Strawberry Days, and how the dates actually fall

In June, and across nine days rather than a weekend. In 2026 the celebration ran from Saturday June 13 to Sunday June 21 under the theme Stars, Stripes and Strawberries, which put the opening weekend in the second week of the month. Almost every listing describes it as the third week of June, and it does not reliably fall there, which is enough to miss the parade by seven days. The dates move from year to year, so take them from the festival's own site for the year you are traveling in.

The first one was held in June 1921, organized by the local Wasatch Club to advertise the strawberry crop the town was then growing. The accounts of that first celebration describe a crowd in the low tens of thousands, free strawberries and cream given away, and cars driven into a field and circled to form a rodeo ring. Pleasant Grove bills the week as the longest continuing community celebration in Utah, and the rodeo bills itself as Utah's longest running rodeo, both on that 1921 date. Those are the organizers' own claims.

At the Pleasant Grove Rodeo Arena at 485 West 220 South, a few blocks southwest of the downtown grid. It runs under Professional Rodeo Cowboys Association sanction with the seven standard events on the card, and it occupies four evenings inside the nine day frame, which in 2026 were Wednesday 17 to Saturday 20 June. The arena was renovated ahead of the 2026 season with roughly 1,500 additional seats, so any seating plan that predates that renovation describes a different building.

Most of it. The grand parade is free to watch, the carnival is free to walk into with rides charged individually, and the strawberries and cream are given away exactly as they were in 1921. The ticketed parts are the rodeo, which is sold by night, the concerts, which are sold by act, and the run, which carries an entry fee and closes registration before the week starts. A family can attend most of the nine days and buy nothing beyond carnival rides and food.

Not commercially, and that has been true for a long time. The town was a substantial producer of berries and orchard fruit from the 1920s through the 1950s and carried the nickname Utah's Strawberry City because of it, but production faded after the 1950s and there is no commercial fruit ground left inside the city. The festival kept going anyway, which means the town now hands out a crop it stopped growing about seventy years ago.

Through the rodeo's own operation rather than through the city, and it is worth being deliberate about it. Resale listings for this event circulate widely and the seating maps attached to them are frequently out of date, particularly since the arena gained roughly 1,500 seats for the 2026 season. Buy from the rodeo's own site or the festival's own channel, confirm which of the four evenings you are buying, and remember the arena is outdoors, so the weather is part of the ticket.

A grand parade through the downtown grid, a carnival on the festival grounds, concerts, a street run, the rodeo across four evenings at 485 West 220 South, and the strawberries and cream session that gives the week its name. The program repeats year to year but the individual days, hours and prices do not, and they are published noticeably later than the dates themselves. Treat any running order you find outside the festival's own site as a rumor until it is confirmed.

Away from the affected blocks, and then walk. The parade route runs the downtown grid, the carnival and town center events sit around the refurbished Downtown Park, and the arena is a few blocks southwest, so everything competes for the same curb space inside a plat that was laid out in 1850. Nothing in the week needs the freeway and nothing in it is more than a short walk from anything else, so parking once on the edge takes less time than circling closer in.

The town center park that was refurbished alongside new public safety buildings in the downtown grid, carrying three pavilions, new play equipment and an oversized strawberry play feature installed as a nod to the June celebration. It anchors the town center events during festival week and it is open the other fifty-one weeks of the year, which makes it one of the better reasons to walk the old grid outside June. It is not the city's splash pad park; that is Cook Family Park.