Down River Days

Ione City Park lies at the edge of the Pend Oreille River in northern Pend Oreille County. On the last weekend of July it fills for Down River Days, the town’s chief annual celebration. There is no parking in the park itself, so a shuttle runs during the event. The 2026 edition ran from Friday, July 24, through Sunday, July 26. It opened Friday evening as vendors set up in the park and children set off on the Kids Color Walk/Run at 6:30. Pend Oreille County Fire District 2 credits the Selkirk Trailblazers with the weekend, thanking them “for another successful Down River Days.”

Breakfast, the parade, and a keg on a cable

Saturday begins at 7 a.m. with the Cowboy Breakfast in the park, put on by the North Pend Oreille Valley Lions Club and served again Sunday morning. Dena Brown of Ione, who died in June 2026, was not a member of the club. Her obituary records that she pitched in behind the scenes with the breakfasts all the same.

Parade entries line up at 9 and step off at 10. They have always gathered at the former Ione Elementary School on Houghton Street. By the account of Lila Middleton, the parade was led by VFW Lloyd W. Ek Post #3082 and the American Legion Color Guard, with the Grand Marshal close behind. After them come logging trucks, PUD utility trucks, floats, horses, and fire trucks, and the riders shower the bystanders with candy. Fire District 2 has driven its ladder truck, Mobile Medical Unit, front-line brush trucks, command vehicles, and fire rescue boat in the line, and once brought out its bulldozer for the first time. The International Selkirk Loop says the parade draws thousands of people from throughout the region.

The fire district also sets up the water-cannon keg fight. Friends and family try to push a keg along a cable using nothing but the force of water. “Everyone comes away soaking wet and smiling,” the district reports.

Through the afternoon the park has a cornhole tournament from noon to 4, inflatables in the Kid Zone, a beer garden, and Riley Crabtree playing music all day. The Miner newspaper also lists Crazy Lady Softball on the bill. At the Pavilion in the Park, the American Legion Family sells a $10 plate: a hamburger with or without cheese and caramelized onions, an optional dill pickle, a bag of chips, and a soda or water.

The Lions Railriders leave at 9 and noon each day. The riders sit four to a car on pedal-powered railroad bicycles. They go first south through pastureland, then north to the Box Canyon Trestle, about 12 miles round trip.

At 7 p.m. Crabtree plays again for the street dance, which runs until 11. Middleton wrote that there has been a Saturday night street dance on Main Street from the beginning. “Children of all ages attended and danced to live music.”

Sunday belongs to the river. Snowmobile watercross sign-ups run from 8 to 10 a.m., and racing goes from 11 to about 4:30. Crowds line the shoreline and the water. Firefighters stand by in the park, and the district’s fire boat patrols the course with the Pend Oreille County Sheriff Search and Rescue boat.

Box Canyon Dam and the summer of 1957

The fullest account of how the weekend began was written by Lila Middleton, Dena Brown’s mother. The Selkirk Sun reprinted it in July 2026 and described her as “a lady extraordinaire who is sorely missed.”

Her story starts with the dam. Box Canyon Dam was licensed in 1952 and began generating power in 1955. Because the Pend Oreille flows north, the water backed up to the south. The river rose and spread into a large expanse at Ione Park. Members of the community saw a use for the park and the new water. Among the original members were:

• Louie Bell, a pharmacist
• Robert Davis, a Box Canyon Dam operator
• Alvin Bircher, assistant fire chief
• John Middleton, also a dam operator

They named the celebration Down River Days and set it for the last full weekend of July, 1957. “This date remains the tradition,” Middleton wrote. The event’s own page gives it as the last weekend of July. Newspapers reported more than 4,000 people at that first celebration. It included a special Water Show and entries from the Pend Oreille County Rodeo and County Fair Queen and royalty from nearby towns. In February 1960 the organizers made plans to mark fifty years since Ione’s incorporation.

The weekend once opened on Friday night from the water. The Boy Scouts, under Robert H. Davis, and Explorer Scouts Troop #116, under John Middleton, paddled six canoes into the park area with two scouts and lighted torches in each. After the canoes landed on the beach, Bob and Mary Jordan, early settlers, read a short history of Ione. Then the scouts set off firecrackers and fireworks.

The Lions breakfast then began at 6 a.m. Later in the day, Pine Forest Rebekah Lodge #271 served hamburgers. Royalty in the parade meant Miss Ione, an Ione High School senior, and her princesses, a custom that ended many years ago. Vendors lined Main Street and filled the park. There were:

• small carnivals with rides
• dunk tanks
• Bingo on Saturday night at the I.O.O.F. Lodge Hall
• parachute jumping at the Ione Airport on Sunday, for anyone willing (“and there were a few locals who did!”)

In 1982 the Lions Club began running train rides from Ione to Metaline Falls and back. The first train was an engine and one flat car fitted with wooden benches and a chicken wire fence around the outside. More cars were bought and leased over the years, and, in Middleton’s words, “thousands of riders rode the rails.”

The Racing Pharmacist and the sleds

For years the Saturday and Sunday afternoon entertainment was the “pumpkin seed” boat races. These were small hydroplanes whose engines, revved up, “sounded like a can of bees,” Middleton wrote. The old train depot had been moved across the street, next to what is now the Block Restaurant. It served first as a roller rink, then as a workshop and storage space. In it a man named Quentin Terry built Louie Bell’s pumpkin seed boat, and Bell became known as the “Racing Pharmacist.”

Attendance at the boat races fell off over the years. By the Spokesman-Review’s account, the weekend had been closing with a hydroplane race when interest waned. Keith Saxe, a former Selkirk Trailblazers president, then pitched snowmobile watercross. He had seen it done in Alaska, where he grew up, and he founded the Ione event in 2003. Middleton recorded the change with her own question: “Whoever thought of a snowmobile racing across the river??”

The Spokesman-Review described the 2019 races in detail.

The machines and the course:

• Riders took 400-pound sleds across a quarter mile of river at speeds up to 70 mph.
• Most riders pulled the stock seat so the foam would not soak through, lowered the suspension, and swapped in a smaller gas tank.
• Each sled carried a buoy for hauling it off the bottom if it failed to reach the far side.
• Forty sleds ran more than 50 side-by-side races.
• Some jolted across with ease. Others made it barely 10 feet before settling slowly to the riverbed.
• The paper called it the only event of its kind in Washington.
• It noted that the first official snowmobile watercross was held in Grantsburg, Wisconsin, in 1977, over about 300 feet of Memory Lake.

The riders:

• Amber McGinnis of Post Falls had ridden each of the previous nine years. Her family had turned the weekend into a reunion, and eight of them geared up that year. Her method was to hit the throttle, keep the skis up, and lean back. “It’s exhilarating,” she said. “But when you make it to the other side it’s just like, ‘Hell, yeah.’”
• John Walker of Colville, 78, sat that year out with a bad knee. He said he and his brothers had been riding snowmobiles on open water in Idaho since the early 1970s. “To me, it’s so much fun,” he said. “That and the water is not as hard to crash on as the snow.” His first sinking had come the year before. “I was just thinking, ‘Oh, crap,’” he said. “Then I had to hurry up and pull the kill switch on my engine.”

Entry cost $25, with an optional $10 for divers insurance to bring a sunken machine up from the river. In 2019 every rider paid it. That has not always been so, and the paper reported that there are still snowmobiles at the bottom of the Pend Oreille River.