The Moose Dropping Festival
Near Talkeetna, Alaska
For thirty seven years Talkeetna threw one of the strangest parties in Alaska, the Moose Dropping Festival. Held each July, it raised money for the Talkeetna Historical Society, and it was named for its signature game. Organizers collected moose droppings, the dried pellets the animals leave behind, varnished and numbered them, then dropped them from a helicopter onto a target on the ground.
People bought tickets on the numbered pellets, lottery style, and whoever's dropping landed closest to the mark won. For decades it was good, goofy, small town fun. But the festival became a victim of its own popularity.
By two thousand nine, the last year it ran, attendance swelled past five thousand people in a town of only about eight hundred fifty. The crowd overwhelmed the community, and the weekend turned rowdy and dangerous, with heavy drinking, arrests, and injuries. This next part is somber.
That final festival ended in tragedy when a reveler went into the river and did not resurface, and his body was never recovered. Facing the mayhem and lacking the community support to control it, the Historical Society canceled the festival for good in August of two thousand nine. The town still tells the story, part fond memory, part cautionary tale about a joke that grew too big.
