Transit Trip: Ridgefield, Washington, via C-TRAN’s Current

I didn’t plan to walk two miles to get to downtown Ridgefield. Not in my rain boots, certainly. But I’d made a rookie mistake with the Current, C-TRAN’s on-demand rideshare service available in certain areas with no scheduled bus service, and not booked my trip the day before. While the Current website and app promise that some aspects are “just like other rideshare services,” that doesn’t necessarily apply to the availability. There was nothing for at least two hours.

In my defense, I didn’t want to book a ride in advance and then have to cancel, and I hadn’t been sure exactly what time I would wake up, which combo of buses and MAX trains I would take to get to the 99th Street Transit Center on the north side of Vancouver, and which C-TRAN 48 I would catch to get me all the way to greater Ridgefield. That bus runs only every two hours, and its schedule, with an out-of-the-way stop a few miles north at Ilani casino, is designed for commuters coming to Portland, not a Portland flaneur looking to wander around this small town for the day. There’s an express bus from downtown Portland that goes to the 99th Street Transit Center, but its arrival times don’t always line up well with the 48. So I took the Yellow MAX to Delta Park, hopped a C-TRAN 60 (the sad route that’s just a reminder that the Yellow Line still doesn’t continue over the Columbia), and then had my choice of a few different frequent-service buses to get me up to 99th and onto the 48.

After the 48’s Ilani detour, the bus turned around at Ridgefield’s Junction Park and Ride (next to a mostly empty expanse that’s the future home of Clark College’s Boschma Farms satellite campus, which promises to bring “advanced manufacturing education” to northern Clark County) and took me past the biggest thing to hit the town in 2024: Costco. The megastore opened in August and is still surrounded by construction zones and orange project fencing. It’s soon to be joined by Washington’s first In-N-Out Burger (and a traffic snarl sure to rival the 2001 opening of the state first Krispy Kreme, up in Issaquah). It’s no surprise Pioneer Street is being widened.

The bus stop closest to downtown is not by Costco but by the terribly exotic (to me, anyway) Rosauers. The Spokane-based chain is common on the other side of the state and in Idaho and Montana, but this was the first Western Washington store when it opened in 2019. (It’s since acquired some sort-of neighbors, in Yakima and Hood River.) I debate whether I could kill the two hours waiting for the Current in the grocery. There’s a café, some good-looking supermarket sushi, and some very cute Sasquatch cookies in the bakery case—and I appreciate on a metaphorical level that books and bread share an aisle. But I didn’t come to a town founded right after the Civil War (initially called Union Ridge) to hang out in a five-year-old grocery store, so I set off on foot and walk the two miles down busy (and often sidewalkless) Pioneer Street to the historic downtown.

Ridgefield might top the list of Washington state’s fastest-growing cities year after year—it’s nearly doubled in population in the past decade—but the growth is far from the intersection of Pioneer and Main. The booming construction is closer to I-5, centered on schools (Ridgefield High: Home of the Spudders!) and sports complexes and work centers and shopping centers like the one Rosauers anchors.

Sitting in Seasons Coffee, two miles later, I’m definitely in a small town. Nearly everyone is greeted by name. There are friends catching up with each other before they head off to work or yoga or Costco and customers who seem to be having business meetings in the space, the front of a theater that opened in 1946 and has closed and reopened a few times since. It’s a dependable spot to get a Danish and a cup of Pull coffee from nearby Yacolt (the company claims to have the oldest roaster in the world—a piece of equipment, that is, not a person), a very satisfying sausage, egg, and cheese biscuit sandwich, a mango smoothie, an ice cream cone, or a recommendation for a local handyman or housesitter.

Across Main Avenue, the Collective sells local artists’ work, plus “Support Live Music” and Sasquatch T-shirts, board games, cosmetics and hair accessories, and fun jewelry and key chains. Ridgefield Hardware carries the usual garden gear, plumbing needs, etc., but also makes a surprisingly good gift shop. The store was home to one of Ridgefield’s most celebrated residents: Otis, a Boston terrier who was once put forward as a candidate for city manager. The job eventually went to a human, but are there murals and stickers and cards dedicated to that person around town, like there are for the late Otis? Certainly not. He might be Ridgefield’s most famous former resident besides the couple who founded U-Haul here in 1945. (The trailer giant is now headquartered in Phoenix.)

Up the street from the hardware store, the Ridgefield branch of Fort Vancouver Regional Libraries doubles as a community center and meeting space. The restaurant next to it also has multiple identities, all delicious: At lunchtime, it’s Little Conejo Norte, an outpost of downtown Vancouver’s creative taco shop. After 3, it morphs into Bunnie’s, where some of the pizzas come with a drizzle of Mike’s Hot Honey and the sandwiches include a muffuletta-inspired Italian panino.

