Fall City Day

The pancake breakfast opens Fall City Day at 7:30 in the morning. At nine the street fair opens and the first runners go off, and from then until five in the afternoon the downtown of this unincorporated King County town, about 25 miles east of Seattle by way of I-90, belongs to the festival. The 2026 edition, held Saturday, June 13, was billed as the 53rd annual. It goes on rain or shine.

Bagels at the Farmhouse Market

The Fall City Day Run was in its 35th year in 2026. It starts and finishes in front of the Farmhouse Market, near Olive Taylor Quigley Park. The Kids 1K goes first, at nine. It is meant for children, typically under eight. They run down Redmond-Fall City Road, across the bridge, around the roundabout and back to the market, a run of about ten minutes. Parents who feel the need may run beside their children, outside the course.

The 5K and 10K start at 9:15 on country roads that cross the Snoqualmie River. The organizers describe the course as pancake flat and very fast. There is water at the turnarounds and nothing else until the finish line, where bananas and bagels wait. Walkers and strollers are welcome but must be done by 10:30, when the courses close and the road reopens to cars. Awards follow at 10:45. Proceeds go to the schools of the Snoqualmie Valley, divided according to the school each runner names at sign-up. One Community Association page puts the total given to the schools and to local youth groups at over $60,000. Another puts it at over $70,000.

Down the road at eleven

The parade steps off fifteen minutes after the awards. The main parade comes through along with a kiddie and pet parade. The festival gives the route as State Route 202, from the Giving Garden to 338th Avenue SE. Clay Eals, writing in The Seattle Times in 2022, placed it on Redmond-Fall City Road, which runs parallel to the Snoqualmie River. He wrote that the town’s processions have used that route since the early 1950s.

Beside the reviewing stand, at 337th Place Southeast, stands a building that Eals traced to the late 1880s, when it opened as a hotel and restaurant. Its name, its uses and its roofline have changed over the decades. It has remained a fixed point on the parade route.

Watermelon, shaved ice and a melted churn

From noon the afternoon program takes over: a helicopter demonstration, dunk tanks, Big Wheels, a Kid Zone, and arts and crafts booths. The watermelon eating contest starts at 1:30. The festival calls it the messiest event of the day. Whiskey Ridge plays country music all afternoon, and a wine and beer garden is open. The 2026 slogan was “Let’s Go Country!”, and the festival’s posts about its vendors addressed readers as “partner.”

Those posts list the food. L’Italiano FoodTruck, run by a young Italian family, served comfort food from family recipes. Grandma Thai Cuisine had pad Thai, mango sticky rice, egg rolls, and Thai tea and coffee. Two Bumz Shaved Ice offered cherry, blue raspberry and tiger’s blood. Sweets & Treats By Antonia, baked in Fall City, sold frosted and unfrosted cookies and Cup-O-Cake parfaits. Among the booths, the Carnation Farmers Market ran Token Tote activities for children, and Encompass, a nonprofit for families in the valley, explained its work.

The Fall City Historical Society has no brick-and-mortar museum. It sets up a three-tent “pavilion” each year with a new exhibit. In 2026 the theme was “Past Times in Past Times.” The Society set out typewriters for visitors to try, a checkerboard, fishing gear, and a butter churn. The Society reported that on a sunny, hot day the churning “was a hit, if a bit melted.” Hilde, who had demonstrated spinning and weaving at the Society’s pop-up museum that April, sat at her wheel. The booth also displayed a Fall City Day Song, with lyrics by Donna.

A hundred painted ducks

For more than two decades the festival raced rubber ducks down the Snoqualmie River. In 2023 the Duck Derby was retired, and its founder, Laurie Hauglie, started a new game with the same ducks. The Snoqualmie Valley Record reported that year that Hauglie and a team of volunteers would hide 100 ducks, each with a custom paint job, in the streets, alleys and trails around Fall City.

The Great Duck Hunt has grown since then. The festival holds a free painting party each year and adds another hundred ducks. They turn up on downtown corners, on quiet trails, and in at least one cemetery. The organizers say no one knows whether every duck will be found, and that one may surface in summer or on a cold day in December. A finder keeps the duck and enters the code that comes with it to see whether it has won a prize.

Strawberries, soapboxes and a barrel in the river

The festival is run entirely by volunteers under the Fall City Community Association. Because the town is unincorporated, sponsors pay for the insurance, security and restrooms.

The sources tell its beginnings two ways. HistoryLink’s history of the town says that, beginning in the 1950s, Derby Days grew out of the annual Cub Scout soap box derby into a summer event with parades, dances, hydroplane races on the river, games and carnival rides. It says the name changed to Fall City Days in the 1970s. Eals, in The Seattle Times, says the gathering began as the Strawberry Festival and only later became Fall City Derby Day. Under that name it honored the Cub Scouts’ soapbox race, and Derby Darlings rode atop a float.

In 1968, by Eals’s account, there was no parade. The town held a River Drift instead. A 35-gallon metal barrel was dropped into the Snoqualmie, and citizens guessed how long it would take to float 3.2 miles to a finish line. A new name came in 1971: Fall City Days and Logging Show. The Historical Society’s June 2022 newsletter listed the names together: “Whether you call it The Strawberry Festival, Derby Days, The Logging Show, or Fall City Day, it’s been a rollicking summer festival for 50 years.” The Society’s April 2026 pop-up museum at the library traced the same changes.

The festival returned in person on June 11, 2022, after two years away during the Covid-19 pandemic. That year it marked 150 years since 1872, when George Boham opened the town’s first post office. The traditional dunk tank and watermelon contest were back. At the Historical Society booth, board member Donna Driver-Kummen handed passers-by free commemorative buttons, and visitors looked over an 1872–2022 timeline in photographs. The grand marshal was Ruth Pickering, the Society’s longtime director. Rick Divers, the Society’s president, drove her down the parade route. Pickering told Eals, “Rural towns are an important thing. They’re kind of an endangered species.”