Fiesta Days

Fiesta Days fills Frazier Mountain Park for three days on the first weekend of August. At the center is the Dining Pavilion, where the stage, the food vendors and an open dance area share one roof. Admission is free. The Mountain Memories Association, the nonprofit that has run the festival since 1968, books local bands and bands from Bakersfield and Los Angeles, along with tribute acts. The 2026 festival ran August 7 through 9. It was the 58th, and its theme was “Small Town America.” On the Friday the music began at three with Andrew Lemburg, then Frazier Mountain Mafia and Wyndsong, and closed with 1983. Saturday ran from Bandit through Journey in Time and Driver to Skynyrd Nation, who played from 8:30 to 10 at night. Petra & Friends and Mile High finished out the Sunday.

The food that year came from Duke’s International Delight, Semper Fries, Sabor Taino, Tacos Chewi, Raw Dawgs, Frenchies Mini Donuts, Kona Ice and Danny’s Fresh Lemonade, among others. Southern Kern Search & Rescue ran a food booth of its own. The VFW served pancakes in the Community Center on Saturday and Sunday mornings from 7 to 11.

Beyond the pavilion the vendor tents sell jewelry, leather work, crystals, wood signs, plants, night lights, mosaic yard art, slime and, from Tuff Shed, sheds. The festival’s own notice calls the market “a hub of creativity and community,” with many vendors returning year after year. Some booths sell nothing. The California Highway Patrol, the U.S. Forest Service, California State Parks, Fort Tejon State Historic Park, the Kern Fire Safe Council, the American Legion and VFW posts, the Mountain Theatre Alliance and the Mountain Communities Amateur Radio Club all set up tables. The Ridge Route Community Museum takes a booth as well. In 2015 its newsletter recorded volunteers Bonnie Kane and Barbara Lederman at the Fiesta, sharing the area’s history and selling from the museum bookstore.

The 2026 festival brought inflatables for the first time. Amazing Bounce set up a Fun Park of bounce houses and waterslides beside the Center Arena. On the baseball diamond it built a Giant Bounce Field with a lumberjack axe toss, a small train called the Funland Express, a 120-foot obstacle course, Zorba balls on a track and a 26-foot rock wall.

Log saws and pie tins

The contests are older than the inflatables by more than five decades. Log sawing and pie eating, the association says, have endured at Fiesta Days for over fifty years. The 2026 schedule opened Friday afternoon with a petting zoo, a diaper derby, a spoon-and-egg race and a three-legged race. The pet show came next in the Center Arena, open to “furry, feathered, hooved, and scaly” entrants. Saturday brought watermelon and pie eating, a piñata party, a water balloon toss, tug-of-war and the sack race. The log sawing ran from noon to two on Sunday. The Royal Flush dunk tank works all weekend: a softball thrown at the target showers the volunteer inside, and local groups take turns raising money from the crowd.

Adults enter the lumberjack matches too. Justin Jones won the log sawing twice more than a decade ago. He told Bakersfield’s KBAK that the prize is “a trophy. Mostly just bragging rights.” Ellen Keowencox, a longtime volunteer, told the same station what she watches for: “Really for me it’s watching the delight on the children’s faces.”

Saturday on Mt. Pinos Way

At ten on Saturday morning the Dale Hansen & Ed Perine Memorial Parade starts down Mt. Pinos Way through the center of town. The association calls it one of the longest-running parades in the Mountain Communities. In 2026 Julia Casebolt sang the National Anthem and a Color Guard led off. Carey Moulder and company announced the entries from the curb while judges watched. Kern Fire, the Sheriff’s Department and Southern Kern Search and Rescue rolled past, followed by floats, decorated cars, dance troupes and horses. The parade theme marked the country’s 250th year: “Small Town America: The Heart of 250 Years.”

Three honoraries ride in the parade each year. The 2026 Grand Marshal was David DeLuise, Jerry Russo on Disney Channel’s Wizards of Waverly Place, who owns the Bigfoot Café in Pine Mountain Club. The Honorary Mayor was Mary Blanchard, born on Flag Day in 1924. She served in the Cadet Nurse Corps in the Second World War. A misdialed phone call led her to her husband, Bud, and the two later ran The Hen House gift shop in Frazier Park for 18 years. At 102, according to the association, she still drives. The Honorary Sheriff was Corey Hansen, principal of El Tejon School. She had come to Fiesta Days since childhood with her grandparents, Dale and Doris Hansen, and in 2026 she rode in the parade that carries her grandfather’s name.

That weekend went on through nearby fires, power outages, freeway closures and heat, all listed by the organizers in their closing notice. “But through it all, our community showed up,” they wrote.

Fiesta Daze and the Pokey

The festival began in 1968, the year the Mountain Memories Association was founded. The Mountain Enterprise gave the founders’ purpose in 2017: to bring people together on the first weekend of August for “crazy fun” while raising funds for emergency medical care in the Mountain Communities. In those first years the event was spelled Fiesta “Daze.” Anyone who failed to dress in wild west costume was held in a mock jail, the Pokey, until they paid their way out.

The Pokey had dropped from memory by 2017. That year Genise Hunter of Frazier Park was searching the museum’s archives for fifty years of Fiesta Days history and found it. The paper announced its return for the 50th anniversary, August 4 through 6, 2017, with a photograph of JJ Reina, Albert Coonrod and Matt Verdon “cooking up a Fiesta Days surprise.” That festival had a carnival, children’s rides and a horseshoe contest alongside the log sawing. Three cast members of Little House on the Prairie served as Grand Marshals: Alison Arngrim, who played Nellie Oleson, Rachel Lindsay Greenbush, who played Carrie Ingalls, and Brian Part, who played Carl Edwards. The parade also carried a float of queens from as far back as 1967. Janie Curtis De Revere recalled wearing the crown in the 1967 Teen Queen contest, held at the park’s “Rec” Community Center. Her rivals that year included Debbie Awana, Carol Turner, Juliana Tipton, Christy Hawks and Claudette Kinsman.

The jail has stayed. “If you don’t have a button, you get arrested by the honorary sheriff,” Justin Jones told 23ABC in 2025. “It’s one of those things that we try to make more child friendly while keeping that old frontier-like vibe when it comes to the event itself.”

An ambulance for the mountain

The money from the early festivals brought the first ambulance service to the mountain. Later the association subsidized Hall Ambulance to keep an ambulance stationed in Frazier Park, for about ten years at $2,500 a month, some $300,000 in all. The association also paid for and installed the town’s original street signs. It gave $60,000 toward a snow cat for Search and Rescue and has awarded more than $50,000 in scholarships. Fiesta Days was once its main fundraiser. It now shares the calendar with a Holiday Faire and the Ridge Route Run Car Show.

Wade Jones, president of the association, was born and raised in Frazier Park and has belonged to the group for 18 years. “To me, it’s like the ultimate family reunion,” he told 23ABC. His son Justin, the festival’s vendor coordinator, traces the family’s part in it to his great-grandfather, who ran the VFW pancake breakfast. Asked what it meant to put on the festival beside his son, Wade Jones said: “To have him right next to me is like having my best friend, and it’s kind of like every good part of me is him.”