Timber Days

Breakfast at Timber Days is huckleberry pancakes. On Saturday, July 25, 2026, the Spartan Booster Club served them downtown from 7 to 10 a.m., between AJ’s Cafe and Popeye’s near High and Main streets, for $10. The money went to player fees, senior night, award cakes and other team needs. At 8 a.m. the Run for the Berries started on 5K and 10K courses, with a kids’ race fifteen minutes behind. Awards for the top three in each age group were handed out at the park gazebo at 10 a.m., and proceeds went to the running programs at Priest River Lamanna High School.

The town is small, about 1,700 people by the city’s count. It sits at 2,100 feet where the Priest River meets the Pend Oreille, 7 miles east of the Washington border. The Priest River Chamber of Commerce runs Timber Days, and the 2026 edition carried the theme “Timbered Traditions.” It had begun the night before with the Asphalt Angels’ Hot Neon Nights car cruise downtown from 7 to 10 p.m. On Saturday a car show ran from 9 a.m. to 3 p.m. at Priest River Junior High School.

A parade of log trucks and the Bull of the Woods

The parade stepped off at 10 a.m., “SHARP,” in the chamber’s own capitals. Floats, bands, classic cars and timber trucks went through town, and a news photograph from the day shows logging and heavy equipment rolling down High Street. The 2026 entries competed in categories for nonprofit, logging truck, logging equipment, classic car, business and open. A licensed driver had to drive every vehicle. When entries reached City Park, riders handed out candy instead of throwing it, so that children would stay out of the street.

One rider is honored above the rest. Each year the chamber names a Bull of the Woods. The honoree must have spent a good share of a career in timber, in logging, forestry, truck driving or one of the area’s lumber mills, and must have shown extraordinary character in the community. The 2026 Bull was Sam Wiley, honored in the parade and again at the competition that followed. “He always helps out with the chamber and the community, delivering log loads and stuff when we need him to,” said Tiffiny Simpkins of the chamber. “It really wasn’t a hard choice because he’s been in the community so long and always helps out with the community.”

The chamber’s list of past Bulls begins with Earl Fiedler in 1991 and runs through Howard Brothers in 2025. Some years went to pairs: Lloyd and Laurence Reynolds in 2002, Curly Davaz and Bobby Bombino in 2019, Todd and Dean Douglas in 2023. Some surnames come around twice: Teddy Naccarato in 1996 and Mike Naccarato in 2017, Don Pettit in 1998 and Rick Pettit in 2021, Floyd Wylie in 2001 and Cecil Wylie in 2004.

Six teams at Bonner Park West

After the parade the crowd moved to Bonner Park West, on the Pend Oreille River, for the logging competition. Vendors and food booths stood there from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. The park’s boat launch closed for the day, and boaters were sent to the launches at Albeni Cove and Riley Creek.

The 2026 competition placed every logger on one of six teams of five. Simpkins called it a twist. The teams worked through four events. In the two-person crosscut, partners pulled a traditional crosscut saw through a 12-inch log. In the chainsaw event, a single cutter ran a stock saw with a 20-inch bar through a 24-inch log. In the choker run, a teammate sprinted 50 feet, jumped a log, ran another 50 feet to fetch a choker cable, then raced back, wrapped the cable around the log and hooked the bell. In the axe throw, a competitor threw a double-bit axe at a bullseye from 15 feet.

The team relay strung all four together. The crosscut went first. A teammate then tagged the chainsaw cutter, and when that cut was through, the choker runner set off. The clock stopped when the runner finished. Last came the axe thrower, whose points were converted into time taken off the team’s relay total.

From hot saws to home teams

The competition has taken other shapes. For the 25th anniversary in 2015, the Sandpoint Reader listed the Jack-n-Jill, open hot saw, modified hot saw, women’s underhand, women’s single buck, single buck, standing block, springboard, underhand and axe throw. Preliminaries began at 9 a.m. and the main events ran from 1 to 4 p.m. Men and women competed across a 60-year age span, some from as far away as California and Wisconsin. The Reader said the contest drew the most spectators of the day, and that in 2009 it had drawn press from the east coast. That 2015 festival filled High Street downtown on July 24 and 25. It closed with the Big Back-In Custom Lawnmower Races on Main Street, then in their 13th year, and a street dance put on by the Asphalt Angels.

In 2018 the chamber changed course. Chad Summers, a chamber board member, told the Bonner County Daily Bee that the competition would have no pros that year, only local teams, and that entrants did not need to be loggers. The events were pole climbing, log burling, crosscut, stock saw, a log walk and an axe throw. “We encourage people who want to put together a team to do it, to come out and compete,” Summers said. “That’s awesome — that’s what we would love to see more of.”

The same year the competition left the grounds across from City Park, where it had been held for several years, and went back to Bonner Park West. The parade was turned around to start at City Park and head east along High Street through the historic downtown. Summers said the westbound route made the log trucks, fire trucks and other large rigs crawl up the hill at the west end of High Street. “Back in the day, the parade used to go the direction we are moving it to this year,” he said. “I don’t know the story behind why it was changed to go the direction that it has been going for, I know of, at least 19 years, but we’ve turned it around.”

Down the river to the Mudhole

The direction the chamber had in mind ran back to the river. From 1901 through 1949, according to the city, a log drive came down the Priest River each spring as the industry worked into the Priest Lake country. The city says that, as far as is known, it was the last log drive in the lower 48 except the Clearwater drive, also in Idaho. From 1916 through the 1940s, Sandpoint Magazine wrote, smaller drives on Kalispell, Granite and Caribou creeks fed the main one. Booms of logs were towed across Priest Lake to its outlet and dumped into the river. At the town of Priest River the logs were sorted by the company brand marked on their ends.

Summers tells the festival’s beginning from the end of that drive. “It actually started when the logging crews came down the river with the logs in the spring,” he said. The celebration, he said, was held at the Mudhole, where the Priest River meets the Pend Oreille. “When all the crews got there, the families met them. They had been gone for a couple weeks in some terrifying situations — high waters, floods ... so they would all meet at the Mudhole and have a celebration.” There were competitions and a big picnic.

The city’s history names that gathering the Logging Celebration and says it lasted through 1980. The Daily Bee wrote that it then gave way to what is now Timber Days, held on the last Saturday of July. The Reader counted 2015 as the festival’s 25th year.

The town that held these celebrations was already old by then. The city calls Priest River a “town that logs built.” Italians from southern Italy began arriving by 1892 to hew ties for the Great Northern Railroad, and they stayed when construction moved on. They settled on the east side of town and the river, and Priest River was known as “Little Italy” into the 1950s. The first townsite stood at Keyser’s Slough, near the meeting of the rivers, until the great Pend Oreille flood of 1894 moved it to higher ground. The first sawmill went up in 1897. The White Pine Lumber Co. ran a mill until it burned in 1905. The Jurgen Bros. Lumber Co. rebuilt it and sold it in 1912 to C.W. Beardmore. The yellow and white house that Henry Keyser, whom the Idaho Heritage Trust calls the first white pioneer in the area, built in 1895 has been moved inside the city limits. It now holds chamber offices and the Priest River Museum and Timber Education Center.