Snow Peak, the Japanese company that has been making tents, titanium mugs and fold-flat fire pits since 1958, runs a string of campgrounds back home in Japan. Its first one in the United States sits on Washington’s Long Beach Peninsula, about two and a half hours from our Portland desks, on 25 acres that used to be an RV park.
The first thing it does is take your car away.
You park at the Gatehouse, load your coolers and duffels onto a sturdy cart, and walk in. A boardwalk lifts you over restored wetland, the pavement runs out, and by the time you reach your site the parking lot is out of sight and out of earshot. Josh Clouser, who manages new ventures for Snow Peak, told Cool Hunting the walk in is meant to be “very much a kind of Alice-in-Wonderland tunnel experience.” The writer, Michael Frank, compared it to the approach to a Shinto shrine, where even a tiny one in the middle of Tokyo manages to pull you out of the street the moment you step onto its path.
The land needed the help. Snow Peak spent nearly four years reworking the old RV park, pulling back past damage to the wetlands and planting seven trees for every one it had to take out, according to the Chinook Observer. What’s left is old Sitka spruce and western red cedar around a pond with a small island in it, and on a drizzly morning the whole place smells like wet bark.
Fires that face each other
With the cars gone, the kids take over. Frank found them everywhere, forming instant gangs and inventing games, and he watched them do the introductions for their parents, who became friends a beat later. That’s partly by design. The sites are laid out so that fire pits and grills face your neighbors’, which means you smell their dinner and they smell yours. Trading bites follows.
You can bring your own gear and just rent the ground, or rent the whole Snow Peak kit, tent to sleeping pad to cookware, and treat the weekend as the world’s most relaxed showroom. Either way the rough edges are sanded off. The Wash House has private bathrooms and showers, plus proper sinks for doing the dishes. Honestly, that detail is the one that sold us. Anyone who has scrubbed a pot with a fistful of sand at 9pm knows!
The Campstore is the shared living room: café, gear shop, coffee in the morning and beer and wine later, in a charred-wood building with walls of glass and a long dark roof that catches the last light over the spruce.
Kengo Kuma’s living box
For people who want a roof, there are the Jyubako Suites. Jyubako means roughly “living box,” and the design comes from Kengo Kuma, the architect behind Tokyo’s Olympic stadium, the 2017 expansion of the Portland Japanese Garden and, our personal favorite, a chicken coop. Snow Peak worked with Kuma’s studio to adapt the original Jyubako for the Washington coast.
Each one is about 200 square feet of pale pine and plywood, roughly the size of a small camper, with a queen bed, a futon, a kitchenette with an induction cooktop and a mini fridge, and a private bathroom. They start at $130 a night.
The smart part is how low everything sits. There’s a low table in the main room, and if you sit on the floor beside it, Japanese style, your eyes land right at the top edge of the small glass door to the porch. The cabin keeps nudging you back outside. For a building whose whole job is shelter, that’s a generous thing to do.
A bathhouse facing the alders
Whatever you sleep in, the real draw is the Ofuro. The name just means bath. With no hot spring feeding it, it has more in common with a sento, the Japanese neighborhood bathhouse: a big hot pool kept at 104 degrees, a sauna lined in hinoki cypress, a cold plunge, and a row of showers to rinse off before you get in.
It’s staged like the walk in from the parking lot. You arrive facing a black wood wall hung with pegs for your clothes, and only when you step around it does the room open up, one whole side of it given to a grove of pale green alders at the edge of the pond. The beams overhead lean and branch on purpose, drawn to echo the trees beyond them. Picture a gray Pacific Northwest afternoon, fog sitting in those alders, and you up to your chin in hot water. We could stay a while.
A soak is included with every overnight stay. If you’re just passing through, day passes run $35 for a two-hour session and open up three days ahead.
And then the peninsula
The Campfield made TIME’s list of the World’s Greatest Places in 2024, and the setting does a lot of the work. Long Beach is a long, flat finger of sand between the Pacific and Willapa Bay, the kind of place people go for razor clams, kites and storm watching. Fall brings the cranberry harvest and Willapa Bay oysters. Winter brings the storms, which is when that hot pool earns its keep.
If this has you thinking about wilder ground, we once rounded up nine of the most beautiful places to camp on the planet. Very few of them come with a dish sink.
Snow Peak Campfield is at 5411 Sandridge Road in Long Beach, Washington, and it’s open all year. The Jyubakos book up months out, with a two-night minimum on weekends. Our pick would be a November weeknight, when the storms come in off the Pacific and there’s nowhere better to be than that pool.
Via Cool Hunting. Photos courtesy of Snow Peak Campfield.
