Mid-August in the Valley
The 57th annual Sun Valley Arts & Crafts Festival takes over Atkinson Park, just off Main Street in Ketchum, from August 14 through 16, with 126 professional artists and craftspeople coming in from 27 states. It's juried, it's outdoors and it is quite good. . There's a genuinely useful overlap worth knowing about if you're building a Friday around this weekend. August 14 is also a Music Festival night, with the orchestra performing Tan Dun's Water Concerto at the Pavilion that evening. Spend the day wandering Atkinson Park, then drive the few minutes to Sun Valley for a concert after dinner. Here's the next two weekends in order, if you're deciding what to actually clear your schedule for:
August 14 to 16: Sun Valley Arts & Crafts Festival, Atkinson Park, Ketchum. Free, no tickets, 126 artists from 27 states.
August 20 (Thursday): Sun Valley Music Festival closes its 42nd season at the Pavilion.
August 21 to 23: Wood River Valley Studio Tour, artists' studios across the valley, 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. Free and self-paced.
What comes after the studios open
The Studio Tour is a different format entirely from the Arts & Crafts Festival. Instead of one park with 126 booths, artists across the Wood River Valley open their own studios for three days, and the pace is meant to be unhurried, with time to actually talk technique with the person who made the piece. It's the quietest of the three events by design, which makes it a fitting way to close out August after two weeks of bigger crowds downtown.
After that, the valley's attention shifts north. The Sawtooth Salmon Festival runs August 28 and 29 at Redfish Lake in Stanley, a free celebration of the roughly 900-mile journey Idaho's salmon make from the ocean back to their spawning grounds, with a Shoshone-Bannock Tribe performance among the weekend's events. It's a 60-mile drive over Galena Pass, the same road Tour de Force used for its Huckleberry Drive, and it pulls the crowd out of Ketchum for a change instead of into it. September brings the 13th annual Ketchum Oktoberfest at Sawtooth Brewery, and October closes with the 30th annual Trailing of the Sheep Festival, October 7 through 11, marking a century and a half of sheep moving through this valley.
For more on what makes this stretch of the Wood River Valley tick through every season, the Sun Valley in Summer guide rounds out the wider calendar, and the Sun Valley neighborhood page has more on what year-round life here actually looks like.
