Custer County Fair

In the animal barns at the Custer County Fairgrounds in Mackay, the 4-H and FFA members who raised the stock hang displays of their own making above each pen. Some put up hardware from earlier fair wins. Others post stories about how an animal got its name. There are ribbons, banners, flags and streamers, and most pens carry a poster giving the animal’s average daily gain. At the 2025 fair, Shelley Ridenour of the Challis Messenger found the two goat pens done up in 1980s style, with cardboard cassette tapes, a cassette player and plenty of neon. Many hog pens had fans hung over them against the heat of late July and early August in Central Idaho. “Grouchy pigs can be problematic,” she wrote.

The exhibitors themselves are often out of sight. Ridenour found them behind the barns, washing their sheep, pigs and steers, then drying, trimming and fluffing them before the showmanship contests and again before the sale. “Watching an 80-pound kid trim a 1,000-pound steer is a sight, to say the least,” she wrote. For the show ring and the judges’ interviews they turn out in pressed patterned shirts, crisp blue jeans, cowboy boots and giant shiny belt buckles.

Six days on 2.72 acres

The grounds are county property, 2.72 acres deeded 6-21-75, kept by the Custer County Fair Board. The board’s five volunteer members hold their monthly meetings by turns in Mackay and Challis, and they put on the fair with the University of Idaho Extension office and others in the county. In 2026 Jake Zollinger was chairman. Sarah Baker, an associate professor and the county’s livestock extension educator, was the contact for 4-H, and the Mackay and Challis FFA chapters each had a representative listed with the board. A nine-hole disc golf course runs between the fairgrounds and the municipal ball-golf course.

The 2026 fair ran from Monday, July 27, through Saturday, August 1, under the theme Star Spangled Summer, which the Messenger tied to the nation’s semiquincentennial. It opened Monday at 9 a.m. with the Open Round Valley Horse Show on the rodeo grounds while livestock and exhibits were checked in. Tuesday brought the judging of exhibits, vet checks, and the weighing of market beef on the fairgrounds scale at 7 p.m. At 8:30 that evening there was a movie night for youths at Scoops on Main Street.

Wednesday filled the grounds. The 4-H horse show began at 10 a.m. At 1 p.m. the Extension tested pressure-canner gauges in the exhibit building. The 4-H demonstration contest followed in the livestock arena, then a tractor driving contest at the Mackay Rodeo Arena at 3. Pies and cheesecakes were judged at 4:30, for $150 in cash prizes in each category, put up by Lambs Market and Ivie’s. Bakers from Challis had left their entries at the Custer Soil and Water Conservation District office there at midday. Kids’ games came at 5, and at 6:30 the 4-H Leader’s Council held a family fun night on the grassy area, with ag trivia and an ice cream eating contest. “You go girls! 1st place in the ice cream eating contest!” the fair’s page posted that night.

The species took their turns. Hogs showed Thursday at 8 a.m., poultry at 4:30 p.m. with rabbits after, and sheep and goats at 7 p.m., followed by an open youth livestock show. Team roping ran at the rodeo grounds at 5 the same evening. Beef showed Friday morning. The ranch rodeo started at 3 p.m., and Jukebox Charlie played for a dance on the grass at 8. Saturday opened with a 4-H corn shucking contest at 9. The Round Robin Show followed at 10, in which the top 4-H and FFA showmen rotate through every species.

The exhibit building stayed open 10 a.m. to 8 p.m. Wednesday through Friday and until 4 on Saturday. Open class entries there come from children, juniors and adults in eight divisions: antiques, baked goods and canning, needlework and quilts, flowers, photography, fine arts, horticulture, and crafts and hobbies. A silent auction ran in the same building from Wednesday morning to 4 p.m. Saturday, with all proceeds to the Custer County 4-H program.

A loose pullet and a pig named Missy

Ridenour’s account of the 2025 fair gives the barns their people. The poultry show was then in its third year, with five contestants ranging from Cloverbuds, youths not yet old enough to join 4-H, to intermediate members. It had moved into the livestock arena, which offered some shade and seating for spectators. Poultry parents Rebecca and Ray Varney said the move created a feeling that poultry was part of the county fair.

Only one bird ran. A small dark pullet brought by young Greyson Zeller hopped off the show table and scooted twice around the arena. Ashley Thurber, a poultry mom, caught it the first time, and on its second attempt the judge, Tori O’Neal, scooped it up. O’Neal had been called in late, after the scheduled judge had a conflict. She came with her questions ready and asked how many eggs a bird laid in a day and in a year, how straight feathers and legs show a chicken’s quality, which feathers were primaries and which secondaries, and what routine care the birds needed, including trimming their toenails. “These kids know a ton,” O’Neal said. “They’ve been taking really good care of their chickens.” Ruby Varney, 9, in the novice division, met one question she could not answer this way: “I don’t know, but I can look it up and get back to you.”

Across the grounds in the hog barn, Grant Parent, 10, the junior division grand champion showman, was checking on the overall grand champion hog, Missy. “She’s the best pig in the barn,” he said. Missy’s last name was Cooper, after the character in “The Big Bang Theory” and “Young Sheldon,” and so models of a solar system hung over her pen. The pen also held a box fan, a misting fan, and a squirt bottle that she tried to chew instead of drinking from. “I don’t do decorations,” Grant said. His mother, Stacy Parent, had done them. Missy weighed 285 pounds. One hog in the barn came in just shy of 400.

That Thursday, Ridenour wrote, Sarah Baker was caught in skinny jeans. Baker said she owned them only because they “fit great inside irrigating boots.” She had brought only so many pairs from her East Fork ranch, and she would not make the 150-mile or so round trip for different pants.

The Saturday sale

The week ends in the livestock arena at 2 p.m. Saturday with the 4-H and FFA Market Animal Sale, followed by an appreciation barbecue for the buyers. After the 2026 sale, the fair’s page reported “another record breaking Sale,” crediting JR Baker of Baker Auctioneering, “a super supportive community, and some great livestock and kids.” The following day the fair offered three butcher lambs from the fair, at 111, 112 and 116 pounds, for $2.45 a pound. They were to be cut and wrapped at Scarrow Meats in Jerome and the meat delivered back to Challis or Mackay.

An aeroplane on a railcar

Six decades before the county took its deed, Mackay was holding the Lost River Fair. According to a history by Earl A. Lockie of the South Custer County Historical Society, drawn from old issues of the Mackay Miner, the program of 1914 included three days of acrobatics by a daredevil pilot in his “aeroplane.” The machine came in on a railcar and was assembled in town. It used a sandy pasture outside Mackay for takeoffs and landings. Lockie wrote that it may have been the first aircraft many in the valley had seen. The Lost River Fairs of 1914 and 1915 drew large crowds of visitors, and Lockie counted them, along with trainloads of fishermen from Pocatello, as early signs of the area’s popularity.

By 1920 a fair and racetrack area was already established near the river. That year the village laid out a tourist park beside it in a grove of cottonwoods. From 1921 well into the 1930s Mackay held an annual Lost River Fair & Race day there, on what was touted as the finest race track in the state, and attendance was very good.

Lockie wrote that nearly every fair program after 1914 included some sort of air show. The 1920 fair brought Hugh Barker, an Idaho barnstormer flying a military plane from the First World War. Many of the spectators had never seen a plane on the ground or in the air, and Barker gave rides to a good number of them.