Sweetwater County Fair

Five nights on Yellowstone Road

On the Tuesday that opens Wyoming’s Big Show, admission at the gates of the Sweetwater Events Complex is $2, cash only. From 6 to 10 that evening every ride on the Brown’s Amusements midway is $2 as well. Wyoming’s Big Show is the Sweetwater County Fair, overseen by the Sweetwater County Fair Board. It is held on the county’s grounds at 3320 Yellowstone Road, north of Rock Springs and five miles from downtown. The 2026 fair ran July 28 through August 1, and the next is set for August 3 through 7, 2027.

The grounds are entered by lettered gates. Gate C, the main gate, leads to the Exhibit Hall, the Small Hall, and the administrative offices. Gate A leads to the grandstands and the BMX, motocross, and stock car tracks. Gate E leads to the Indoor Arena, the horse stalls, and the campgrounds. The complex holds a 20,000-square-foot exhibition building, a 42,480-square-foot agricultural complex, a 1,200-space RV park, and parking for more than 1,000 vehicles.

Brown’s Amusements has brought the carnival to the fair again and has won the Outdoor Amusement Business Association’s Circle of Excellence Award for Safety in multiple years. After the $2 Tuesday, the midway opens at noon on Wednesday, with pay-one-price tickets until 4. Thursday’s hours run from 5 to midnight, and the first two hours are Buddy Day, buy one and get one half price. Friday opens at 4 and Saturday at 1, both running until midnight. The fair’s own 2026 promotions offered a funnel cake as a prize, a free ride on the mechanical bull, and a running argument over corn dog against corn on the cob.

The nightly concerts are free with paid fair admission. Seating is festival style, and the complex advises coming early with lawn chairs and blankets to stake out a spot directly in front of the stage. In 2026 Hairball played July 30, Corey Kent played July 31, and Ian Munsick, a Wyoming native, closed the series on August 1. The 2016 bill ran from Josh Turner on Tuesday through A Thousand Horses, The Used, and All That Remains to Chris Janson on Saturday. That year events coordinator Lena Warren explained how the acts were chosen: “We have just been really lucky. Kandi Pendleton usually suggests the country artists, and I like to help pick the rock bands.” She said suggestions from the Facebook page and from people who stopped organizers on the street were taken into account. By fall 2026 the complex was asking followers directly, posting lists of names for a Tuesday slot with the reminder that “Tuesday is TWO DOLLAR NIGHT — which means we’re working with a reasonably smaller entertainment budget. (So maybe save those Luke Combs requests.)”

Daytime acts in 2026 included BOOM! Percussions, a troupe that combines drumming, comedy, and movement and came to Rock Springs directly from the Last Chance Stampede in Helena. A Rockstar Silent Disco handed out headsets with a choice of channels. Lanky the Clown, a row of giant games, and animal shows in the Indoor Arena filled out the program.

Ribbons, beef, and the Legacy Silo

The Exhibit Hall fills with Open Class entries: pies, needlework, photographs, flowers, woodworking, metal art. Anyone may enter, youth or adult, and every exhibitor earns a ribbon, with premium payouts besides. In 2026 the complex tied the call for entries to America 250.

The 4-H and livestock exhibits close with the livestock auction. Tommy Thoman chairs the Fair Board and also chairs the Sweetwater County Youth Livestock Auction Committee. Donald Pallesen, a rancher from Manila, Utah, sits on the board for Daggett County and has served for many years as the fair’s 4-H and Open Class Beef Superintendent. He and his family show livestock and rodeo around the region. Kandi Pendleton, marketing and events manager in 2016 and the complex’s executive director by 2026, described the fair in 2016: “The fair has always been about family and friends getting together to celebrate.” Warren put it more plainly: “It may be the first time kids see a cow, or hold a chick.”

Fair week is a small part of the complex’s year, which it counts at more than 700 event days. In 2026 live horse racing ran at the grandstands from August 15 to a final weekend in late September. Monster trucks came to Sweetwater Speedway, and the Bitter Sweet Bombshells skated roller derby. On September 19 a drawpot roping in the Indoor Arena sent off two men leaving the place that fall. John Keller had spent decades caring for the grounds, and Paul Zancanella had served years on the board.

Silo Square, built in part with a grant from the Wyoming America250 Commission, holds the Legacy Silo. Twelve historical photo displays with QR codes tell the county’s agricultural story. One recounts Joseph Crookston, who at 22 homesteaded on Nitchie Creek in 1887 beside the Killpecker Sand Dunes and worked the land until his death in 1915. Another tells of Thomas Seddon Taliaferro, Jr., who helped establish the Rock Springs Grazing Association in 1907. A third describes how, also in 1907, John M. Farson financed the Eden Valley Irrigation Project, carrying water from the Big and Little Sandy Rivers onto dry rangeland, and how the town of Farson took his name. Landscaping, pathways, a front patio, and more lighting are planned for fall 2026 and spring 2027.

Harvest Home Day in Eden Valley

The fair began in that irrigated valley. In 2016 Brie Blasi, director of the Sweetwater County Historical Museum, shared the museum’s records of the fair with the Rock Springs Rocket Miner. In 1914, those records state, residents of Eden Valley sponsored Harvest Home Day at the University of Wyoming Experimental Farm. There were displays of canned goods, baked goods, fancy work, and crops. There were speeches, greased pole climbing, bronco busting, and sack races. Valley residents supplied everything from the prize ribbons to the food at the potluck supper. About 300 people came, and a sizable portion of them had motored up from Rock Springs for the day.

The next year a Sweetwater County Fair Association was formed and filed articles of incorporation with the Wyoming secretary of state. According to the museum’s account, little changed after that. Eden Valley went on holding small community fairs through the 1920s, the 1930s, and the early 1940s, under names such as the First Annual Eden Valley Fair of 1928 and the Eden Valley 4-H Club Fair in 1938.

Slab fairs and the Community Park

By 1946 it was decided that a formal Sweetwater County Fair should be organized, and it moved from Eden Valley to Rock Springs. The museum dates the fair’s first holding to that year. A photograph from the first fair shows Jack McMurray and Paul Joslin standing with their cows. The early fairs were held at the Old Timers Building, the Rock Springs Civic Center. They were called “slab fairs,” because the corrals, pens, and other outdoor structures were built from slabs of wood donated by a local lumber mill.

In 1948 a committee was formed to look into a community park for ball games and other outdoor activities. Land was bought north of the town as it then stood, on ground now south of I-80 near the Elk Street exchange, and work on the Community Park began in 1949. By 1953 the park was judged the right place for the fair, and buildings were put up for it. Parades, horse shows, street dances, stock car races, and soapbox derbies joined the program then, along with horseshoe pitching and bocci bolli.

The Rocket Miner called the fair southwestern Wyoming’s largest event in 2016 and reported that more than 75,000 people had passed through its gates in 2015.