The crowd fills the main the drag of vendors at the Mossyrock Blueberry Festival Saturday afternoon.
Local emergency vehicles kick off the Mossyrock Blueberry Festival’s annual parade Saturday morning.
A string of classic cars rolls down State Street in Mossyrock Saturday as part of the annual festival’s parade.
The temperature was warm and the sky was clear in Mossyrock Saturday morning as a crescendo of emergency sirens filled the air. A voice over a loudspeaker joked that either the Mossyrock Blueberry Festival Parade was underway, or someone was in some serious trouble.
Now in its 12th year, the Blueberry Festival has expanded from a simple street festival to an event spanning the entirety of Klickitat Prairie Park for a full weekend, always the first weekend in August.
Just as the parade was gearing up to start, with hundreds of people gathering along either side of State Street, Bruce Baskin finished his mic test. Baskin was the parade’s emcee, a title he donned about a decade prior. It was his first time seeing the festival since.
“They didn’t have nearly as many vendors, so it has grown, definitely,” he said.
Janet Meade, one of six current festival board members, echoed that sentiment. She was just getting started running a small set-up in a wooden shelter in the park, selling blueberry goods.
Each year, they try to make the festival family-centric, she said. A special emphasis is put on things that draw in the kids, such as an art activities tent, a bouncy house and musical acts that appeal to a wide audience, consisting of a number of Lewis County bands. Throughout the entire weekend, visitors tally into the thousands, she said, estimating any given year falls between 3,000 to 7,000 attendees.
The pie-eating contest drew a crowd of all ages, too. On Saturday afternoon, the contests were separated by age brackets, with kids 6 to 9 kicking it off, then 10 to 13, and finally 14 to adult.
Waiting for their queue, the kids smashed their faces into a pie tin filled with blueberry pie, eating as fast as they could.
The winner of each bracket won a $20 prize. The Robert Morris Lodge in Silver Creek put on the contest.
One of the festival’s volunteers, Debbie Turner, said that questionnaires given to visitors in years past indicated the array of vendors has been the most popular aspect of the festival. This year, she guessed, there were upwards of 30 vendors. While many were locals, some came from eastern Oregon or Idaho.
This was Debbie Turner’s first year volunteering at the festival.
“I just wanted to do something for the community. Community enrichment, make our town bigger and better,” she said.
Her husband, Kevin Turner, was a first-time festival volunteer, too. He pointed out an improvement gleaned from guest questionnaires: A shuttle between the popular car show on the school grounds to the festival. Kevin Turner said he had been operating nearly non-stop a tractor donated by Brim Tractor pulling a shuttle car donated by Cowlitz Prairie Grange.
“We need more volunteers,” Meade said, adding that the local school has done a lot to fill that gap and giving credit to school administration for getting kids involved. They’ve helped man admission gates and run different aspects of the festival. Each group that gets involved, whether that’s the cheerleading squad, football team or a class, gets a donation from the festival board.
Farther into the park, a dunk tank was set up, with all proceeds going to benefit the senior class of Mossyrock High School. The funds get divvied into a few different directions, but most are funneled into the senior class trip, said senior class advisor Phil Voelker.
“Every senior class goes on a senior trip, and so it depends on how much money we raise in this and other events through the year, and then this will pay for the senior trips,” he said.
There was a steady stream of challengers, hoping to hurl balls, at a buck for three, at the target and drop an unlucky volunteer off his or her perch into the water below.
As for the parade, the 45-minute procession kicked off with a string of local emergency vehicles, starting with a cop car from the Morton Police Department.
What followed was a string of classic cars, revving their engines and showering — sometimes pelting — the kids eagerly standing along the roadway with candy. Interspersed throughout were local businesses and organizations on floats, along with candidates for county offices vying for votes in the Aug. 7 primary.
