October - Ketchum, Idaho - Trailing of the Sheep Festival

October in Idaho is a wonderful time of year. The weather starts to cool down, the hoodies start to come out of the closet and what few leaves we have around start to turn beautiful colors. One of our favorite events that happens in the area this time of year is the Trailing of the Sheep in Hailey & Ketchum, Idaho. We happen to have stumbled upon this event in 2011 when we were forced to stop in Ketchum due to a road block for a parade. We walked around for a while, watched the parade and were stunned to see it end in hundreds of sheep flocking down Main Street. It was a hilarious sight to see sheep stumbling over each other.

The next year we couldn't help but plan our weekend around a trip to Ketchum to watch the sheep again. We researched it a little more on the Trailingofthesheep.org site and found out that there was a whole weekend of events for this silly old tradition and found that there is championship sheepdog trials happening the same day of the parade so we made a tentative plan for the day of enjoying the parade, eating some lunch and watching the sheep dog trials.

We hit up our favorite little pizza shop called Wise Guys Pizza in Ketchum for a slice after the parade. If you are ever in Ketchum or Hailey check out Wise Guys, they have a fun, hipster atmosphere and some great pizza.

Quigley Field in Hailey is where the sheepdog event happens. The view of the area was amazing and we couldn't have asked for better weather. Admission is $2 and it's best if you have a lawn chair. The announcers did a great job of explaining the event and what the judges are looking for. Although we had a great piece of pizza from Wise Guys we couldn't resist the delicious smells of the lamb meals that the food stand at the field had. We tried out the lamb sandwich and it was just as good as it smelled!

All in all I'd say our Sunday trip north was a great, inexpensive adventure, one that I know we will plan for many years to come!

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