Happy Saturday friends!
Hope you have been having a great week, we are here, so many great friends coming by, and having plenty of fun... leaving quite a bit of gear here too. Gonna be some warm folks here this winter. It's been our best Alaska Fair yet... and that is saying something. Been doing this a while.
Life in the shed is good, did get a bit chilly this week, woke up to 35F one morning, and there is Termination Dust on the mountains here.. that is the indicator that winter is coming. Maybe we should insulate it sometime soon.
Other than that, the concerts have been great, Bachman Turner Overdrive last Monday night was exceptional... they really are Taking care of business. Got a couple more fun ones coming this weekend too.
One more fun little thing, we had a super nice young lady come in and share her story of climbing to the top of Denali wearing our Trekker socks... Completely amazing story and person. Love hearing how well they did for her too.
Only have a few days left before we have to come home and get ready for our fall season... going to share a couple more fun Alaska stories today, it's been quite a few years here at the fair, and thought we should share some fun about the fair.
Ron and T and the crew running the show back home at the BWC
might have gone hiking/fishing on our days off... luckily there were no photographs taken or published...
The Alaska State Fair is what happens when summer realizes it is about to get evicted and throws one last, slightly unhinged house party in Palmer.
It's such a fun event, so many great friends here, excellent food, fun shows, and some really great vendors... this is our happy place, really enjoy it.
Every year, about an hour north of Anchorage in the Matanuska-Susitna Valley, hundreds of thousands of people show up at the foot of the Chugach Mountains for Alaska’s official last blast of summer. This is like year 17 or 18 for us, and it is the most fun eve In 2026 that blast runs August 21 through September 7, 11 a.m. to 10 p.m., with Tuesdays and Wednesdays off so everyone can go home, do laundry, and emotionally recover from funnel cake.
Thursday the whole circus wakes back up and runs through Labor Day Monday. What started in 1936 as a celebration for Depression-era farm colonists has grown into the state’s biggest annual gathering: rides spinning under actual mountains, barns full of prize animals, flower halls that smell like a greenhouse on vacation, and enough fried food to power a small village. (can't beat the fried halibut booth across from us, it's the best)
Then there are the vegetables.This is the fair where cabbages become celebrities. Long summer daylight plus glacial soil turns ordinary produce into furniture. The official world-record cabbage, grown by Palmer’s Scott Robb in 2012, weighed 138.25 pounds. Pumpkins have tipped past a ton. People bring forklifts. Crowds cheer. There are Cabbage Fairies. It is all extremely normal, if you live in Alaska.
The 2026 weigh-off for the leafy heavyweights is Friday, September 4 at 6 p.m. Come for the science. Stay for the collective gasp when something that should be coleslaw needs two people to carry it.
The giant pumpkins are amazing too..
Everything else is also extra. There is a carnival with mountains as the backdrop.
There is a fair train. Parking has been free for a fourth straight year, which in Alaska is almost as miraculous as a 100-pound cabbage. Concerts at the Borealis Theatre have ranged from Modest Mouse to Nate Smith to deadmau5, with names like CAKE, Megadeth, The Beach Boys, and Lyle Lovett also on the 2026 poster. (the venue is right behind our shed, the concerts come to us every night... usually great stuff) Have had some amazing shows over the years.
Somewhere in between you can catch a Diaper Derby, a beard contest, lumberjack show, rodeo, antique tractor pulls, senior joke-telling, livestock, quilts, honey, local art, and at least one person eating something on a stick that has no business being on a stick. (The pork chop on a stick is great)
One of my favorite things is the "Rat Race Game" hamster and a wheel, they release the rat, and whatever color hole it goes into wins from 1x to 15x the money you put down.
The mood is half county fair, half “winter is coming and we refuse to go quietly.” They do such a great job of not letting it go full on commercial, and keep stuff local (other than us) and real fun, real food, and not all made overseas stuff.
Kids scream on rides. Grown-ups compare giant zucchini like they are comparing fish stories. Vendors sell everything from birch syrup to things you did not know you needed until you were already holding them, like bison socks and hats. By closing night, everyone is tired, sticky, slightly sunburned, and already talking about next year.
That’s the Alaska State Fair: a 90-year-old nonprofit party in a valley that grows vegetables the size of toddlers, set against mountains that make the Ferris wheel look shy.
One of our neighbors here on the fairgrounds: Nuska.co
super cool handmade wool fish rugs...
Once upon a time, in a land of midnight sun, glacier-fed rivers, and enough fish stories to fill a freezer, there lived an artist in Alaska who looked at a rainbow trout and thought: You would look incredible on someone’s floor. That was how Nuska.co began—not with a grand business plan, but with yarn, a tufting gun, and the slightly unhinged conviction that a halibut belongs in a living room.The first fish did not arrive politely. They burst onto the frame in loops of wool and acrylic, all spots, stripes, and attitude. Rainbow trout showed up in pairs, because one trout rug is a statement and two is a school. Rockfish arrived already looking like they had opinions. Halibut—the quiet celebrity of the collection—became the bestseller, the big flat ambassador who somehow made people say “I need that” before they even knew where they would put it.Each rug was signed and numbered on the back, like a tiny catch-and-release ceremony. Full-sized fish got sequential numbers.
Mini fish got their own little census. By the time the maker hit one hundred full-sized rugs, the studio felt less like a workshop and more like a hatchery that had gotten wildly out of hand. The process was part craft, part ritual, part “please don’t sneeze on the wet glue.”
Tuft the body. Glue the backing. Wait eighteen hours. Cut the fish free. Shave the pile until the colors sat crisp as a river stone. Separate the hues so a trout’s pink stripe actually meant something. The maker didn’t even put neighboring colors right next to each other on the frame—because fish, like Alaskans, need a little space.
Then came the plot twist: tropical fish. A mahi-mahi crashed the party, neon and unapologetic, as if Alaska had briefly borrowed Florida and decided to keep the souvenir. Sardines followed in a collaboration, small and silver and suspiciously charming. Foraging clothes appeared too—sweatshirts and hats for people who wanted to look like they might vanish into the woods and come back with berries and a story. People started taking the fish home. A rockfish shipped off to a new kitchen. A pair of trout claimed a cabin floor. Minis gathered on walls like a very soft aquarium. Strangers walked in, pointed, and said the sentence every fish rug dreams of hearing: “That’s the one.”The rugs never swam again, of course. They had a better job now. They waited by doors. They caught muddy boots instead of mayflies. They made guests laugh, then kneel down, then run their hands along a tail that would never flick.And late at night, if you listened closely in an Alaskan studio that smelled faintly of yarn and glue, you could almost hear them:One hundred down. A hundred more. Gone fishing—just not the way you think.
Think we need a giant halibut for the ranch... or maybe some salmon. Really impressive stuff
if you need anything... we still have some stuff in stock (for now)
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