In Cedar City, Utah they have lots of parades and festivals throughout the year. Moving to Alaska, I live in a small town, that’s not classified as a city, just an unincorporated area. We do have a great community, and have community events to participate in, but only one parade. I miss all the parades that Cedar has throughout the year.

But, while in Utah, I was able to go and watch the Sheep Parade! This is a new one, at least since I moved away. According to the website it’s been around since 2006, so not that new. It’s put on as part of the Cedar Livestock and Heritage Festival. It happens in the late fall when the sheep are done at their summer pastures and are being moved to the valley winter grazing.

The parade is one of a number of different events that happen during this long weekend. Some of the other events are:

• Quilt Show
• Antique Tractor Pull
• Cowboy Poetry
• Art and Photo Display
• Stock Dog Demonstrations
• Dutch Oven Cookoff
• Rodeo
• Sheep shearing demos
• Vintage Auto Display

There are quite a number of other activities and events as well, these are the ones I’ve either been to or seen done other places and found very interesting.

This year we only had time for the parade, but they had a new addition from the last time I went. Even though it’s called a sheep parade, they started the parade with long horn cattle. Those are impressive to see, and I’d not been around too many long horns in my life, and never that close.

The parade also has a lot of other items, there’s tractors and horse drawn wagons, lots of horses, a few floats, and quite a number of sheep trailers used by the shepherds throughout the summer as they take care of the sheep.

The grand finale is the sheep, somewhere around 1,000 sheep coming down main street. Most of the time the sheep are pretty well behaved, but I was told there have been times when they’ve gotten a little bit excited and ended up in some of the stores along the way.

This usually happens toward the end of October, so if you’re anywhere near Cedar City that time of year, look it up and then go and see. It’s a fun weekend to be in town!