Third annual Kootenai Highland Gathering July 17

The third annual Kootenai Highland Gathering will take place July 17-19. The festival, held at River Bend outside Libby, celebrates Celtic heritage.

Celtic heritage, however, isn’t a requirement, the event is being billed as a family fun weekend.

 “Traditionally, gatherings and games were held as a means of allowing clans to come together to celebrate their kinship,” Angie McLaury, one of the coordinators for the Highland Gathering, said. “It’s a big family picnic.”

The event will kickoff Friday, July 17 with a Caele.

“It’s a get together. There will be live music, a tug-a-war competition and admission is free,” McLaury said.

For those that own a kilt and want to show off their legs, there will be a nice legs contest Friday evening.

The Celtic competitions will take place Saturday, July 18, and are sanctioned by the Scottish American Athletic Association, which means the event is recognized worldwide. Admission into the event will cost $8 for the general public and $5 for seniors and military personnel, and will be free for kids 10 years old and younger.

The most popular event is the caber toss. In this event competitors toss a large tapered pole called a caber. The caber is stood upright and lifted by the competitor using both hands under the bottom of the caber to rest against their body. The competitor then runs forward to build momentum, before tossing the caber into the air so that it turns end over end with the upper end landing before the end originally held by the competitor follows through and hits the ground. The goal is for the caber to land in line with the original run. “The running joke is that Scottish people are too cheap to get their own cell service, so they carry their own telephone pole,” Tammy Blackburn, a coordinator for the Highland Games, said.

The other athletic competitions include, the braemer stone, weight over bar, sheaf toss and the hammer throw. Drew McLaury, one of the competitors said that all the events have some type of military background. “They weren’t allowed to train with actual weapons back in the day. So they used the resources that were around them to train.”

Other competitions were a right of passage. “The manhood stone was a right of passage. You weren’t  considered a man until you picked up that stone,” McLaury said. “If you couldn’t lift that stone by the time you were 16 or 17 years old, you were considered lazy.”

The competitions are laid back and friendly. “In the competitions, your biggest competition is right there behind you cheering you on and giving you tips,” Drew McLaury said. “It’s definitely a friendly competition.”

The weekend will be more than just the competitions. There will be over 20 vendors set up and bagpipers from Flathead County.

“All the vendors have hand crafted items, nothing is premade. We try to keep it authentic,” Angie McLaury said. “We will have weavers, spinners and woodcarvers.”

“We will have a genealogy booth set up and it will help people do a little research on their heritage,” McLaury said. “It was very popular last year.”  

Blackburn and McLaury believe that the Highland Gathering is a good way to get people to visit Libby.

“We went over to the games in Hamilton and Tammy went to the games in Spokane and we both talked about how it would be a cool thing to bring to our area,” McLaury said. “It’s a good way to get people to Libby. It’s a fun family event. We have a beautiful area with the Kootenai River and the mountains and people need to see that.”

For McLaury the theme of the event is family and history.

“It’s all about learning a little more about your family. I think that’s something that’s been a little lost with the younger generation. They don’t know their heritage,” she said. “If you don’t know where you’ve been, how do you know where you are going?”