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45500 Wilson River Highway, 866-930-4646, tillamookforestcenter.org. 10 am–5 pm Wednesday–Sunday. Free, $5 donation suggested.
Remember when that kid threw a firecracker down a ravine and set the Columbia River Gorge on fire, burning almost 50,000 acres of wilderness? Harsh tokes. Anyway, that fire was just one-seventh the size of the Tillamook Burn, four blazes sparked by logging equipment between 1933 and 1951 that consumed much of the old-growth forest in the Coast Range. The fire rages again every 30 minutes in the Tillamook Burn Theater, where the Oregon Department of Forestry presents a multisensory documentary on the inferno. As the sound of fire crackles and the cinema’s walls turn red, the room fills with the smell of burning trees (but only faintly; the theater’s machines have run out of artificial smoke scent 18 years after opening). The movie is the centerpiece of the Tillamook Forest Center, a gorgeous facility on the Wilson River, halfway between Portland and the coast, focused on how the timber industry burned down the forest and planted a new one. Every Oregon family that doesn’t want to call the junk hauler starts a roadside “logging museum,” but this site offers real value. Just behind the center and over a suspension bridge, trails lead into the forest that followed the fire. Verdant with enormous ferns, it’s a glimmer of hope for an age of climate disasters. If it’s raining, the museum has loaner umbrellas.
Don’t miss: I’m partial to the display on the beach trains, aka the “Suntan Specials,” that a century ago carried Portlanders over the mountains to the ocean on logging railroad tracks for $3 a head.
Will kids like it? The exhibits are tactile, and the theater still smells a little like it’s on fire. Bring their swimsuits: A quarter-mile upstream at Jones Creek Day Use Area, the Wilson River pools into a deservedly popular swimming hole.