STORY AND PHOTOS BY KAREN BOSSICK

Is there room for a second Trailing of the Sheep parade?

One might have looked at all the adults and children wearing lamb’s ears and sheep headdresses at Saturday’s Folklife Fair and decided it reasonable to assume you could shepherd a herd of people-sheep down the road.

If they aren’t baaaa-shful, that is.

Thousands of people flocked to Roberta McKercher Park in Hailey Saturday—many of them dressed in sheep’s clothing ranging from scarves to wool hats to wool sweaters, which were clearly not needed on a warm 70-degree day.

Those who hadn’t been to the Folklife Fair in a few years were flabbergasted at the crowd. No telling  whether it eclipsed the 2019 Folklife Fair before the pandemic, but no one could deny that the parking stretched for several blocks along at least three Hailey streets.

Deida Runswick brought her Valais sheep Curly and Lambert from her animal rescue ranch in Hailey to the fair for the first time. And they were fast hits as adults and children alike edged in to pet the animals’ coarse curly hair and run their fingers along the spirals on the horns, which Mother Nature seemed to have artistically sculpted.

The scent of sheep soap drifting across the park beckoned festivalgoers to the booths of some 80 vendors who had come from as far as Texas and Minnesota.

Ketchum artist Ronni Neumann showed off a pumpkin patch full of purple and blue pumpkins, along with the customary orange and white pumpkins, made of soft Merino wool. There’s no need for carving with them, she noted, and they’re easy to dust with a hair dryer.

Mountain Valley Farmstead’s Randal Stoker, who raises sheep north of Salmon, Idaho, told how sheep cheese can often be tolerated by those who can’t tolerate conventional cheese made from cow milk.

Students representing The Community Table set up an assembly line of face painters, who painted rainbows, lamb and other colorful pictures on children’s faces. And others taught children how to make sheep masks and puppets using cotton balls.

B’s Brooms offered the most colorful brooms one might ever find. And a weaver from Boise stopped her spinning demonstrations periodically to let toddlers pet the angora rabbit that she trims three times a year for the soft fuzzy wool she spins.

“We love this festival,” said John Marsh, of Bellevue. “We come every year.”