Calaveras County Fair & Jumping Frog Jubilee

The jubilee begins in town. At 10 a.m. on Thursday, May 14, 2026, the youth parade came down through Angels Camp. It had frogs, Smokey Bear, marching bands, dance schools, and a Tom and Becky from Hannibal, Missouri. Soroptimist International of Calaveras County puts it on. The first day is Kids Day, and in 2026 children 12 and under got in free all day. The year’s slogan, “Let Frogs Sing & Freedom Ring,” was picked by the fair board from more than 180 entries, some of them from local students.

From the parade the crowd goes out to the county fairgrounds at 2465 Gun Club Road, outside town, which everyone calls Frogtown. The fair runs four days, Thursday through Sunday, under the 39th District Agricultural Association, with Laurie Giannini as manager. The organizers describe it as being “in the spirit of the old movie classic ‘State Fair,’” with entertainment, exhibits, livestock, arena events, food, and the Frog Jump. They put attendance at over 40,000.

Four days at Frogtown

The 2026 fair was dedicated to the Renaldo “Aldie” and Paula Broglio family for their generations of service to agriculture, youth, and the county. On opening night Winter Adkins was crowned Miss Calaveras in the fair’s scholarship pageant. Payton Kelling-Ballard was first runner-up and Scarlett Pinkston second. Pam Tillis played the Frogtown Stage on May 15, and Marty Davis and Legends of the Pioneers brought back their Americana show.

Saturday, May 16, had an Armwrestling Grand Prix at noon, held for the nation’s 250th anniversary, with local first responders competing as special guests. At 7:30 that evening the CCPRA rodeo filled the Historic Frogtown Arena. Rockin M Rodeo Co. produced it, the California Cowgirls Drill Team rode, and it came with fair admission. Sunday ends the fair: the frog finals in the afternoon, then a Destruction Derby in the evening. The next fair is set for May 13–16, 2027.

The pad, the jockey, and the Frog Spa

Frog jumping starts on Thursday too. Anyone can jump a frog for fun on Rosie the Ribeter’s Stage, or on the main stage to try to qualify. Qualifying runs through Friday, Saturday, and Sunday morning. The 50 best jumps of the four days go to the International Frog Jump Grand Finals on Sunday afternoon.

A 2017 account in the Morgan Hill Times describes how it works. The frog is set on an 8-inch pad and makes three jumps in a row. Its jockey drives it forward by whatever method works: one champion blows on his frog, while others clap hard behind theirs. The measurement is taken from the pad to where the third jump lands. Between rounds, serious competitors keep their frogs in water in a controlled box. Each champion gets a brass plaque set into the Frog Hop of Fame in downtown Angels Camp, engraved with the jockey’s name, the frog’s name, the year, and the three-jump distance. In 2017 the winner also took home $900 and a trophy.

Rosie the Ribeter set the world record in 1986 with 21 feet 5¾ inches. Anyone who breaks it wins $20,000. “If a frog breaks the world record, in the finals, they will win $20,000,” Giannini told myMotherLode.com in 2023.

During the fair the jumping frogs live in the Frog Spa, which is open for tours every day. The California Fish and Game Commission began regulating the contest in 1933 to protect the California bullfrog. In 1995 the 39th District board adopted a Frog Welfare Policy. Professional frog teams come from all over the state, and past champions camp at the fairgrounds’ Frog Pond. The fair suggests that first-time jumpers ask one of the teams for tips. A volunteer committee meets monthly through the year to plan the contest.

The Fasanos of Gustine

By 2017 the Fasano family of Morgan Hill had been doing the same thing every May for 60 years. They go to a spot in the San Joaquin Valley that they keep secret and catch about 300 California bullfrogs. Then they take them home to train and test. The tradition began with the family patriarchs Gene Fasano and Frank Borrelli, and the family competes as the Gustine Frog Jumping Team. “We’re looking for frogs that when we jockey them they are going straight out,” Bob Fasano said. “We are looking for frogs that are big athletes, jump strong and go straight.”

The family’s record goes back decades. In 1979 Frank Fasano became the youngest champion up to that time and was entered in the Guinness Book of World Records. Gene Fasano won in 1988. Bob Fasano won his second title in 2004 with Red Bull, at 20 feet 2½ inches.

