Cannon Beach's Fall Runs on Two Saturdays, Not a Season
August 27, 2026
August 27, 2026
Ask someone who lives here how fall works in Cannon Beach and you'll usually get some version of the same answer: it's a slow wind-down from Labor Day to Thanksgiving, dotted with a festival or two. Ask someone who's lived here longer and you'll get a more useful answer. Fall isn't a season you drift through in this town. It's built around two specific Saturdays, and only one of them lets you inside anybody's house.
Everything else on the calendar, from the trick-or-treating downtown to the string lights that start going up by late November, happens in the space those two dates create. Know them and you know when the gallery blocks on Hemlock Street will be genuinely packed, when the museum parking lot fills before nine, and when you get most of downtown back to yourself with no plan required.
The first is September 12, 2026, a single Saturday afternoon that is the Cannon Beach Cottage Tour, the Cannon Beach History Center & Museum's marquee fundraiser and, per a Sunset Magazine designation the museum still points to, the best autumn event in town. The second is the weekend of November 6 through 8, when the Stormy Weather Arts Festival turns the town's gallery district from browsing rooms into event rooms for three straight days.
Both get called weekend events on flyers and calendars. Only one of them actually opens front doors.
| Cottage Tour | Stormy Weather Arts Festival | |
|---|---|---|
| 2026 dates | Sept 11 to 13, but the home tour itself is Sept 12 only | Nov 6 to 8 |
| What happens | One afternoon of self-guided touring inside private homes, bookended by a Friday benefit party and a Sunday art workshop | Three days of gallery receptions, artist demonstrations, a fashion show, and a spotlight concert |
| Where | Midtown, plus a sprinkling of homes on the Presidential Streets this year | The existing gallery blocks downtown and in Midtown, open to the public year-round |
| Access | Ticketed, tiered pricing | Galleries are open to walk into any day, this weekend just layers programming on top |
| Hosted by | Cannon Beach History Center & Museum | The town's gallery community |
The distinction matters more than it sounds. Cottage Tour is the one weekend a year private residences become public. Stormy Weather is a festival happening inside spaces that are already public the other 362 days of the year, just with more artists standing next to their own work.
Despite the "weekend" framing, the home tour part of Cottage Tour is one afternoon: noon to 5 p.m. on Saturday, September 12. Friday and Sunday are separate, ticketed, and don't involve going inside a single house.
Friday, September 11, from 5:30 to 8 p.m., the museum hosts its Opening Night Benefit Bash: live music from the RJ Marx Jazz Trio, food from Rainy Day Boards & Bakery and Cannon Beach Chocolate Café, drinks from The Wine Shack and Pelican Brewing Company, and a silent auction that helps fund the museum's operating budget for the year.
Saturday is the tour itself, routed this year through Cannon Beach's Midtown neighborhood with a handful of homes on the Presidential Streets included. The museum rotates which part of town gets toured from year to year, so a given block might host the crowds this September and sit untouched for several years after.
Sunday, September 13, closes the weekend with a watercolor workshop led by Oregon artist Nora Sherwood, working from historic black-and-white photographs of past tour cottages. Sessions run at 11 a.m. and 1 p.m., capped at 20 participants each.
A few logistics worth having settled before the weekend arrives:
The museum has run this event for more than two decades and alternates which part of Cannon Beach it tours from year to year rather than repeating the same blocks. This year it's Midtown and a portion of the Presidential Streets. Other years it's been different pockets of town entirely.
That rotation is worth knowing if you live somewhere else in Cannon Beach. Your block isn't hosting foot traffic through your yard this September, but that doesn't mean the weekend passes you by. Ticket sales, the Friday party, and the map pickup are all anchored near South Spruce Street and the Hemlock Street gallery block regardless of which neighborhood is being toured, so expect the usual congestion around downtown and the museum even if the actual houses on display are across town.
Stormy Weather Arts Festival, running November 6 through 8 this year, works differently. Cannon Beach's galleries are open to anyone walking in off the street on any given Tuesday. What the festival adds is density: receptions happening the same weekend across most of the town's galleries, artists on hand for demonstrations and talks, plus flagship events like the Stormy Weather Fashion Show and a spotlight concert that don't happen the rest of the year.
Where Cottage Tour is about access you don't normally get, Stormy Weather is about timing. The doors were always open. This is the weekend everyone decides to walk through several of them in the same afternoon.
Count the days from the end of Cottage Tour weekend to the start of Stormy Weather and you get roughly seven and a half weeks, mid-September into early November, with nothing on the calendar built to pull a crowd downtown on a specific date. The one break in that stretch is the Halloween Treat Trail, a low-key route through downtown shops and restaurants on Halloween afternoon, more neighborhood tradition than festival.
That gap is arguably the more useful part of the calendar for anyone who actually lives here. It's the stretch where a dinner out doesn't require planning two weeks ahead, where a walk past Haystack Rock at low tide doesn't mean sharing the beach with a festival crowd, and where the galleries you'd normally have to elbow through during Stormy Weather are just quiet rooms again. Fall in Cannon Beach isn't one long festival season. It's two specific Saturdays with a lot of open calendar around them, and the open calendar is where most of the actual living happens.
If you're weighing whether this town, or one of the others along this stretch of coast, fits how you want your next chapter to look, that's exactly the kind of texture worth talking through before you start looking at listings. Andrea Mace and the Mace Team work and live on this stretch of coast year-round, through the festival weekends and the quiet ones alike, and are always glad to schedule a concierge consultation for anyone starting to think seriously about a move.
More than 30 years later, I’m still here—and the Oregon Coast continues to shape the way I live, work and think about home.
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