Duvall Days

On the first Saturday in June, Main Street in Duvall closes to cars at 7 a.m. and stays closed until 5 p.m. Main Street is also Highway 203. The town lies in the lower Snoqualmie Valley, 26 miles east of Seattle, 25 miles north of Issaquah and 16 miles south of Monroe. The side streets east of the closure fill early, so organizers advise arriving before 9:30 a.m. Most visitors park at Cherry Valley Elementary, Cedarcrest High School, the Safeway lot or Muddy Boots Farm, where parking costs $5, and ride the free shuttles in. For the 2025 festival the Snoqualmie Valley Record counted three shuttle routes, each running every 20 minutes. Admission to the festival is free.

The parade and four stages

The festival starts the evening before. On Friday the Riverview Education Foundation holds its 5K run and walk, out and back on the Snoqualmie Valley Trail from McCormick Park. Runners receive medals, t-shirts and commemorative cups, which are filled on the spot with root beer floats. In 2025 a ticket also came with a burrito. The local party band VibeMind played the 2026 run. At 7 p.m. the band Stomping Ground opened the music at the Duvall Tavern.

The parade steps off Saturday at 10:30 a.m. and runs north on Main Street from Valley to Stewart. The Rotary Club of Duvall organizes it, and its entries are the town’s community groups. Afterward Main Street serves as a pedestrian mall, with vendor booths along the curbs and in the Twin Dragon Redemption Church lot. In 2026 the shop Aldermoss live-printed the official festival shirts on the street. At Stella and Main, Cascade Community Theater sets up, runs and takes down the community stage. The festival thanked the company in 2026 with the line “The mornings are early and the shade is fleeting!” That day’s community-stage program was VibeMind, the Tolt Choir, the CHS Drumline, Ethan Galvez and The Outmodes.

In 2026 the food vendors moved to Depot Park, which the festival called “the new home to the Food Vendor Court.” Tolt Golf Club lent two golf carts to carry visitors who needed help down the hill to the food court and back. The Harmonica Pocket, a family band from Port Townsend, played at Depot Park in the early afternoon, followed by 4 & 20 Blackbirds. The Duvall Tavern became a fourth stage in 2026 with the Stillwater Hill Bluegrass Band, all ages and no cover.

Farther out, the Big Rock Classic Car Show fills the Safeway parking lot, and the Riverview School District hangs its K-12 student art show at the district building on 1st Ave NE. Most of the afternoon happens at McCormick Park. Plucky Palomino brings miniature goats, sheep, piglets, bunnies, ducks and chickens, and there is face painting. The zip line through the park is free. The Rotary Club runs a beer and wine garden. The 2026 festival held its first pie eating contest there, with pies from Corie’s Café.

The evening main stage in 2026 began with the Tolt Middle School Jazz Band and the Battle of the Bands winner. Miller Campbell followed, then Black Dogs, a Led Zeppelin tribute band, then Eden. Valley 104.9 FM, the Snoqualmie Valley station, has broadcast the main stage for many years. Fireworks close the night at 9:45.

Rain on the fiftieth

The 2026 festival ran through what its organizers called “a few torrential downpours.” Before the parade, the mariachi band from Ixtapa Mexican Restaurant waited out the rain under an eave. Cedarcrest Lacrosse marched in the parade for the first time and handed out sunglasses along the route. At the City of Duvall, Luke in Emergency Management watched the weather from his office all day. The festival’s recap said “he didn’t leave his office folks.”

The sky cleared by evening, and photographers recorded a sunset over McCormick Park while the bands played. Eden played straight through the fireworks, with its guitarist taking a solo over the display. Morgan Henley listed the set’s run “From ‘Voodoo Child’ to ‘Thunderstruck’ to ‘Master of Puppets.’” The singer Savanna Woods said from the stage, “AI can’t do this.”

Daze, Days, and two anniversaries

Henley is executive director of the Duvall Days nonprofit, a registered 501(c)(3). He also owns Morgan Henley Presents, which produces most of the Snoqualmie Valley’s large summer festivals. He grew up near Duvall. The rest of the board is Travis Weatherbee, Samantha Stedman, Nicole Rohwer and Kim Piira, and volunteers stage the festival with the city’s support. In 2025 Henley estimated attendance at around 5,000. Because Duvall Days is the first town festival of the Valley’s summer, it usually draws well.

For 2025 the festival used the name “Duvall Daze” and a 1960s-style look. Henley told the Valley Record the aim was to honor the town as a center of arts and music. “Duvall is a very historic arts and cultural town, which I don’t think a lot of people realize, especially the newer demographic that’s moving out here,” he said. “If we’re not showcasing this culture and this history, then it’ll disappear.”

The festival’s own account of the two names takes some following. It billed 2025 as the 65th anniversary, a throwback to “the original verbiage, Duvall ‘Daze!’” It billed 2026 as “the 50th year of Duvall ‘Days!’” and added, “Haha, we know it’s a wee bit confusing.” The Valley Record called Daze the name the festival was “temporarily called some years ago.” In 2004 the Seattle Post-Intelligencer reported that the tradition dated to 1960. That year the festival was being renamed Duvall Daze “in a nod to one of its earlier titles.” Don Williams, then 75 and president of the Duvall Historical Society, remembered the parade as one that “for years went by the name Duvall Days,” with tractors, motorcycles and fire trucks. In 2015 the city billed the festival as the 55th annual.

Marilyn’s Bicentennial parade

The 1976 date belongs to Marilyn Oline Moen Herzog-Peck-Ruffolo. She was born in 1932 in a farmhouse in Alderwood Manor to Norwegian immigrants. In 1954 she married William T. Herzog, a grandson of Duvall pioneer settlers, and in 1961 they settled in Duvall. In the early 1960s she served as town clerk. According to her obituary in the Snoqualmie Valley Record, she started and chaired the city’s Bicentennial celebration in 1976. “The idea of a parade took hold and she became the mother of the Duvall Days celebration.”

In 1994 she and her second husband, Gale Peck, were Grand Marshals of the Duvall Days Parade for their civic work. Her obituary says they both treasured the honor. She died in 2014, remembered as a storyteller who loved retelling the funny events that followed her through life. The Grand Marshal for the 2026 parade was Marilyn Country Roney.

Bagpipes and a lion dance

The parade the Post-Intelligencer described on May 31, 2004, was larger than the one Williams remembered. Organizers had contacted Hmong farmers and others of many backgrounds, and they handed out information in Spanish along with thousands of English fliers. The parade lineup included Scottish bagpipers, farmers on tractors, Chinese lion dancers, masseuses, acupuncturists, artists, equestrians, firefighters, and mothers pushing strollers. The festival afterward at McCormick Park offered blues and Latin American music, a Korean dance group, and ax-throwing and log-sawing contests.

Resident Kirsten Lints, a mother of two, planned to ride her Arabian horse. Michelle Solis, 23, owned La Tienda Mexicana on Main Street. She built a float with piñatas and flags and planned to wear a traditional Mexican dress. Speaking through a translator, she said, “We have the opportunity to represent the Spanish-speaking community.” Michael Lee had owned the Twin Dragon Chinese restaurant for 10 months, and he invited a lion dance group from Seattle. “In Chinese tradition, when there’s an event, there’s a lion dance to bring luck and good fortune,” he said.