After that the family went 12 years without a win. In 2017 they brought their best 80 frogs to the fair. Bob’s 19-year-old son Justin qualified a frog named Kermit with an 18-foot-9-inch trial jump, then skipped the second day of trials to keep the frog fresh. Finals start from zero. Justin watched 45 jockeys go before him, and the best mark when his turn came was 18 feet 2 inches. Kermit went 18 feet 4.

“It’s all about preparation, being ready by the time you pull it out of the box and jump it,” Justin said. The team took five of the eight places that year. Lisa Fasano was second with Spare The Air Frogger, Bob third with Green Flash, Joseph Fasano fifth with Jumpin Johosafats, and Lillian Fasano seventh with 5 Froggy’s. “Winning it is like hitting a hole-in-one,” Bob said. After every contest, he said, “We always return the top frogs to the same spots.”

Other teams have built their own runs. In 2011 Kevin Daly, captain of the Bozos, won the International Frog Jump for his team for the fifth year in a row. His frog, It’s Cheaper to Leaper, went 20 feet 4 inches, Daly’s personal best. The 2025 title went to Riley Kitchell, a local. In 2026 the winner was 88-year-old Lillian Fasano, who had also won in 2024, at 86, with a frog called The Frog Father. Her 2026 frog, Fuzzy, went 19 feet 2¼ inches.

Main Street paved, 1928

The fair is older than the frogs. The organizers date it to 1893, when it was held in Copperopolis, before it found a permanent home outside Angels Camp. The 2023 fair’s theme marked the anniversary: “Frog Cheers for 130 years.”

The Jumping Frog Jubilee came later. The Angels Camp Boosters created it in 1928 to celebrate the paving of Main Street. According to the Calaveras Heritage Council, more than 15,000 people came to watch a parade honoring the area’s Gold Rush heritage and a frog-jumping contest.

Sources disagree on when the jubilee joined the fair. The fair’s history page says the two events merged in 1937. Its frog-jump page says only that the jump became part of the fair in the 1930s. The Heritage Council and the Calaveras Enterprise both say they combined ten years after 1928, at the fairgrounds, and have been held there every May since.

A rained-in winter at the Angels Hotel

The contest is modeled on a story. As the Heritage Council and the Enterprise tell it, on January 25, 1865, Samuel Clemens walked from the Jackass Hill cabin he shared with pocket miner Jim Gillis, in Tuolumne County, over to Angels Camp. Rain kept him there nearly two weeks. To pass the time, people traded tall tales at the bar of the Angels Hotel, and Clemens wrote them down. One was about a frog named Dan’l Webster that could outjump any other frog. On November 18 of that year the New York Saturday Press printed it as “Jim Smiley and His Jumping Frog.” Later reprints called it “The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County,” and the Heritage Council credits it with launching his career.

The state Office of Historic Preservation lists the Angels Hotel as the place where Clemens first heard the yarn. It stands at the northeast corner of Main Street and Bird Way. C. C. Lake put up a canvas hotel there in 1851. A one-story wooden building replaced it, then a stone one in 1855, and a second story was added in 1857.

The Elk Grove Historical Society gives a different account. It says Clemens spent 88 days in Calaveras, and that the frog contest had happened that same summer and was told to him by Ross Coon, whom one passage calls the hotel’s bartender and another its proprietor. In this version two city slickers from New York teased Jim Smiley about his frog until he took their bet. Smiley went off to catch them a frog, and while he was gone they crossed to Scribner’s store, bought buckshot, and filled Daniel Webster with it. The frog would not move, and the slickers took the money and left town. In 1945, the society adds, a film company making a picture about Twain’s life, starring Fredric March, gave Angels Camp a statue of him, which was placed in Utica Park.

Edna Bryan Buckbee’s Calaveras County Gold Rush Stories, quoted in the Enterprise, makes Smiley a gold washer from Calaveritas. In her telling, a New York Bowery boy named Pete Stag loaded the frog with buckshot while Smiley was up at the town pump, helping Johnny Ludrun fish out one of the frogs that lived there. Lieutenant Benjamin Ross Coon of the Angels Camp Home Guards, who was visiting San Andreas that morning, was later openly accused of supplying both the idea and the buckshot. Sam Seabough of the Independent heard about the scheme and hurried out of the newspaper office to join the crowd, Victor Gottschalk among them. Years later, at his home in San Andreas, Judge Gottschalk described the frog in front of Knickerbocker Hall, flopping over and dying instead of jumping, held down by “buckshot that anchored the amphibian to the hardpacked dirt of Main Street.”