Eagle Fun Days

The 55th Eagle Fun Days opened on Friday, June 26, 2026, at Heritage Park in downtown Eagle, with live music, food, and drinks from 5 to 8 p.m. Because 2026 was “America 250,” the city asked those attending to come in their favorite red, white, and blue outfits. It also asked that they “respect the political beliefs of all in attendance.” The city’s announcement said the event was spreading out again “after a difficult 2 years of construction.” At Eagle City Hall the whole campus became an inflatable amusement park, an alcohol-free kid zone with food trucks parked alongside. It stayed up through Saturday for families who missed it the first night.

Friday at Heritage Park, Saturday on State Street

The Friday kickoff party is held with the Eagle Chamber of Commerce, which counts Friday Fun Night among its larger events. Saturday is the long day. At 8 a.m. a fun run organized by Pulse Running leaves Merrill Park. From 11 a.m. to 9 p.m., Heritage Park and downtown State Street fill with live local music, a vendor market, and activities for all ages. Spitfire Tacos + Tequila runs a car show on State Street from noon to 3. The parade steps off at 1 p.m. and covers State Street between Edgewood Lane and Stierman Way. At 3 the cornhole tournament begins. Teams play three round-robin games, are split into two brackets by record, and finish in single elimination, with prizes for the top two. At 4 the Eagle/Garden City Rotary Club holds its ball drop at Heritage Park, with $1,000 to the winner.

Fire hoses, a bookworm, and the Wet N’ Wild

Glida Bothwell moved to Eagle from Indiana in 1974. With a newborn and a three-year-old at home, she skipped Fun Days for a few years. When her boys were older, she wrote, they loved the parade, “especially the ‘Wet and Wild’ part.” Firemen sprayed the onlookers from fire truck hoses. Kids and adults on the curb squirted back with water guns “until everyone on the sidelines was drenched.”

One year the Friends of the Library entered the parade with a bookworm built from hula hoops and fabric, carried by eight or nine pairs of children’s legs. Bothwell’s two boys were two of the pairs. The rehearsal went poorly, and parade day went worse. There were no-shows, so the child at the tail carried two hoops. The children were of different heights, which made the worm lumpy. Shoes came off and had to be fetched. One child quit halfway and slipped out from under the fabric, and someone cried most of the way. The leader could not see well, so the worm kept running into the crowd. At the end of the route the children got Popsicles and hot dogs. The next year, Bothwell wrote, she sold cinnamon rolls “but did not volunteer to lead the Eagle Library Bookworm.”

The parade kept its water. As the Idaho Press described it in 2025, floats and cars throw candy along the route, and at the end riders and onlookers turn water guns and buckets on each other. Parts of the route are kept dry for those who would rather not get wet. The city’s 2021 listing told people to bring “buckets, super soakers, and clothes you don’t mind getting drenched.” That year’s theme was “Eagle Through the Decades!”

By then the city had tried banning water balloons, a rule the crowd did not follow. At a February 2025 council meeting, staff listed the risks: children caught under floats, people slipping on wet asphalt, crowd congestion. Brian Allen, the city’s recreation director, recalled the end of the previous year’s parade. “The first comment made to me by public safety officials from our security team was, ‘that can never happen again,’” he said. At a safety training for special events, Allen had watched footage of the Wet N’ Wild Parade used as an example of what not to do. “Myself and the other staff there were a little bit mortified,” he said. Some recreation staff proposed dropping the wet section. Josh Herker, the city’s special events coordinator, warned that attendance would fall: “Most people are coming to get wet.”

Council member Melissa Gindlesperger spoke against dropping it. “We are family friendly,” she said. “We live, work and play. This is a play item and to take play away, I think, would just be detrimental to our community.” On a motion by Helen Russell, seconded by Gindlesperger, the council voted unanimously to keep a wet and dry parade. The approved parade had crowd control and barriers, plus at least three people beside each float to cover its front, back, and side. Craig Kvamme had pressed for those walkers so that children chasing candy would not end up under the wheels. The council also moved Fun Days from its usual place near the Fourth of July to June 27 and 28, a few days earlier, so the temperatures would run a couple of degrees cooler. Mayor Brad Pike put the city’s Fun Days budget for 2025 at $155,000.

The Nut Feed

In Bothwell’s early years, Fun Days had food and craft booths, sometimes a carnival, fireworks, and the “Famous Rocky Mountain Oyster Feed.” When she asked what the oysters were, she wrote, “all I got were snickers and smiles.” Once she learned what came off the bulls, she swore she would not eat one. Friends talked her into going anyway, and she got a sitter.

She stood in a long line winding toward the food tents. Servers handed out large plastic cups and filled them with beer, since the ticket covered all one could eat and drink. She took potato salad, baked beans, and a roll. At the grill a burly cook in a greasy apron waited with his spatula. “How would you like yours cooked, ma’am?” She pointed at one very crispy silver-dollar-sized slice. “Only one?” he asked. It was, she wrote, “not too bad, just gristly.” Live country music and dancing filled the rest of the evening. “After my night at the Nut Feed and my first taste of a Rocky Mountain Oyster,” she wrote, “I was now an official Eagle resident.”

The feed belonged to the Eagle Volunteer Fire Department. According to Michelle Heart of LITE-FM, it was quite possibly the department’s largest fundraiser of the year. In 2006 it was a tradition approaching its 60th anniversary. That year the firefighters hired a New York advertising firm. The firm invented a “Spokesbovine,” a bull outraged that his “family jewels” had been taken, and put him in television commercials, radio ads, and posters. Mayor Nancy Merrell saw the videos on the department’s website. As Heart tells it, citing an archived Seattle Times article, the mayor found them offensive enough that she considered banning the feed from the public park where it was scheduled. The department agreed to pull the ads from its website, and the dispute made national news. Lucille Guardala, a group creative director, later reported that attendance rose 200 percent over 2005 and funds raised rose 64 percent.

In his 2020 State of the City address, Mayor Jason Pierce promised to bring the feed back for the festival’s 50th year. On July 10, 2021, it returned to Merrill Park for the first time in nearly a decade, according to LITE-FM, with proceeds going to Special Olympics Idaho. The fireworks moved that year to Eagle Island State Park.

The Chamber, the city, and a buried stove

For years the Eagle Chamber of Commerce held Fun Days as an annual celebration of summer, according to the Eagle Rodeo’s account of its own history. The rodeo started in 2001 as part of Fun Days and became its own entity in 2011. By 2020 the city’s Parks and Recreation department, then six years old, was the main organizer.

Ada County approved Eagle as a city in February 1971, when it had 359 residents. In 1990 city officials and residents buried a time capsule with instructions to open it in 2021. On August 12, 2021, Pierce and former mayor Steve Guerber emptied it outside the senior center, which had once been City Hall. The capsule was an old stove holding children’s letters, VHS tapes, old newspapers, and a Miami Blues movie poster. Much of what was inside concerned Eagle Fun Days or the Idaho Centennial. One child had written, “I hope there will be horses and pigs and all sorts of animals in Eagle.” Guerber lifted out a volunteer fire department helmet with “Miller” lettered on the back.

“He was a volunteer forever,” Guerber said.

“Friend of yours?” Pierce asked.

“They all were,” Guerber said.