4th of July Parade

The chairs go out the night before. Ahead of the parade on Saturday, July 4, 2026, the Rotary Club of Idyllwild noted that many spectators set theirs along North Circle Drive on Friday night. The club called the custom “our small town respect for people & property.” By 9 a.m. the street and every cross street along it are closed to cars, and there is no parking on North Circle that morning. The club told visitors that the stretch between the Fern Valley corners and Oakwood offers better seating and fewer people.

Idyllwild is an unincorporated community in the San Jacinto Mountains of Riverside County. It sits about a mile up, mostly in a high valley cut by Strawberry Creek. The Rotarians put on the parade, and by their count the 2026 parade was the 60th annual. It also marked the 250th anniversary of the United States.

Down North Circle Drive

The club’s parade page gives the route as starting at Four Corners in Fern Valley, running down North Circle Drive, and finishing at Idyllwild Park. Its notice for 2026 adds detail. The parade steps off promptly at 10 a.m. at North Circle and Pine Crest, led by the American Legion Post 800 Honor Guard. It travels down to Idyllwild Park, then turns left toward Idyllwild Brewery. Four staging areas feed the line into the route where Upper Pine Crest meets North and South Circle Drives. Idyllwild Fire and Cal Fire trucks wait in staging, blocking Fern Valley Road at South Circle. The course is about a mile, and each entry takes 45 to 60 minutes to cover it. The club’s notice put the end at about 11:30. Its parade page says noon. One vacation-rental guide, Experience Idyllwild, gives a different route in its questions section: from Pine Cove Road down North Circle to Highway 243, then on to the Idyllwild Community Center.

More than 40 entries marched in 2026. There were floats built by local organizations and businesses, and marching bands. The Fire Department, the Sheriff’s Department, and Mountain Rescue marched as well. The grand marshal was Marsha Kennedy of Mountain Disaster Preparedness. The club named her its president in some notices and its director of outreach in another, and called her “always community first.” Announcers stationed along the route read a short narrative for each entry at least three times. Entrants write these themselves, in 40 words or less. Candy is handed out, never thrown: walkers carry it to the curb and put it in a hand, because children run into the street. Horses must be “parade experienced,” and every equestrian unit has a person on “Poop Patrol” behind it. July on the route can reach the high 80s. When the National Anthem is played or sung, the club asks spectators to stand and remove their hats.

Experience Idyllwild names three places to watch. At the top, Fern Valley Corners has the Fern Valley Emporium and the Funky Bazaar parking lot. Midway along upper North Circle, the Rustic Theatre has occasionally set out reserved patio seating. At the bottom, chairs go up near Idyllwild Park, close to the village shops.

Fireworks are banned on the mountain to protect the forest. For 2026, the same guide listed a Heroes and Hounds Silent Celebration at McCall Memorial Park from 4 to 10 p.m., with light displays and no booms. From 3 p.m. the American Legion Post 800 served deep-pit barbecue at $25 a plate, with local bands into the evening. A two-day blues festival played the Rustic Theatre’s back lot on July 4 and 5. The Town Crier was already calling the Legion’s deep-pit barbecue a tradition in 2011.

“Holy Cow Let’s March!”

The first parade was in 1966. The flier sent home with summer-school children a few days before was headed “Holy Cow Let’s March!” Mickey Regal reported this in his column in the July 8, 1966, Town Crier. The paper’s July 1 edition ran a photograph of four youngsters and one pet lining up: Shelly Smith, Teri Leih, Bobby Leih, and Jerry Smith. The caption said the parade would start Monday morning at 10 o’clock.

About a few dozen children and parents came that morning. They waved flags, walked dogs, and rode horses, bikes, and trikes along a short route. “There were a few girl scouts, a few cub scouts, three or four boys with decorated bicycles, a girl, Patty Jones, dressed as Uncle Sam,” Regal wrote. Some families pulled caged rabbits on carts, and others drove pony carts with small horses. According to Regal, County Service Area 36 sponsored the parade, and Town Hall director Dolores Bergman started it. Bergman and her husband, Les, brought their five children, a baby burro, a hen, and a poodle. Regal closed his column this way: “I hope the character of this first parade will prevail, that over-organization will never replace the spontaneous and fresh. It was such a glorious first.”

