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Editorials

September 15, 2022

Help bring history alive for Washougal students

Washougal middle school teacher Scott Rainey has been leading his eighth-grade Jemtegaard students on a “rite of passage” for 18 years. Students who can afford the trip — which now costs around $4,000 per person — head to the East Coast with their teacher, peers and chaperones during the summer break to take in some of the most iconic pieces of America’s history, including the United States Capitol, White House and Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington D.C.; Times Square and Broadway in New York City; and the famed Civil War battlefield in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania.

August 25, 2022

August Cheers & Jeers

As much as we might love the long days, lake swims, camping trips and backyard barbecues summer brings, the shift from summer to fall has its own magic: cooler weather, the joy of drinking apple cider at a local pumpkin patch and the new school year’s promise of what might be.

August 4, 2022

July Cheers & Jeers

We’re a week into August already, so our first Jeers for this July Cheers & Jeers column should probably go to the fact that rainy, dismal months like January and February seem to drag on forever while the sunny days of July and August fly by faster than a reporter typing on deadline.

July 14, 2022

We can’t ‘return to normal’ on our own

It is becoming increasingly clear that the federal government’s monthslong push to “return to normal” and get past the COVID-19 pandemic is not working. In March,…

June 23, 2022

Camas-Washougal officials must plan now for new climate reality

“An unusually intense, early season heat wave is gripping areas from Texas to the entire Southwest, including major metro area such as Houston, Phoenix, Las Vegas and Sacramento,” is how one media source explained the “dangerous” heat wave, with temperatures between 100-106°F (Sacramento) and 122°F (Death Valley) that swept over Texas, Arizona and California earlier this month, causing the National Weather Service to issue a high warning for heat-related illnesses.

June 9, 2022

Forget the ‘Big Lie,’ tune in to the truth this week

It has been more than 17 months since the Jan. 6, 2021 attack on our United States Capitol — 17 months since someone planted a pipe bomb outside a building containing our then vice-president elect Kamala Harris, the first woman ever elected to the vice presidency; 17 months since people erected a noose and makeshift gallows outside our Capitol and cried for the hanging of Vice President Mike Pence; 17 months since someone seemingly removed the panic buttons from a Democratic congresswoman’s office; and 17 months since Donald Trump’s most ardent supporters hurled racial slurs and beat Capitol Police officers on duty that day.

June 2, 2022

May Cheers & Jeers

With graduation ceremonies less than two weeks away for Camas-Washougal seniors, our first CHEERS goes out to our local graduates in the class of 2022. This class only had one “normal” year of high school before COVID hit, and then jumped into a world of remote learning, event cancellations, limited in-person communication with their peers and other mitigations meant to rein in our community’s COVID transmission rate. Despite so many upheavals, this class kept pushing forward through each new upheaval. May this resiliency stay with them throughout their adult lives.

May 12, 2022

Camas must do more to protect its established, ‘heritage’ trees

There are few issues that draw standing-room-only crowds to local city council meetings, but in the days before the COVID-19 pandemic put a damper on everything even remotely “crowded,” the Camas City Council used to pack the house when officials discussed protecting the city’s tree canopy.