McCall Winter Carnival: A Hundred Years on the Snow

McCall holds one of the oldest winter festivals in the American West, and its origins are as genuinely local as the snow piled against the town's storefronts each January. The first event was called the Payette Lake Sports Carnival, and it was held in the winter of nineteen twenty-three to nineteen twenty-four. In those early years the program included dog sled races, snowshoe races, ski jumping, horse skijoring, and a tug-of-war.

Horse skijoring is a sport where a skier is pulled across the snow by a horse at speed, and it was as popular on Payette Lake as it was in mountain communities across the West at the time. The original sports carnival faded and ended in nineteen forty-one, and a winter carnival was revived decades later. The event recently marked one hundred years since that first carnival.

Over the decades the event grew into a week-long gathering that draws tens of thousands of visitors to a town of fewer than four thousand permanent residents. The centerpiece today is the snow sculpture competition, in which teams from across the region spend days carving elaborate figures from massive blocks of groomed snow along the waterfront. Some sculptures rise twelve or fifteen feet, and the finished works are lit at night against the dark water of the lake.

It is one of those rare events that was not invented by a resort or a tourism board but grew from the community's own winters, from the impulse of people who lived with deep snow for months at a time and decided to celebrate it rather than simply endure it.