By Pepper Fisher
JOYCE, Wash. – The 40th Annual Joyce Daze Wild Blackberry Festival is this Saturday. Started in 1983 by Jean Robertson, it’s gone through some name changes along the way, but you can still get some tasty blackberry pie by the slice for $6, or $7 if you want it ala mode. All made by dozens of volunteers using their celebrated local wild blackberries.
Over the years, organizers have added some events and discontinued others. Gone is the Joyce Daze Royalty, the beard contest, the trail hike, and the notorious cow pie bingo. But you can still get in on the pancake breakfast, hosted by the Crescent Grange, with proceeds going to scholarships.
Highlights of this year’s festival include a parade, vendor’s booths, live entertainment, and Rae Leiper says they’re bringing back the slug races.
“The slug races are a big, new event that’s only been here a couple of years. It’s not sponsored by the Joyce Daze committee, but it’s by a local man, raising money for the fire district. Bring your own, or you can just show up at the family kitchen and bet on one of the slugs that’s there. Nobody wins cash prizes. Mugs and patches, if your slug wins, but all the money goes towards the fire district.”
And Joyce Daze wouldn’t be Joyce Daze without the blackberry pie baking competition. Leiper says this year they’ve expanded the youth division.
“That’s an important part of the event. We get lots of local people wanting to bake pies. And, we have a youth entry this year that changed ages so it can be older. It used to be the cutoff was 12, and now the cutoff of his 17 years of age for the youth category. So, hoping to encourage some young pie bakers out there.”
Go to joycedaze.org for more details on the timing of the events. That’s Joyce Daze with a Z, dot org.