Kootenai River Days

On the morning of Saturday, Sept. 26, 2026, runners gathered at the Boundary County Fairgrounds, four blocks west of downtown Bonners Ferry, for the 8 a.m. start of the Kootenai River Run. The 5K and 10K courses wind in and around the city and finish where they began. A Bonners Ferry Herald photograph from that morning shows participants with their pets bringing up the rear of the pack. Idaho Forest Group sponsors the race. Its race page states that net proceeds go to college scholarships for local student runners and to the Bonners Ferry High School cross-country program.

The run opens Kootenai River Days, which the Bonners Ferry Chamber of Commerce hosts downtown as a free event. The chamber’s own page calls it “Bonners Ferry’s largest summer festival.” In 2026 it came in late September as a condensed, one-day celebration, because wildfire had stopped the July edition partway through.

At the same hour the Bonners Ferry Farmers Market opened at the Bonners Ferry Gateway Visitor’s Center and ran until 1 p.m. The market keeps Saturdays from late April to early October, with fresh fruit, vegetables, baked goods and handmade crafts. Participating stores ran Crazy Days sales. Teshra Steffen Robles, the chamber’s liaison representative, gave the Herald the reason for the day: “Kootenai River Days is for the chamber to give back to the community by hosting a free event and to support local businesses by bringing an event into town that will bring many people to support them.”

Chalk on the downtown sidewalks

From 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. the sidewalks went to Chalk the Block, hosted by Teascarlet Fine Art. Visitors pick up a bucket of chalk at the gallery, choose a spot on the pavement and draw. The gallery’s page invites “the guy who claims ‘I can’t even draw a stick figure.’” Entering the contest is optional. Anyone may vote for a favorite in each category, and prizes go to six category winners. The two pages describing the event disagree on its age: the chamber’s 2026 page says Chalk the Block is in its fourth year, and the gallery’s page says its third. The gallery reported 84 entries and more than 700 voters the year before.

Hannah Sucsy, who owns Teascarlet and organizes the event, told the Herald: “There’s lots of things that divide people, and this is definitely a unifying community event.”

Ice cream and a DJ on Main Street

The afternoon belonged to children. From 4 to 8 p.m. there were face painting, a bounce house and live music by the Kip McMillan Trio. Food and beverage vendors served from 5 to 9.

At 7:30 came the community ice cream social, held with the Longest Table, an Innovia Foundation event, and paid for by its Longest Table grant. Each person collected one sweet-treat voucher from the chamber’s table on Main Street at Georgia Mae Plaza. Vouchers could be spent at Hidden Haven Sweets & Treats, Rusty Moose Tavern & Grill, Mugsy’s, Elmer’s Shaved Ice, Froyo Mama or Under The Sun.

DJ Mark took the street from 8 p.m. to midnight. The chamber promised he would “mix up the jams covering all the decades to keep us Dancing in the Streets!” The Herald’s photographs from the night show teenagers dancing while he played.

Smoke in July

The 2026 edition had begun on its usual summer schedule. Chalk the Block ran July 14 to 18. Rain washed away several works before judging, but Sucsy said participation was comparable to the year before, with about 70 artists entering the contest and hundreds more stopping to draw. The Rotary Wine Walk and Crazy Days went ahead early in the week.

Then smoke, wildfires and evacuations came into Boundary County. The farmers market, the River Run (set for July 18) and many of the Saturday activities were postponed. The Herald reported that organizers put public safety first and kept the ongoing emergency response in mind. Through that weekend the fairgrounds, where the run starts and finishes, sheltered residents and their animals displaced by the fires. Organizers said they hoped to bring back parts of Chalk the Block when the celebration was rescheduled, so artists could finish pieces the weather had interrupted.

Four days in July, in earlier years

The September Saturday was a short form of a longer event. In 2024 Kootenai River Days ran four days, July 17 to 20. It had a farmers market street fair, a cornhole tournament, a co-ed softball tournament, street dances, food and drink, and the River Run on the last morning. The Innovia Foundation sponsored that final Saturday with free face painting and cookies as part of its 50th-anniversary theme, “Celebrating Community.” Jennifer VanEtten, a community outreach coordinator, said then: “Kootenai River Days is a true sense of community. It’s a time to celebrate our town, history and to reconnect with old friends.”

In 2015 the celebration fell on July 11, in the centennial year of Boundary County, which was created on January 23, 1915. At 1:00 that afternoon the Boundary County Museum held an indoor virtual history walk with Howard Kent and the Class of 1975. On its walls hung the work of the county’s fourth graders, each of whom had colored one of the three bas-relief sculptures on the face of the courthouse.