For the first few years the town kept the parade small, with fire engines and a tiny marching band. The Town Crier’s account of the third annual parade, published July 5, 1968, said the early parades started at the Fern Valley Corners. They went down Circle Drive, around Eleanor Park, and back to the Town Hall Park. The paper’s cover photograph that week showed Julie, Wendy, and young Mike Coulter holding flags and firecrackers. Afterward came sack races, potato races, and watermelon-eating contests. Old-fashioned freezers held enough ice cream for the 100-plus people who attended. A bake sale raised money for local charities, and the Jaycees held a family-style barbecue.

A microphone, a fire, and a dog mayor

Janice Fast owned The Ponderosa pet supply store on North Circle Drive for three decades. She recalled that organizers added a microphone to tell spectators about the parade about fifteen years before 2011. In the 1990s, Janet Reno’s agents asked to use her store so that Reno could watch the parade from it. “She really loved the parade,” Fast said.

In July 1996 the Bee Canyon Fire forced evacuations affecting between 5,000 and 12,000 people. It was not fully contained until late on July 4. The parade went on that year, with firefighters and fire trucks riding down the street ahead of it. Volunteer Warren Monroe recalled locals on a shop roof in town waving a large American flag to salute them. “The town just came together and we had a potluck with tables made of saw horses and plywood,” he said.

By 2011 Pat Parish, a Rotary member and one of the organizers, counted about 1,000 people marching. The parade took more than an hour and a half, and spectators numbered in the thousands. “I remember years ago when we came to the parade it was over in 30 minutes,” she said. The year before, the 45th annual parade had 70 contingents, fewer than the usual 85 to 100, which she put down to the down economy. Car clubs came from across Southern California, their cars decorated in red, white, and blue. Donations had brought in the University of California’s bagpipe band. “We’re never quite sure what we will have from year to year, so it’s a surprise,” Parish said.

Pat and her husband, Bob, had met in the Peace Corps in Ethiopia. They chaired the parade for ten years. In 2012 they rode in it as grand marshals among 57 entrants, Pat then struggling with cancer. The year before, her voice and offhand remarks had held the crowd near the midpoint at the Community Presbyterian Church. They shared the honors that year with Idyllwild’s first mayor. The town has no local government, and the winning candidate was Max, a golden retriever, elected in a fundraiser for Idyllwild Animal Rescue Friends. The mayor’s own website keeps photographs of him in the July 4th parade. That summer the Idyllwild Area Historical Society honored Nanci and Ben Killingsworth for their work on its home tours and newsletter. The couple rode in member Paul Leverenz’s 1949 Mercury wagon.

In 2023 the grand marshal was Dr. Marshall Hawkins, a jazz bassist and co-founder of Jazz in the Pines. The Euphoria Brass Band followed his car, and the University of California Riverside Bagpipes Band returned.

A boy in a red wagon

Bob Parish told another story about the start. Writer Wendy Watts recorded it in the Town Crier in 2015. In the early 1960s, he said, the idea began with a “little boy in a Radio Flyer Wagon with an American flag being led by his parents.” Watts went looking for the boy. Bob Smith of the historical society had no photograph. Shopkeeper Bud Hunt remembered no first parade, only townspeople saying, “It starts at 10. Let’s all get up and get in the parade.”

Jackie Kretsinger, who came up in 1963, gave Watts a lead. “I remember Eleanor used to drag Steve and Jay along in a red wagon as she was working,” she said. The Johnsons’ first home stood on North Circle Drive, on today’s parade route. Jay Johnson laughed and said, “I think it was my brother, Steve.” Steve said he had been 5 in 1963. Watts did not claim to be certain. Steve did remember the “Mickey Bikes,” motor-styled bikes his grandmother bought for him, his brother, and their cousins. “We would take crepe paper and decorate them and then we almost got ticketed by CHP for driving them down the route,” he said.