Culver Crawdad Festival

At ten in the morning on a Saturday in mid-August, a parade starts down the main drag of Culver, in Jefferson County. Brooke Snavely of Central Oregon Daily, covering the 2023 festival, found a marching band, fire trucks and floats decked out in crawdad themes, and judged that half the town marched while the other half watched. Candy goes over the side to the children along the curb. At the 2025 parade, which Miss NPRA 2025, Regan, rode on a Palomino horse, Marilyn Clark of the Madras Pioneer reported that almost every entry tossed handfuls of it, “perhaps more candy than they get on Halloween.” The rain had stopped and the skies cleared just in time that morning.

The parade ends at Culver Veteran’s Memorial Park, a block off the route, where the festival runs until four in the afternoon. Admission is free. The town around it lies in a valley with Haystack Reservoir and the Crooked River National Grasslands to the east, Lake Billy Chinook and the Cove Palisades State Park to the west, Juniper Butte to the south and Round Butte to the north. A billboard at the edge of town reads “Culver is Oregon.” The city’s own website puts the population at fewer than one thousand. Snavely gave it as 1,700.

The boil

The crawdads come from Lake Billy Chinook, where they are harvested commercially. “Even way back in the eighties, that’s where they got all the crawdads. And we still get the crawdads from Lake Billy Chinook today,” Cindy Dix of the Culver Park Committee told Central Oregon Daily at the 2026 festival.

The boil is served at midday and sold by the pound. In 2025 Red Beard BBQ cooked it for the first time, filling plates with crawdads, potatoes, corn on the cob, a roll, shrimp and sausage. Owner Zach Mewes said he added the sausage to capture the flavor of Cajun crawdad boils. He sold 118 pounds of the full-pound meals and 203 pounds of the half-pound size, close to selling out. Young Jackson Stem, whose family has come over from Crooked River Ranch for several years, found it a bit spicy. His father, Ryan, liked the heat.

The 2023 menu ran to crawdad Louise salad, Cajun crawdad rolls, and smoked chicken and crawdad gumbo. Paul Phillips of Scappoose, who keeps a vacation home in nearby Three Rivers, described the taste as somewhere between lobster and crab. “They are good, but they are a lot of work to eat,” he said. “It would be nice to have a nutcracker to crack the claws, but they are good.”

Booths, a book walk and two crawdads on foot

For those who pass on crawdads, the 2025 festival had nine other food trucks and a beer garden. Forty-seven vendors set up that year, many selling hand-crafted goods, and in 2026 the count passed fifty. Culver High School graduates have used the day to hold class reunions.

Children get free face painting, a balloon artist and the park’s splash pad. In 2023 there was a piñata to smash and a book walk laid out by the Jefferson County Library. “We’re asking kids to read the story signs along the way and then we’ve got some goodies for them,” said Jane Ellen Innes, the library director. “I did not know that crawdads are in the mud all the time. But I know that now because I just read it.” A father and son walked the grounds in crawdad costumes, posing for pictures. “It’s a big hit. Everybody’s like ‘Hey, the crawdads!’” said Noah Kaiser of Culver. “We just got done with the parade throwing out a bunch of candy.”

Live music plays from the park stage through the afternoon. The 2026 bill paired Thomas T & the Blue Chips with Olivia Harms.

The raffle is put together from gift cards donated by central Oregon businesses. In 2023 it ran under the name “play where the crawdads stay,” with free use of party barges and pontoon boats on Lake Billy Chinook as prizes and the money going toward a skate park in Culver. In 2025 the six packages raised $820, half for the next year’s community events such as the festival and the Christmas parade, half for the Culver Park expansion. Denise Woods took package number six, which held two flight-line tickets to the Airshow of the Cascades. The festival is run by the city’s Crawdad Festival Committee, whose members are listed as Patti Carpenter, Crystal Ough, Rebecca Mock and Kristi Saulsbury. Dix, called a committee member in the 2025 report, gave the reason for the day in 2026: “We’re all so busy that unless we have a day like today it’s hard to connect with our neighbors and friends, so we all just share a wonderful, fun day together.”

Crawdads shipped to Europe

Jess Smith spent a few years making his living fishing crawdads in Lake Billy Chinook. “After three or four years of shipping the crawdads to Europe for their festivals, I decided I was going to do this,” he told the Madras Pioneer in 2022. He could not fix the year: “Around 1988 or ‘89, I can’t remember.” He held the boil on his farm south of town as a private gathering for family and friends, and he set the date between deer and elk season so it would not cut into his hunting.

“I started the crawdad fest with Bill and Bertie and Heather and Rich Holbert,” Smith said in 2023. “It was my idea and my place but without all those other people it would have never come together. It just got bigger and bigger.” It began with about 50 people and drew more than a thousand by the early 1990s. Smith kept it going until 2002.

The city takes the pot

In 2010 the City of Culver took over the festival in honor of the town’s centennial. The pandemic stopped it for two years, and it came back to City Park on Saturday, August 20, 2022. That year, instead of recruiting volunteers for the boil, the city handed the cooking to food truck owner Mariah Larson, “because I love food and I love sharing food.” She worked out a traditional creole recipe in her home kitchen. The shopping list called for 1,000 pounds of Lake Billy Chinook crawdads, 600 pounds of shrimp, 400 pounds of sausage, 250 ears of corn, and 200 pounds each of potatoes and onions. Her father, Shane Ford, served as chief cook and warned that the spice mix “is going to have quite a kick.” They put out 800 plates at $32 each: a pound of crawdads, half a pound of shrimp, sausage, potatoes, corn, cornbread and a drink. The city brought in food trucks that year for the first time, along with bingo, a bouncy house, piñatas and a dunk tank, and the day closed with a five o’clock concert by Matt Borden and the MFB.

Smith now sits back and eats. “I’m glad the new people are running it,” he said in 2022. A year later, watching the crowd, he said: “I’m just amazed how many people come to these things. Social functions for towns. You know, the big cities you can’t do that but a town like Culver, yeah, we can shut the town down.”