Park County Fair

Fair week on East Fifth Street

The Park County Fairgrounds lie north of US Highway 14A, which in Powell is Coulter Avenue. Coulter to Ferris brings a driver to the main entrance, with the Events Department office in the building on the left. The grounds cover 20 acres and nine buildings, with paved and lighted parking and open stretches of grass. Powell sits 75 miles east of Yellowstone National Park and 98 miles south of Billings, Montana, in the valley between the Big Horn Mountains on the east and the Absaroka Range on the west.

For most of the year the county’s Events Department rents these halls for weddings, benefits and company parties and keeps 72 trailer and RV sites on gravel, some under trees. In the last full week of July it closes the campground to the public and puts on the county fair, working with the Park County Fair Advisory Board, which Andrea Earhart chairs. Billy Wood, the Park County Events Manager, ran the 2026 fair, his fifth in that post.

The 2026 fair opened on Tuesday, July 21, and ran through Saturday, July 25. The showing began a week earlier. A 4-H dog show was held on July 14, and a cat show followed in the Poultry Barn. A public fashion revue was staged in Heart Mountain Hall. The youth horse show filled the arenas on Saturday, July 18, while campers pulled in for the week. On Monday the horse speed events ran, and at 7 that evening came a pocket pet show on the Pepsi Free Stage.

Tuesday was free admission all day. Vendors opened in late morning and free stage acts began in the Open Air Pavilion. The beer garden opened at 4 p.m. at the south end of the grandstands, and the carnival opened at 6. An all-day ride voucher cost $43 at the carnival booth and $10 less if bought before 6 p.m. that Tuesday. On the days that followed, the gate stayed free until 1 p.m. on Wednesday and Thursday and until 11 a.m. on Friday and Saturday. A $6 daily admission was charged after those hours.

From Wednesday through Saturday the 4-H served breakfast at 6:30 a.m. in the Heart Mountain kitchen. Wood said he had spread out the food and drink vendors so there were not too many of one type. Among the free stage performers the Powell Tribune listed one local newcomer for 2026: Jimmy Rush, a country musician who moved to Wapiti from Texas in 2021.

The fair also marked the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. Open-class entrants were offered categories for patriotic photographs with American flags, red, white and blue agronomy baskets, and a patriotic dress-a-goat. Wood told the Tribune he hoped the theme would start a run of yearly themed exhibitions. By September the fair office was asking the public for a theme for 2027.

Five nights in the grandstand

Each evening of fair week has its own grandstand event, with gates opening an hour ahead:

• Tuesday: pig mud wrestling. In 2026, for the first time, the fair sold box seats for it. Wood said this would give the event more premium seating and might make it a bit more profitable, since revenue from it is often a wash.
• Wednesday: boxing by the local 307 Boxing Club. The club had set up a ring and put on free fights for the past two years. In 2026 the advisory board made boxing a full grandstand event, in place of the Wednesday concert. Wood said the 2025 concert sold only around 500 tickets and lost money.
• Thursday: truck and tractor pulls, back for a third year.
• Friday: figure-8 races, which the Tribune called ever growing.
• Saturday: the demolition derby, which starts at 6 p.m., an hour earlier than the other nights. The Tribune called it always sold out. On the afternoon of the 2026 derby the fair posted that, with a sell-out crowd expected, stadium seats would not be allowed in the grandstands.

Saturday also brings the fair parade through Powell at 10 a.m. Horseshoe pitching is held at the 5th Street Gate, singles on Friday evening and doubles on Saturday.

The show ring and the sale barn

The fair book for 2026 runs from agronomy and hay to quilting, cake decorating, rabbits and wool. Open-class exhibits are judged in Heart Mountain Hall, and the livestock barns open to the public at noon. The animals are shown through the week:

• Wednesday: goats in the show ring and swine in the sale barn, after the Park County Youth Bred & Fed shows that morning.
• Thursday: poultry, market beef, rabbits, wool, sheep and market swine.
• Friday: dairy goats, dairy cattle, beef breeding classes, a bottle bucket calf class, a dress-a-goat show and a sheep lead contest.
• Saturday: a large-animal round robin, then the Park County Junior Livestock Sale at 1 p.m.

On Sunday morning at 6 the livestock and exhibits are released to go home.

In 2026 the horse show added para equestrian classes for riders with disabilities. “We’re going off of the U.S. paraequestrian qualifications, so we’ve had a couple of exhibitors that were extremely excited about this,” Wood said. “They’ve got their own showmanship, horsemanship, trail, and driving.”

The speed events had moved to Monday the year before, when a torrential downpour on their scheduled Saturday forced the change. The response was good enough that Monday became their day. Wood said contestant numbers were rising. Some residents of neighboring Big Horn County had started showing in Powell consistently.

Bleachers and a race track

Powell began in 1907 as Camp Colter, a United States Reclamation Service work camp beside the Chicago, Burlington and Quincy tracks. Its residents dug canals across an arid flat a few miles north of the Shoshone River. Water flowed through the system on April 27, 1908. The town took the name of John Wesley Powell, the Grand Canyon explorer and an early proponent of federal reclamation. It sold its first lots on May 25, 1909, and was incorporated on May 10, 1910. Alfalfa, grain and bean mills followed along the tracks.

The fair in its early years, the Tribune reports, bounced between Powell and Cody. WyoHistory.org dates the settlement to 1923. That year Powell became the host of the Park County Fair under an agreement with Cody, the county seat, which took the Fourth of July celebration in return. Jeremy Johnston, writing for WyoHistory.org, saw in the trade the difference between the two towns: Powell an agricultural hub with its farm fair, Cody depending on Yellowstone-bound tourists and its big Fourth of July rodeo and parade.

A photograph from the Shoshone Irrigation District shows Crow men, women and children taking part in traditional dances at the 1921 fair. They are on the ground that would become the fairgrounds, where an early grandstand and racetrack already stood. On April 3, 1926, the U.S. Congress approved a land patent letting Park County use a stretch of land on the east side of the Powell townsite as a county fairgrounds. One Tribune photo caption credits the state Legislature with setting the land aside, but the paper’s own reporting names Congress and the federal patent. Other early photographs show horse races on a large track and tractors on the grounds, which the Tribune says have been part of the fair since its first years.

The 2026 fair was the hundredth held on that ground. “At that point it was just, they built a set of bleachers and a race track, and that’s all they had here,” Wood said.