Yep Kanum Celebration

On the Saturday of the Yep Kanum Celebration, the Colville Firefighters Association serves pancakes from the Pavilion Concession Stand. In 2026 it served from 7:30 to 10:30 in the morning. Classic cars register at 8:00 for a show that runs from 9:00 to 3:00. Yep Kanum Park, at Dominion Avenue and Maple Street, covers about 18 acres of Ponderosa pine and Douglas fir. It holds the city pool, a splash pad, tennis courts, picnic shelters, and the Rotary Pavilion stage. For three days each July the festival fills the park. Admission is free, and the organizers suggest bringing camp chairs or picnic blankets for the entertainment.

Pancakes, wood bats, and two stages

Music on the Rotary Pavilion stage ran from 11:00 in the morning to 9:00 at night on the Friday and Saturday of the 2025 festival, which had 20 live bands. By 2026 there were two stages. The Saturday bill named the Sammy Eubanks Band, the Vaughn Jensen Experience, Danny Bacon, Jake Rozier, and Chet O’Keefe, with Eubanks as that night’s headliner. The beer garden stands by the Rotary Pavilion and opens at noon. Food vendors serve until 8:00 and marketplace vendors stay open until 7:00. The organizers counted 80 vendors in 2026. A Kids’ Village, hosted in 2026 by Momentum Church, runs through the afternoon.

Much of the weekend is amateur sport. The Jim Marshall Inspirational Wood Bat Tournament, for 10U and 12U youth teams and hosted by Colville Baseball, opens on Friday evening at the city park ball field. On Saturday it plays games every two hours from 8:00, holds a Home Run Derby at 6:00, and finishes with championship games on Sunday. On Saturday morning the Basement Boys Wrestling Club runs the Heat Wave Classic Wrestling Scramble on the tennis courts. The Jeff Weeman Memorial Pickleball Tournament plays across town at the Jeff Weeman Memorial Court at Colville Junior High. It begins with a co-ed round robin on Friday, then women’s and men’s doubles on Saturday and mixed doubles on Sunday. 509 Cornhole hosts a cornhole tournament on Saturday and Sunday. Many of these events also raise money for the local organizations that run them.

The car show drew more than 80 entrants in 2026. Its trophies were credited to Foust Fabrication and Davis Auto, and it was coordinated by Lynn Clark, Shannon Lent, and Wendy Enright. Sunday is shorter, ending at 4:00. It opens at 9:00 with a multi-denominational community church service on the Rotary Pavilion stage, one of the purposes written into the festival’s mission along with youth sports and amateur performing arts. On the Saturday night of the 2026 festival, the organizers posted that a girl’s lost shoes, “that resemble something from the wizard of oz,” could be claimed at the information booth in the morning. After the weekend they thanked Parks and Recreation Director Jillian Marshall and the city crews who had spent “long hot hours” hauling trash and picking up litter over the four days the festival occupied the park.

A street fair in 1914

The first Yep Kanum was held in 1914, sponsored by the Colville Chamber of Commerce. The festival’s own account and HistoryLink’s thumbnail history of Colville agree that it lasted three days. They describe parades, a large “Indian village,” and a ball at the Masonic Temple. An article from Avista, the utility, calls it Colville’s first annual street fair. In its telling, electricity was still a novelty, and the local newspaper urged businesses to light their storefronts for the occasion. That first fair had agricultural exhibits, a baseball tournament, live music, and demonstrations of electric power.

The festival’s website says the name comes from the language of the Colville Confederated Tribes and means “harvest time, good powwow, or good time.” HistoryLink gives the same three meanings. Avista gives “harvest time” or “good time.”

HistoryLink records a story about the first Miss Amatap, Violet Pettengill English. She wore a heavily beaded buckskin dress borrowed from the Spokane Tribe. The dress had to be returned to Inchelium on the Spokane Reservation by Saturday night. The next day the store where it was kept burned to the ground, and the dress was lost with everything else.

By the mid-1920s the festival was called the Yep-Kanum and Fair celebration. The Statesman-Examiner’s “Out of the Past” column of August 13, 2025, reprinted a notice from a century earlier. It said the opening-day parade would “depict as nearly as possible the progress of the Colville country from the year 1825, the time when old Fort Colvile was located on the Columbia River at Kettle Falls, to the present time.” Avista says the event later became a Fall Festival and Livestock Show that drew crowds from across the region.

Rendezvous Days and the long pause

In the 1980s the celebration moved to Yep Kanum City Park, under a new name, Rendezvous Days. According to the festival’s website, the name recalled the summer gatherings at Kettle Falls, where fur traders met with Native peoples and up to 14 tribes came together to fish, trade, and socialize. Rendezvous Days had craft markets, baseball tournaments, live music, and classic cars. Avista says it ran for 35 years and drew nearly 100 vendors a year.

The people who later revived it remember it from the inside. Nikole Morrison ran a craft booth there, served food from Brown Boyz, the business she co-owned with her husband, and watched her sons play in the baseball tournament. Brandi Lopata played in its 3-on-3 basketball tournament as a child, alongside her father. Rachelle Latapie grew up attending with family and friends.

The last Rendezvous Days was held in 2019. The pandemic stopped it in 2020, and in the years after, there were too few volunteers to bring it back. The festival’s own history says it “quietly slipped away.”

Eight volunteers and a new name

In October 2024 a group of local volunteers formed a nonprofit, renamed the festival the Yep Kanum Celebration after the park, and began rebuilding it from the beginning. Morrison led the effort. She grew up in Leavenworth and moved to Colville in 1999. The festival’s board page lists her as president. Avista’s 2025 article calls her vice president and says she and eight core volunteers spent nearly ten months planning and raising money for the first revival. She told Avista: “I’m focusing on the importance of community and trying to bring people together in this crazy world we live in. We can’t control everything that goes on, but we can work to make our communities better.” The big banners Avista had once helped hang were missing in 2025. “Maybe next year,” she said.

The rest of the board came to the work from other jobs. Tarrel Cripps, who books the entertainment, has lived in Colville since 1995. He played his first DJ job at the junior-high dance there in 1996 and believes “music can heal the soul.” Lynn Clark, who helps run the car show, has lived in Colville for 46 years. She said the festival gives residents “something to be excited about—and something they can count on for years to come.”

The revived celebration was held July 18–20, 2025, and was held again in July 2026. The 2027 festival is set for July 16–18. Within a week of the 2026 festival, the organizers posted that they were looking for an organization to host a basketball tournament at the 2027 event.