Western Weekend

On the first full weekend in June, Highway 1 through downtown Point Reyes Station closes for a parade. This is Western Weekend, two days of farm market, barn dance, barbecue and procession in the West Marin town. In 2026 it fell on June 6 and 7 under the theme “Celebrating the Rural Roots of West Marin.” It is run by the Western Weekend Committee, a shared leadership project of the Lions Club of West Marin, with its mail going in care of the Rotary Club of West Marin. The 4-H, the Farm Bureau, the high school and a long list of local clubs cook the food and fill the parade. The flyer bills the event as family-friendly, substance-free and zero waste, and asks visitors to bring a refillable water bottle.

Saturday at Toby’s Feed Barn

The weekend opens at Toby’s Feed Barn with the “Wild West” Point Reyes Farmers Market, 9 a.m. to 2 p.m., where local producers and artisans set out their goods. The organizers send visitors on from there to the town’s shops and art galleries. In 2026 the barn also showed, on a loop, “The Last Year,” Inverness director Dave Mackie’s photographic record of the final year of cattle and dairy ranching in Point Reyes National Seashore. It featured the Grossi, Lucchesi/McDonald, Lunny, Nunes, Kehoe and McClure families. The committee’s own posts called the pictures tributes to “the Seashore’s lost ranching families.”

Saturday evening moves to the Dance Palace for the annual Barn Dance, free and open to all ages and hosted by West Marin Commons. The invitation reads “put on your dancing boots and get ready to swing your partner.” At 6:30 p.m. the grand marshal and junior grand marshal are presented. In 2026 Ingrid Noyes & Friends played for dancing from 7 to 9.

The parade on Main Street

On Sunday cars are kept off the parade route and Mesa Road. Visitors park at West Marin School or other designated lots, and placard holders park at Wells Fargo Bank. The organizers advise coming early for a viewing spot, and add: “Or – ride!” KWMR, the local radio station, plays western music from 9 a.m. At noon it carries the parade live. As each entry passes, the announcers read a one-minute description of it for the crowd on the street and the listeners at home.

Anyone may enter: individuals, organizations, businesses, people on foot, vehicles, animals and musicians. The website promises decorated horses, colorful floats, local bands, dancers and vintage cars. The 2026 line included the National Park Service’s Morgan horses, which patrol hundreds of miles of Seashore trails each year. The West Marin School Samba Cats played, and the West Marin Scholarship Program put in its first float, carrying current and former scholars. Matt and Loretta Murphy rode on Stretch & Gator, “all shiny and fancy,” and the 4-H took the youth prize for themed float.

The 2025 results show the range of entries. The grand prize went to the West Marin School Samba Band. Spaletta and Cookie the Heifer won the trophy for best animal float. Tim Bunce’s tractor took first among kids’ vehicles, and “Tom and his Harley” placed third among adults. The McIntosh Pipe Band won adult music. The theme that year was “Honoring Those Who Labor on the Land,” and the Tomales Bay Explorers won it.

The Food Corral by Toby’s Feed Barn opens at 11:30 a.m., before the parade, and runs until 4. The 2026 menu was:

• the Farm Bureau’s chicken barbecue, which the flyer calls “Famous”
• homemade desserts from the 4-H
• burgers from the Tomales High School classes of ‘27 and ‘28
• a chili booth from the Rotary Club of West Marin
• an oyster bar from Papermill Creek Children’s Corner
• the Point Reyes Mexican Grill

Nonprofits set up a corral of their own alongside. In 2024 the Rotary’s chili cook-off was won by Bernie Bernier, with Trevor Bridgewater second and Charles Nichol third. In the afternoon Gallery Route One holds its “Artists in the Schools” reception at Toby’s Gallery, and the parade awards are announced at 2:30.

A historian and a fifth-generation farmer

Before naming its 2026 grand marshal, the committee posted a single clue: “Mt. Wittenberg, 1974.” The answer was Dewey Livingston, 72. He is a historian, archivist, mapmaker and photographer, a longtime Inverness resident, and author of Point Reyes and Tomales Bay: A History of the Land and Its People. He once worked as a historical researcher for Point Reyes National Seashore and Golden Gate National Recreation Area. He helped create the Jack Mason Museum of West Marin History, where he volunteers. That museum holds a photograph by Lee Sims of the weekend in 1971, which the Marin Independent Journal printed in 2024 courtesy of Livingston.

The junior grand marshal was Eva Taylor, 17, a fifth-generation Marin County farmer who grew up at Bivalve Dairy. She was a senior at Tomales High, president of the Tomales chapter of the Future Farmers of America, and an award-winning member of the 2025 California Shotgun Team. Since birth she has come every year with her parents to cook chicken, build a 4-H float and bake cookies. “This is an event I’ve never missed in my entire life,” she said. Her great-grandmother was Scotty Mendoza. The 2025 pair had been Bob Giacomini and David Rodriguez.

From cake walk to livestock show

The organizers date Western Weekend to 1948. Their website calls it a community celebration “since 1948,” and their Facebook page says “Going strong since 1948!” A Marin History Museum column by Lane Dooling, run in the Marin Independent Journal in June 2024, gives 1949. In that account a women’s group, Companions of the Forest Circle 1018, held a festival, fashion show and cake walk in the hall in Point Reyes Station. The next year members of the Lions Club joined in and added a parade and a livestock show for 4-H and Future Farmers of America members. For its first three decades the event’s proper name was the West Marin Junior Livestock Show.

The parade crowds grew. The Independent Journal reported on June 29, 1964, that 5,000 spectators jammed both sides of Main Street, against 800 in 1953. That year’s Saturday began with livestock and farm project showings and a chicken barbecue. By 9 p.m. Delores Grossi, a high-school senior, had been crowned queen, and the night ended with a ball. On Sunday a record 115 entries followed Grand Marshal James Mendoza. Bands, clowns, high-stepping horses, antique cars, floats, precision drill teams and majorettes took more than an hour to pass the judges’ table. The 4-H Club gave horsemanship demonstrations. Afterward, the museum’s column says, crowds went to Toby’s Feed Barn for live music, barbecue, 4-H exhibits, homemade desserts, the Rotary chili cook-off and the barn dance.

Doris “Scotty” Mendoza, known to many children as “Grandma Scotty,” was part of the Point Reyes ranching community for almost seven decades. The museum’s column says she co-founded the Queen Contest, ran it for many years, and encouraged children to join the 4-H. The committee says she created the contest. She died in 2008, at 88, in the ranch house she had lived in for 67 years. For more than 60 years young women competed for the title, which brought a coronation at a dance, the opening of the livestock show, a place in the parade and a cash scholarship. In 2016, with interest lagging and for other reasons, the title became junior grand marshal, open to a young person of either sex, with the same perks.

The Point Reyes Light reported on May 6, 2020, that the coronavirus had canceled that year’s weekend, which would have been the 71st anniversary. “I think it’s sad, but that’s the nature of the beast,” said Loretta Murphy, who sat on the coordinating committee for Sacred Heart Church. In March 2022 the Light announced the return of what it called the “75-year-old celebration,” after two pandemic cancellations, with the parade set for Sunday, June 5. The mainstays that year were the 4-H Club Fair, the Marin Farm Bureau barbecue, the Rotary’s chili cook-off and the Halleck Creek Ranch Cow Flop contest. By the museum’s reckoning the 75th anniversary came the following year, in 2023, under the theme “back in the saddle.”