Wagon Days

The last entry in the Wagon Days parade is the Big Hitch: six ore wagons coupled in a line, wooden and enormous, rolling through downtown Ketchum behind a long team. The City of Ketchum’s calendar and Visit Sun Valley described the 2026 team as twenty Shire draft horses. The festival’s own welcome page still describes “a remarkable 20-mule team all the way from Bishop, CA,” driven in a jerkline formation. That is the wording the Valley Chamber used for the 2022 parade. The Idaho Mountain Express put the change plainly in 2024: a team of draft horses, “formerly mules.”

The parade leaves from Sun Valley Road at 1 p.m. on the Saturday of Labor Day weekend, turns north on Main Street, and finishes on Saddle Road. Nothing in it runs on an engine. Ahead of the wagons come buggies, carriages, carts, and stagecoaches, along with equine performance groups and what the Express called “eclectic animals.” The city produces the event. The festival’s history page puts the crowd at more than fifteen thousand. The city bills the parade as one of the largest non-motorized parades in the West, and other pages say the Pacific Northwest.

Along Main Street on parade day

The entrants’ rules shape what the crowd sees. No candy, literature, or trinkets are thrown from the entries, because they can draw children into the street among the horses. Each entry keeps 25 feet from the one ahead and stays near the center of the road. Riders dressed in early-1900s costume may wear a period firearm only if it is unloaded and holstered. Political candidates who ride must wear Western attire. A modern bicycle is allowed only if it dates to before 1910, belongs to a mining-era costume, or is disguised, as the rules suggest, as “a bicycle made to appear to be a horse.” A judging stand stands on Sun Valley Road in front of the Idaho Power Water Wheel. The entries pass it without stopping.

The reserved section sits at the corner of Sun Valley Road and Main Street. For the 2026 parade those seats were $30 each and ground-level only, with “no elevated or bleacher-style seating … as in past years.” They sold out the day before. Holders collected a lanyard at the Ore Wagon Museum that morning. In 2026 Sun Valley Road closed to traffic from noon to 3 p.m., and the Silver Route bus brought people in from Sun Valley Lodge and River Run Lodge every half hour through the morning.

Poets, pancakes, and bareback riders

The 2026 festival ran September 4 and 5. The entrant instructions called it the 69th Wagon Days. On the Thursday before, wagon maker Doug Hansen gave a free talk on Fourth Street outside the Wood River Museum of History + Culture. The complete Big Hitch was parked beside him. The city described Hansen as the expert entrusted with the wagons’ restoration, and he explained how the freighters were built and worked.

Friday opened with a one-hour bus tour of the area’s historic sites from the Visitor Center on Sun Valley Road. From 1 to 4 p.m. the Idaho Cowboy Poets recited at the Ore Wagon Museum. At 5:30 the city honored the 2026 Grand Marshals in Ketchum Town Square. The instructions sent to entrants promised a barbecue dinner there.

Saturday began at 8 a.m. in Town Square with an all-you-can-eat breakfast of pancakes, sausages, and eggs, served by club members and local personalities. The breakfast has run at Wagon Days since 1977. It was long the Papoose Club breakfast, and the club now goes by the 5B Kids Fund. The proceeds go to children’s programs in the Wood River Valley. In 2022 it ran both Saturday and Sunday. In 2026 it was served Saturday only. At 10 a.m. families could try pioneer-living activities at East Avenue and Fourth Street. At the same hour the Eh-Capa Bareback Riders performed at Champions Meadow.

The Valley Chamber’s 2022 listing describes those riders as ages 8 through 19. They ride without saddles or bridles and steer with their legs, their voices, and a one-inch leather strap around the horse’s neck called a “tack rein.” According to that listing, the club took its name by spelling Apache in reverse. It rides “in the hope of bringing honor to Native Americans,” in handmade clothing, with traditional symbols painted on the horses. The Idaho State Historical Society’s 2026 citation also lists Shoshone-Bannock dancing and talks on the area’s mining history among the weekend’s programs.

At 2:30 p.m., after the Big Hitch has gone by, the crowd moves to Town Square for the street party, with local food vendors and a concert. The 2026 headliner was Susie Brown, a country singer from Alpine, Utah. She started on fiddle at four and sang lead for The JaneDear Girls on “Wildflower,” which reached No. 15 on the Billboard Country chart.

The museum on East Avenue and the bunkhouse beside it

The rest of the year the wagons are housed at the Ore Wagon Museum, 500 East Avenue, which serves as festival headquarters. From late August it opens daily with maps and merchandise and displays on the town’s mining era and founding. Visitors can walk up close to the wagons, which the Chamber describes as having six-foot wheels.

The Bonning Cabin stands next door. It was built in 1882 as a one-room log building of hand-squared logs hewn with a broad axe, and its original roof was covered with clay. For years it was the bunkhouse for the ore wagon freight crews. It is one of the oldest buildings in Ketchum.

Horace Lewis and the Fast Freight Line

Ketchum was founded on August 2, 1880, the Chamber says, and soon afterward the frontiersman Horace Lewis started the Ketchum Fast Freight Line. Its first load of ore went from the Elkhorn mine to the railroad at Kelton, Utah. The wagons made the round trip in about two weeks and came back with merchandise for the town’s businesses.

The Oregon Shoreline Railroad reached Ketchum in 1884. After that the wagons hauled freight out to the mines, carrying “pick axes to pianos to cloth and whisky,” in the Express’s account. They returned with lead and silver ore for the Philadelphia smelter near Warm Springs Creek. A wagon could carry as much as 18,000 pounds of ore and covered 12 to 14 miles a day.

Lewis built the road up Trail Creek for his wagons, the Express says, and the original grade ran at 12 percent. The wagons were built in Ketchum, and their wheelbase was sized to the Trail Creek Summit road. One main route was a 160-mile loop over the summit to the camps at Clayton, Challis, Bayhorse, and Bonanza in the Big Lost and Salmon river valleys. The loop often took more than two weeks.

At the height of mining in the 1880s, the Lewis operation owned some 700 mules and 30 wagons, and in a single year its men and mules hauled 700,000 pounds of ore to the Philadelphia smelter. Twenty to thirty mines were working in the valley then, and the best ore yielded more than 1,000 ounces of silver per ton. Around 1887 the rich veins began to run thin. In 1902 rail service opened to Mackay and Challis, and the giant wagons were needed less and less.

The donation of 1958

According to the festival’s history page, the Lewis family’s wagons once drew interest from the Disney Corporation. In 1958 the family gave the Big Hitch to the City of Ketchum instead, on the understanding that it would be displayed to the public. That year a few hundred people watched the first Big Hitch Parade. The same page notes that the first parade coincided with “Katherine’s 85th birthday.”

The Express wrote in 2024 that Wagon Days went through different forms over the years and “even endured a period when the tradition was lost.” In June 2026 the Idaho State Historical Society gave Wagon Days its Esto Perpetua Award, named for the state motto, “Let it be perpetual.” Ketchum Mayor Pete Prekeges said of the festival, “It’s a unique opportunity for our community and visitors to come together and experience the history, culture, and spirit that define this valley.”