not only survived but grown and thrived. It’s hard to describe just how big this thing has become. The schedule of events for the 2018 fair listed 120 performances on the first day, spread over 19 stages. There are dozens of musical acts, dancers, comedy acts, vaudeville, circus acts, and more than a dozen groups of performers that wander the miles of paths of the fairgrounds. And that’s just the entertainment.
There are also more than 300 artisans selling hand crafted goods – pottery, jewelry, leatherworks, glassworks, furniture and other woodworks, sculptures, paintings, photography, clothing, and you name it. There are also dozens of workshops, classes, and “gatherings,” and almost ninety food booths. There is a childcare center, three first aid stations, a cell phone charging station, drinking water bottle filling stations, showers, and five ATMs.
