Glacier Fiddle Festival

Cornerstone Community Church stands at 1970 U.S. Highway 93 North in Kalispell, across from the Blue Cow Carwash. For one weekend each spring, in late March or early April, it holds the Glacier Fiddle Festival. The weekend opens on Friday at 6 p.m. with registration and an open jam. Leah Farnes, who founded the festival, described the jam to the Daily Inter Lake in 2022. “Everyone just sits in a big circle, plays together, visits and has fun before the competition starts,” she said. “I want to keep that kind of old-timey feeling.”

The contest runs Saturday from 9 a.m. to 10 p.m., and spectators get in free. In 2022 the paper put the usual audience at 50 to 100 people over the two days. That year there was also a raffle of items donated by local businesses and a bake sale, both to help pay for the next year’s contest. Volunteers sold T-shirts and stickers.

The 2026 festival, the sixteenth, was held Saturday, March 28. The fifteenth was held April 4 and 5, 2025, and the twelfth April 8 and 9, 2022.

Hoedown, waltz, and a tune of choice

Each time a contestant takes the stage, the contestant plays three tunes in a fixed order: a hoedown, a waltz, and a tune of choice. No tune may be repeated from one round to the next, and no sheet music is allowed on stage. In 2022 the Inter Lake reported that judges score timing, danceability, and technique. The age divisions run Pee Wee, 8 and under; Jr. Jr., 9 to 12; Junior, 13 to 17; Adult, 18 to 59; and Senior, 60 and over. Each division plays three rounds. A tie is broken by one more tune of the players’ choosing.

A fiddler may bring up to four accompanists, but no more than three of them may be guitar players. Under the rules, accompanists are judged “by times on stage,” and they may not ask to play with a fiddler on pain of disqualification. Anyone who appears intoxicated may not perform or judge and forfeits all prize money. The contest chairperson decides what counts as intoxicated.

One division sets most of this aside. The No Holds Barred division plays a single round with “No Rules” and a five-minute time limit. The standing rules otherwise impose no time penalty “unless abused.” The 2026 schedule changed that and announced that a five-minute limit would be timed for every division.

The 2026 schedule shows how the day ran. Registration opened at 8 a.m. and the judges met at 8:30. At 9 the youngest fiddlers played first: the Pee Wee and Jr. Jr. rounds, the first Senior round, and the Pee Wee final. The Pee Wee and Jr. Jr. trophies were presented before the lunch break. In the afternoon the seniors played their final round, the champions played their first two rounds, the juniors and adults played their first rounds, and the picking contest was held for juniors and adults. The senior trophy came before the dinner break. At 6 p.m. the judges played for the room. The finals followed: Adult, Junior, No Holds Barred, and last the Champion round. Trophies for Junior, Adult, No Holds Barred, Picking, Champion, and accompanist closed the night. The festival’s site also lists rules for the picking contest and a page for workshops on Sunday morning.

In 2022, Farnes said the contest drew 25 to 40 fiddlers from Washington, Idaho, Oregon, and across Montana, aged 4 to over 80. Contestants played for prize money and trophies. There were also awards for the youngest and the oldest fiddler.

Judges from Great Falls, Livingston, and the Mission Valley

The 2022 contest was judged by Tobi Magruder of Great Falls and Lisa Barrett of Livingston. Farnes said both women had taught fiddle in Montana for years. Lisa Barrett and her late husband, Dick Barrett, were, in the paper’s words, big names in the fiddle community. “They have taught so many people, fiddlers who are out performing, gigging and teaching now,” Farnes said. “I met some fiddlers from Nashville last summer and they knew who they were.”

Magruder was a former student of Lisa Barrett’s and is in the Fiddlers Hall of Fame. The festival’s 2025 judges page adds more about her. She grew up in Pocatello, Idaho, began contest fiddling at 12, and spent many weeks of her teens at the Barretts’ house in Rapelje. She won the National Adult Championship at Weiser, Idaho, in 2008 and again in 2012. She has judged the Montana State Contest, the Northwest Regionals, and the National Fiddle Contest. After years of teaching lessons from her home, she now works as a business analyst in the IT department at Benefis Hospital. Difficult medical realities now limit her playing, the page says, but she continues to love the music and the community. When she judges, she looks for a nice groove, intonation, and danceability above difficulty.

Magruder judged again in 2025, alongside Lydia Conway. Conway studied violin classically and earned a Master of Music in violin performance before turning to the fiddle. In 2024 she posted a fiddle tune on TikTok every day for 100 days, and she runs a YouTube series called “Waltz Wednesday.” She plays fiddle for Release the Squirrels, a bluegrass band based in Missoula, and is secretary of the Montana State Old Time Fiddlers Association. She lives in the Mission Valley with her husband and two children and keeps chickens.

Leah Farnes and her fiddle family

Farnes was raised in the Flathead and started playing fiddle at 10. As a girl she played in fiddle contests and a junior fiddle group, and she met young fiddlers from around Montana and other states. Many of them were still her friends in 2022. By then she had taught private weekly fiddle lessons for more than 20 years and had served three years as president of District 1 of the Montana Old Time Fiddlers Association.

In April 2022 the Inter Lake reported that she had started the nonprofit 12 years earlier. “Fiddling around Montana has slowly started to decline since I was a kid,” she said. She organized the festival with her fiddle family because she wanted her students to know that same sense of community and because she wanted to help preserve traditional American music. “Some of the songs date back to the 1700s and 1800s,” Farnes said. “If we don’t teach them, they’re just tunes that get lost.”

The state association, founded in 1963, has helped sponsor the contest together with District 1 and local businesses. The association also holds a Montana Fiddle Camp each June and a state contest every summer in a different Montana town. Farnes credited the work on the ground to others. “I wouldn’t be able to run this contest without all of my wonderful volunteers,” she said. “They run registration, score keep, emcee, run the raffle, bake sale, get donations and help sell T-shirts and stickers.”

On April 10, 2026, the festival’s Facebook page thanked Brian K. Curtis for all the pictures and posted “Last of the photos!!”