Crawdads back in the Yaak at the Dirty Shame Saloon

Crowds of crustacean lovers gathered at the Dirty Shame Saloon during the weekend to enjoy a revival of the once-renowned Crawdad Festival in Yaak.

Saloon owner John Runkle said about 2,000 pounds of crawdads had been sent - live, via Fed Ex - from New Orleans, just in time for the comeback of the saloon’s homage to the southern delicacy. 

The crawdads were cooked “southern-style” and served with corn, potatoes and spicy sausages for both the regulars and tourists who had crossed state lines to attend the saloon’s first big event since the establishment re-opened last fall.

Live music kicked off on Friday night, and people were offered the option of camping out or taking the shuttle back to lodging down the road. People on horseback rode by to take a closer look at the festivities in the late afternoon. By early evening on Saturday, the atmosphere was rambunctious and welcoming.

Runkle, looking across the bar and outside to the campfire and horseshoe ring, estimated “a couple hundred” of people attended the three-day festival that wrapped up Sunday. It was a promising new beginning to a fresh era at the Dirty Shame, Runkle said.

The Crawdad Festival – or CrawFest, as it has sometimes been called - was discontinued by the saloon’s previous owner. 

When Runkle brought the bar out of foreclosure last February, he was determined to bring the festival back.

“This is the first [crawdad festival] in seven years,” Runkle said, as he greeted customers near the busy bar, where serious crawdad eaters hunched over their plates. 

“The response has been overwhelming.”

For Bonners Ferry, Idaho man Corey Richards, the event was a chance to eat a bountiful amount of crawdads, just like he did when he regularly made the trek to the festival two decades ago.

With two plates of crawdads in his hand and a pile of claws and shells on the picnic table he sat at, Richards said he had gone through about 100 since the saloon started dishing them out earlier on Saturday.

 “I used to come to the festival in the 90s,” Richards said. “I’ll be coming back again if I can.”

Two picnic tables behind him, Celine Fuchs said she and her partner, Matt Niedermann – both from St. Gallen, Switzerland -  had come across the Canadian border the day before and were told by a border officer that they should stop at Yaak for the festival.

“We’ve met people from everywhere,” Fuchs said. 

Fuchs said they were on the last leg of a trip around the world that had taken them to Australia, the Philippines, New Zealand and Fiji before they reached Los Angles and traveled up the coast to Canada, and then east.

“We were planning to head south after this, but we might be going to see our new friends in Spokane now instead,” Fuchs said. “This has been a great mistake.”

Runkle said that, after all the work that had gone into the 2014 Crawdad Festival, it will definitely be back next year. “This will absolutely be an annual event,” he promised.