Drive up Observatory Drive on any Thursday night this month and you'll find a locked gate instead of a line of cars waiting for the evening show. Goldendale Observatory State Park, home to one of the largest public telescopes in the country, has paused its solar and evening programs due to staffing shortages. The grounds are still open for anyone who wants to walk the hilltop and take in the view over the Klickitat Valley, but the domes that made this park a destination are closed for now, with no firm date for when programs resume.
If you judged Goldendale by its most famous attraction, you'd assume the town goes dark this fall. It doesn't. Walk two blocks in either direction from Main Street and you'll find a butcher shop that opened its doors for the first time in January, a Renaissance faire arriving for the first time ever on September 26, and a farmers market that's kept its Saturday rhythm going all summer. The telescope going quiet hasn't slowed anything down. It's just made it obvious that Goldendale's actual social calendar was never up on that hill to begin with.
What's Actually Closed, and What Isn't
The distinction matters if you live here and were planning a stargazing night before the temperature drops. According to the park's official status page, the solar shows and evening telescope programs are on hold "for the time being" because of staffing issues, and the campus itself stays open for self-guided visits from 6:30 a.m. to dusk daily. That means the picnic area, the amphitheater, and the panoramic overlook are all still yours to use. What you can't currently do is book a reservation to look through the 24.5-inch reflector, because there's no program running to reserve a spot in.
This isn't a permanent closure and it isn't the kind of story that ends the same way twice, so treat any date you hear secondhand with some skepticism and check the park's own page before you make plans around it. What it does mean for this particular September is that the thing most visitors associate with Goldendale, a night under some of the darkest skies in the state, isn't currently available on demand. The town's evening life this month is happening somewhere else.
Main Street's New Butcher Counter
That somewhere else includes a building at 112 S. Columbus Avenue that used to be Jerry's Stop N Go, then Café Genevieve's, and is now Siebert Meats, doing business as The Meating Place. The Siebert family bought the property in the spring of 2025 and spent months rebuilding it from the studs out, lining the walls with century-old barn wood and locally milled blue pine to give the space the feel of an 1800s saloon. It celebrated its grand opening on January 8, 2026.
The shop sources beef, pork, and lamb from ranchers around Klickitat County, which is the point. Kristi Siebert told the Goldendale Sentinel that the family's goal was to give the area's own ranching community a retail outlet for locally raised meat, rather than routing everything through processors elsewhere. The shop keeps Thursday through Saturday hours, 11 a.m. to 7 p.m., and on any given day the counter turns out smoked brisket, pulled pork sandwiches, smoked mac and cheese, and ribs alongside the retail cuts.
"We look forward to serving the community that serves us," the Siebert family said when the shop opened.
That's a small business, not a headline event, but it's the kind of addition that changes a Thursday night in a town this size. A meat counter with a smoker running is now a reason to be downtown at an hour when the observatory's evening show would normally have been the draw.
A Renaissance Faire With No Precedent
The bigger disruption to the usual September routine arrives on Saturday, September 26, when the Srathdale Fantasy Renaissance Faire sets up on North Wilbur Avenue for its first run. Gates open at 10 a.m. and the event runs to 6 p.m., rain or shine. It's built around a market of vendors, live blacksmithing demonstrations, and costumed performers, with an activity table for kids that includes a crown while supplies last.
There's no prior year to compare this to. Goldendale has hosted its share of car shows and street fairs, but nothing organized around a full day of market stalls and craft demonstrations at this scale. The exact footprint of the event was still being finalized as of the Chamber's own listing, which noted the location as "coming soon" even after the date and general site were confirmed on North Wilbur Avenue. If you're used to knowing exactly where to park for a Goldendale event, this one is worth checking again closer to the date.
What it signals, regardless of turnout, is that someone believed a one-day market-and-performance event could draw a crowd here without any existing track record to lean on. That's a different kind of bet than reopening a shuttered storefront. It's a bet on foot traffic that doesn't exist yet.
The Calendar That Was Already There
None of this displaces what was already running. The Goldendale Farmers Market has kept its regular Saturday schedule through the season, and the Chamber's community calendar has stacked additional one-off events around it, including Sunset in the Park, a joint evening gathering hosted by the market and the Chamber at World War II Park. These aren't new discoveries. They're the baseline the town has been operating on all along, and they're the reason a paused observatory doesn't actually leave a hole in the week.
Put the three threads together and the picture is less about any single opening or closure and more about where the weight of activity sits right now:
- The observatory, historically the thing that pulled outside visitors up the hill after dark, has no running evening program as of this writing.
- The town's newest retail draw, a from-scratch butcher shop with smoker hours three nights a week, sits on Columbus Avenue, not Observatory Drive.
- The town's newest event, a one-day faire with no prior year to reference, is staged on North Wilbur Avenue, also downtown.
- The market and its Chamber-organized evening add-ons have quietly kept Saturdays and select weeknights populated all season without needing the observatory at all.
What This Actually Says About the Town
The easy version of this story is that Goldendale lost its marquee attraction for a season and is filling the gap with smaller things. That gets the direction backward. The observatory's programs were never what filled a Tuesday night for someone who already lives here. They were what filled a Tuesday night for someone driving up from Portland or through on Highway 97. The butcher shop, the market, the new faire, these are built for people who are already in town on a Thursday and need a reason to walk two blocks instead of driving home.
A paused telescope program is a real loss for anyone who came here specifically for the dark sky, and it's worth watching the park's status page for updates rather than assuming it's back on a normal schedule. But it doesn't touch the part of Goldendale that runs on its own clock, the one built around a meat counter that smokes brisket three nights a week and a faire that's betting on a crowd it hasn't drawn before. That clock was running before the observatory paused its programs, and it'll keep running after they resume.
If you're weighing whether Goldendale fits the kind of daily life you want, whether that's a short walk to a butcher counter with smoked ribs on a Friday or a five-acre hilltop park you can visit at sunset without a reservation, CB Cascade works this part of Klickitat County regularly and can talk through what different pockets of town actually offer month to month. Connect with a local expert today.
