Tri-County Fair

At six o’clock on the Saturday of Labor Day weekend, the Labor Day Rodeo opens in Leighton Arena, the outdoor main arena of the Winnemucca Events Complex. The arena seats 2,300. Its lighted performance area measures 134 by 300 feet, with two elevated announcer stands above it and livestock holding pens and a loading chute at hand. The 2026 rodeo, held September 5, was the 105th. Broken Heart Rodeo Company helped produce it, and the fair’s own page promised “more money, more cowboys and more action than one has a right to see!” Organizers took care to tell spectators that the 2026 rodeo would be held outdoors. During the evening the announcers also read out the winners of that morning’s parade.

The rodeo is the centerpiece of the Tri-County Fair & Stampede, four days the fair calls “Winnemucca’s Wildest Weekend.” The fair belongs to Humboldt, Lander and Pershing counties and is produced by Humboldt County Agricultural District No. 3. The 2026 fair ran September 3 through 6 under the theme “USA 250,” for the 250th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence.

Carnival, concert and a parade from the Model T

The Schoeppner Shows carnival opens first, on Thursday afternoon. In 2026 it ran from 4 to 10 p.m. that day, 2 to 10 p.m. Friday, and noon to 10 p.m. Saturday and Sunday. No wristbands were sold on the weekend days, so riders bought tickets ahead; presale tickets were offered at C.B. Brown Company Hardware Store. On Friday night the fair holds a ticketed concert billed as the Labor Day Jaripeo. The 2026 bill was Cadetes de Linares – El Último Batallón, 4ta Gerencia and Banda Purenibe.

Saturday begins with the Labor Day Parade at 11 a.m. Entrants gather from 10 o’clock at the east entrance of the Model T Resort Casino, next to O’Reilly Auto Parts. They enter as hitch-drawn vehicles, mounted groups and mounted riders, walking groups, musical groups, novelty, political and ethnic entries, autos of the past, and children 12 and under. Two plaques stand apart from the rest. Most Original goes to the entry that best carries the theme. The One Moccasin is given at the judges’ discretion.

At noon the main arena belongs to the youngest competitors. In the Great Basin Youth Challenge, children ride stick horses around barrels, rope dummies, ride sheep in mutton bustin’ and ride calves, and the winners take home silver buckles.

Sunday has the eating contests. Sign-ups open at 2 p.m., pie eating starts at 3 and watermelon eating at 4. Each age group, from 6 to 9 up through 19 and older, is limited to ten contestants. At 6 p.m. the arena program closes with truck and tractor pulls presented by MLM Motorsports. Local pullers are welcome, and in 2026 gate tickets cost $20 for adults.

Purple ribbons and potato critters

Only residents of the three counties may enter the competitive exhibits, at any age. The fair judges by what it calls the Danish System, scoring each exhibit on its own merits. A score of 98 to 100 earns a purple ribbon, 90 to 97 a blue, 80 to 89 a red, and 79 or below a white. The divisions run from fruits, vegetables and crops, floriculture, foods and food preservation through sewing, quilting, knitting, crocheting and handwork, to ceramics, photography, digital and fine arts, science and technology, and recycling. The high-point exhibitor in foods and food preservation is named Cook of the Year. Every entry must have been made by its exhibitor within the past two years. No food, drink or animals are allowed in the Exhibit Hall, and nothing leaves the building before 9 p.m. Sunday, when a Fair Board member checks each piece out.

The smaller contests ask less of a garden or a kitchen. Biggest Home Grown takes the largest pumpkin, zucchini or anything else grown at home. The Mini Construction Contest takes builds of Lincoln Logs, Legos, Popsicle sticks, sugar cubes or toothpicks, no larger than 2 feet by 2 feet, and its rules advise that “the more unusual the material, the better your chance to win.” Children color pages at the fair booth just inside the Exhibit Hall door. Amtrak’s profile of the Winnemucca station adds a ribbon for the wildest “potato critter,” which it describes as “a creature crafted from a brown potato and one’s imagination.”

The Western Art Roundup brings artists, poets and craftspeople to the fair. It offers demonstrations and buckaroo poetry readings and honors inductees into the Buckaroo Hall of Fame.

The livestock side is run by the Tri-County Junior Livestock Show and Sale Board. In the livestock arena, 4-H and FFA youth show beef, goats, sheep and swine. Cavies, rabbits and poultry are shown in the 4-H hall, some of them by Cloverbuds aged 5 to 8. The weekend ends for these young exhibitors at the junior livestock auction, which begins at 10 a.m. in the Livestock Arena after a buyers’ breakfast. There the youth sell the market beef, goats, sheep, swine, turkeys and fryer pens they raised. The public is invited to attend.

From the Winnemucca Stampede back to 1885

The district gives the fair a long pedigree. Its annual-events page says the Tri-County Fair & Stampede carries on “a tradition dating back to 1885,” and that the Nevada Legislature created the Ag District #3 Rodeo Board “130 years ago for the purpose of sponsoring an annual fair.” That page gives no year for the Legislature’s act. Amtrak’s station profile dates the rodeo to the 1920s.

The rodeo’s count has shifted in the press over the years. Margo Bartlett Pesek, writing in the Las Vegas Review-Journal in 2012, called it “the 91-year-old Winnemucca Stampede.” She listed the Western Art Roundup as 30 years old and mentioned an antique tractor show. Her 2016 column described “95 years of traditional rodeo events” and noted pig wrestling and a truck pull. The fair’s 2026 rodeo page headed the event as the 105th Annual Labor Day Rodeo and then, in the next line, called it the 104th.

A high school club and an arena

The grounds were once the Humboldt County Fairgrounds and now cover 72 acres. According to a 2024 Humboldt County commission record, the Agricultural District No. 3 board moved to the present site in the mid-1960s. Over the following decades it built the grandstands, the Exhibit Hall, the indoor Event Center, the Pavilion, the arenas, the livestock holding pens and hundreds of covered stalls, with the aim of drawing events from outside the area. The Event Center covers 93,000 square feet, with a 150-by-244-foot dirt-floor arena and retractable seating for 2,800. The Pavilion is a 170-by-320-foot building with a white fabric roof over red steel walls. Its builder, Legacy Building Solutions, dates it to 2017, while the visitors authority says it was completed in February 2018. The builder says the natural light and acoustics cut down the shadows and sounds that can spook horses. The exhibit hall is named for J. Kirk Day (1916–2009), the county extension agent and a long-time member of the Humboldt County Rodeo Board. The complex now counts 1,092 horse stalls and 319 improved campsites.

Before any of this, the first Winnemucca High School Rodeo was held in an arena behind the site of the present Ridley’s Supermarket. Chris Bengoa belonged to the high school rodeo club that put it on. As a senior, he helped build the first arena at the current grounds. He graduated from Oregon State University in 1970. In 1976 he bought the original Quinn River Merc in McDermitt, and in 1986 he sold it to manage the Lucky 7 Ranch. He served on the Ag District 3 board for more than twenty years and was named the district’s Ranch Hand of the Year in 2022. His citation says he “has been on horseback from West of Denio to the Owyhee River in northern Humboldt County.”