Thousands of kites over the past 45 summers have graced the shores of Long Beach, Wash., flown by enthusiasts from all over the world.
The Washington State International Kite Festival attracts kite enthusiasts the world over to the small town to celebrate the sport they love and to preserve it for future generations.
Thad Walton is one of those enthusiasts. He drove from Utah to the Pacific Northwest, which he called one of the epicenters of kiting in the country. Kite flying has brought Walton personal peace over the years, he said, an opportunity to escape the demands of everyday life and “let all my problems run off the end of the kite line.”
But he’s afraid his passion is dying. Looking around Long Beach, it’s easy to see that kite flyers skew older.
“I’m 60, and I’m old, but I’m the young guy out here on the field,” he said, sitting behind his car to shelter from the win. “If we can’t get this sport into the hands of the youth, it’s gonna die.”
In an attempt to keep his passion alive, wherever Walton travels for festivals — Washington, Michigan or Italy, to name a few — he brings dozens of extra kites to give away to children for free.
The passion he and others feel was on full display on the beach last weekend. Large dragons, tigers and other creatures filled the skies. During mass ascensions, hundreds tossed their kites in the air at once, the powerful coastal winds howling above.
The Washington State International Kite Festival has grown to be one of the most popular events for kiting, purporting to be the largest of its kind in North America.
Harry Osborne, one of the founders, started the event in 1981 to break the world record for keeping a kite continuously in the air, at 169 hours.
In the first year, only a few kiters attended. But from the beginning, the founders knew the festival could grow into a premier event. Osborne thought the Long Beach event could become “the Super Bowl of kite festivals,” according to a Chinook Observer article from the time.
Indeed, the entire Pacific Northwest has become something of a kiting hotbed. Today, Long Beach is home to the World Kite Museum.
Some people at the festival this year have seen that growth firsthand. Eric Forsberg has attended every festival in Long Beach since 1982, and serves on the kite museum’s board of directors.
The festival was a boon for a city lacking an economic identity after the decline of the local fishing industry. Forsberg said the popularity has exploded in recent years.
“When we first started, all the sound system was on a flatbed truck out on the approach,” Forsberg said. “Now, we have a big sound system that goes up on poles.”
He now owns several hundred kites, which have consumed an entire corner in his garage. He made many of them himself.
“There’s some I don’t want to fly anymore,” he said. “They pull too hard, and I’d be dragged down the beach.”
Kite flying, of course, is at the mercy of wind conditions. On Aug. 22, it actually became too windy for many kites, as powerful gusts pummeled the Southwest Washington coast. Many flyers took cover in the cars they had driven onto the beach.
Mike Sterling sought shelter in his forest green 1969 Volkswagen microbus. The Portland resident first became a kite fanatic while working in a sports department store, where he was put in charge of kites.
Now, he travels to festivals across the region and enters his handmade kites into competitions. He proudly showed off a red, second-place ribbon as it dangled from his rearview mirror.
“Kite flying, it won’t change your life — it will give you a brand new one,” Sterling said. “It’s like flying your own airplane.
