Above the Columbia: A New Cultural Destination in the Gorge
Above the Columbia:
The Vision Taking Shape at The Hilltop
There is a place in central Washington where the land falls away to the river and the sky goes on without interruption. The high desert keeps its own quiet — basalt warmed by the sun, sagebrush bending in the wind, the Columbia a thread of blue far below. Stand here a while and the idea starts to make sense: ground like this is owed something lasting.
That something is The Hilltop.
A New Kind of Cultural Destination
The Hilltop is a nonprofit cultural destination rising above the Columbia, just outside Quincy, Washington. The easy way to describe it is by what it gathers — arts, science, environment, and the human experience, brought together to spark curiosity, creativity, and connection. The harder thing to convey is that it isn’t a venue, or a festival, or a single season. It’s a long view: a permanent home for the kind of experience this landscape has always seemed to promise and never quite had. Most cultural destinations pick a lane — a concert hall, a science center, a stretch of protected land. The Hilltop was imagined the other way around.
A performance, a conversation about the rock underfoot, a walk along the basalt rim — here, those aren’t separate outings. They’re the same afternoon.
Why Here?
Washington is the only state that holds both a high desert and a rainforest. Most people know the green, wet half. The Hilltop belongs to the other one — a country of basalt and lichen, sage and unbroken sky, carved over millions of years by the river still running below it. It rewards being in it far more than looking at pictures of it.
It helps that it’s reachable. The Hilltop sits a short drive from the Gorge Amphitheatre, in the middle of central Washington’s wine country, a few hours from Seattle, Spokane, and the Tri-Cities — remote enough to feel like an escape, close enough to actually go.
The Long Game
What’s coming will arrive in chapters. Two performance venues, set into the slope so the stage looks out over the gorge, are in design now. Educational programs will put geology, ecology, and the arts in the same room. Community gatherings will be open to every age.
None of it is built for a single night under the marquee, and all of it is built to outlast us — the venues will take their time, the way good ground tends to insist.
GUIDED BY FOUR WAYPOINTS
Four Ways of Seeing One Place
Four ideas keep the whole thing oriented: Arts, Science, Environment, and the Human Experience. We call them the Waypoints. They aren’t four attractions standing in a row — they’re four ways of seeing one place, and every program is meant to draw on all of them at once. They’re worth their own telling, which we give them next door.
None of it is built for a single night under the marquee, and all of it is built to outlast us — the venues will take their time, the way good ground tends to insist.
ARTS
Music, performance, and craft staged where the gorge becomes the backdrop.
SCIENCE
Geology and ecology read straight from the basalt underfoot and the river below.
ENVIRONMENT
The high desert itself — sage, lichen, and sky — as the work to be protected.
HUMAN EXPERIENCE
Gathering, curiosity, and connection — the reasons people climb a hill at all.
THE FIRST CELEBRATION
SOAR Festival 2026
You don’t have to wait for the buildings to feel any of this. The first public invitation is SOAR Festival 2026 — one evening above the river, the opening chapter, not the whole book.
WHEN: August 22, 2026
WHERE: Cave B Estate Winery · Quincy, WA
16 Time Grammy Winner
Vocalist & Broadway performer
with special appearances by broadway performer Mari Nelson and Alexandar Kilian of Jesus Christ Superstar
THIS IS JUST THE BEGINNING
The venues, the programs, the seasons of gatherings still ahead — they all begin here, on this hilltop above the river.
Come along while it’s still taking shape. The early part is the best part to have seen.