Autumn is my favorite time of year.
For 15 years, Bayfield Heritage Days and Sheep Trailing has kicked off fall with a fun, family event that welcomes both our locals and visitors to downtown Bayfield.
We would love to have you join us Saturday!
The unique aspect of our festival is the sheep trailing, where J. Paul Brown and his family bring a sheep herd through Bayfield to start our event.
We're pretty proud that our trailing is authentic. Some towns host sheep trailings where they truck in some sheep, the sheep run around for awhile, then they get trucked back out.
Ours are really moving through from their summer range in the mountains to winter pastures south of here.
That happens about 9 a.m., give or take. They run on sheep time, not our time.
After that is the Heritage Days parade, which has lots of entries this year and promises to be a good show.
Then we move into Joe Stephenson Park, where we have lots of fun stuff going on. New activities include a tractor-decorating contest, two horseshoe tournaments, and a square dancing demonstration. And we have some fun for Saturday night as well! These include events include a riding lawnmower race and a miniature caber toss. A caber is the size of a tree trunk. This is a traditional Scottish sport that is at a lot of Highland game contests. Ours are smaller than the huge cabers so we can have more participants!
There's also a cast iron pan toss and a street dance. Upper Pine Fire is hosting a chili cookoff between their cooks and those from other fire departments, as well as Xrock radio, one of the event sponsors. Samples are $5 and benefit firefighters' charities.
There's a complete lineup of events in today's edition and at www.bayfieldheritagedays.org.
Hope to see you tonight and Saturday!
Thanks for reading.