I return to Pioneer Street and follow its new overpass extension down to the waterfront along Lake River, a tributary of the Columbia. When an Amtrak Cascades train whooshes by, I can see why the $15 million span over the tracks is a literal lifesaver. There are floating homes, a marina, a seasonal outpost of Portland’s Alder Creek that rents kayaks and stand-up paddleboards in warmer weather, and a walking path that’s so new some of its interpretive signs are still blank. There are plans for a beach and an event space, though the details are still coming together (and, locals say, seem to always still be coming together), and the north end abuts the expansive Ridgefield National Wildlife Refuge, which I add to my list to come back and explore with a car or bike. One of the fresh signs along the walking path links the creation of west coast wildlife refuges to the Great Alaska Earthquake of 1964, which drained nesting sites for Canada geese and added to habitat loss.

Since I’m near the Columbia River, there’s the obligatory Lewis and Clark info hut. Other interpretive signs share tales of the old lumber mill, a terrible fire, dangerous pollution, and ongoing cleanup and renewal—a couple of the panels mention plucky local high school students who, say, bravely wielded a firehose or investigated some dead plants and discovered major environmental contamination. Between the Hardy Boys/Nancy Drew aura, the “Swans Resting” trail-closure sign that reminds me of the pre-Buffy Sarah Michelle Gellar soap Swans Crossing, and the ballooning numbers of families with kids, I decide Ridgefield would make a good setting for a CW teen drama.

Downtown, the teens could hang out at the small food cart pod (sushi, tacos, and pasta options, with a covered seating area), hit the Pioneer St. Game Park (a tiny lot with a little free library holding Scrabble, Boggle, Chutes and Ladders, Ticket to Ride, and other games), and maybe try to sneak into the cocktail lounge about to open in an old church built in 1884. Called the Neighborhood Refuge, it’s guarded by a dramatic owl in a stained-glass window, its interior stocked with leather couches and old yearbooks from across the region, Ridgefield to Roseburg, Banks to Beaverton. The opening date is still TBA. Just down the block, Main Avenue ends at another neighborhood refuge, a woodsy overlook with a bench for deep thoughts.

The new bar will join a few other places to raise a glass in downtown Ridgefield. At Sportsman’s Public House, the scene is down-home but the menu skews a little fancy, with marsala mushrooms, truffle fries, and a smoked-salmon crostini to go with your Leinenkugel’s Shandy or Belching Beaver Peanut Butter Stout. The beer selection isn’t as large but is more local at Zebrun’s Starliner, a daytime pub (it’s only open 11 to 6) attached to a grocery that feels a bit like a store you stop at on the way to a cabin: curated beer and wine, pantry essentials, Dippin’ Dots, work gloves, brooms, and Hot Wheels.

I was hoping to try more beer at Ridgefield Craft Brewing after enjoying its fresh-hop IPA with my lunch at Little Conejo Norte, but it doesn’t open until 4, and a friend I meet for coffee at Seasons at 3 offers me a ride back to the bus stop instead of walking two miles again, this time in the rain (and, if I wait much longer, in the dark). Throughout the day I’ve been trying to book a ride back to the C-TRAN stop on the Current, which runs until 7pm, but I kept striking out both in the app and, after a while on hold, with a customer-service rep on the phone. So I take the ride and leave a little earlier than planned. Before I board my 48, I check out more of the new complex around Rosauers, since not much had been open when I passed through in the morning. Copper Bell Bookshop is far cozier than I’d expect from the strip-mall setting. At restaurant and bar BevRidge Public, portraits of the Dude and Ron Burgundy on the walls help establish a convivial, laid-back vibe. Across the way, Taps Beer Reserve has a more limited menu but, as advertised, loads of suds choices.

On my next trip to Ridgefield one afternoon a couple of weeks later, I book my Current legs two days in advance, and it’s easy as pie. When my ride appears in front of Rosauers (right on time, though users are told to be ready five minutes early and also be prepared for the driver to come 10 minutes late), it’s not a private car as with Lyft or Uber but a fully branded Ford minibus with a Hop card reader ready to deduct the $1.25 fare. “Store, clinic, coffee shop, anywhere,” the driver lists when I ask where Current users in Ridgefield are usually going. Besides here and nearby La Center, C-TRAN offers the service, launched in 2022, around Salmon Creek, in Camas and Washougal, in the Rose Village area of Vancouver by the VA Medical Center, and between downtown Vancouver and the port area just to the west, which includes the Amtrak station.

I’d scheduled the Current to pick me up at 6:05 in front of Ridgefield Craft Brewing so I’d be at the 48 stop with plenty of time to spare before it came at 6:37. But I’d dallied for so long at Zebrun’s Starliner, where the grandson of the market’s founders poured me a beer and talked about how Ridgefield has changed from a rural live-work place to a bedroom community, and at Bunnie’s, where I couldn’t decide between a pizza or a sandwich and eventually got both, that I didn’t have time to actually go in. With Current service ending at 7pm, Ridgefield’s after-dark attractions aren’t too accessible to a humble transit rider who needs to take the Current to a bus to another bus to another bus to a MAX train to another bus to get back home. So my next trip there might be (gulp) in a car, but that way it could include a spin around the wildlife refuge, at least. I’ll just have to dodge the traffic around Washington’s first In-N-Out Burger.