The Eighth Annual Joe’s Valley Bouldering Festival will take place September 22 through September 25 in Castle Dale. Castle Country Radio spoke over the telephone with Festival Representative, Julie Janice to talk about all the details of the festival.
“It’s September 22nd through 25th, we run it Thursday through Sunday and we try to have something for everybody. So we would really love to have the local community come out and join us. We kick things off Thursday the 22nd when everybody is showing up, we have food trucks out, we do a motorcycle rodeo. So Thursday is kind of our starting to get everybody acquainted,” said Janice. There will also be a cornhole tournament at 7:00 pm with YETI prizes and then a Night Bouldering Meet-up at 9:00 pm both events will be held at the Emery County Rec Center.
Friday is dedicated to getting to know the local community and events are geared around that. “So we have clinics all day long with local artisans. People can come make donuts at the Food Ranch, they can make Ungermans Beef Jerky, we do a lot of clinics like that and the climbers just love it. Then our big event that night, that I would really encourage everybody to come check out, is we do a climber’s rodeo,” stated Janice. This is open to all climbers. They host events like steer wrestling, chicken chases, hide races, and riding horses. This can be pretty entertaining as most of the climbers have never competed in these types of events.
“Then Saturday is more focused on climbing clinics out in the canyons, and we would love to have folks come out and see what we do out there, boulders too. Even if you not interested in doing that, we have a huge raffle on Saturday evening, that people can come check out the food trucks, we’ll have vendors, we’ll have the Young Entrepreneurs out, and then after that we do a big raffle in the evening,” said Janice. The amazing prizes and products are all donated by sponsors of the event. The total value of the raffle prizes is around $20,000.00.
Sunday finishes up with a community service event and this year will feature two projects. One will be cleaning up and making improvements to the Grand Wash Area along side officials from the Forest Service and BLM. “One I’m really excited about is we do a volunteer in town project and we’re going to be working with the Castle Dale Senior Center to do a painting project for them inside. So this is a huge event, people love it, I’ve had people reaching out to me all year, how can I help? what’s going to be going on? So we usually end of with 50-60 people that are volunteering between the two and we just love that we are able to give back through that,” said Janice.
To learn everything there is to know about the Eighth Annual Joe’s Valley Bouldering Festival visit their website at https://www.joesvalleyfest.com/