Clark County Nevada Fair & Rodeo Festival
Nevada’s Clark County contains one of the most famous cities on earth, yet its county fair does not happen there. The Clark County Fair & Rodeo unfolds each spring in Logandale, a small farming community in the Moapa Valley roughly fifty miles northeast of Las Vegas, where the grandstand looks out on fields and desert hills rather than neon. It is a rural, volunteer-powered gathering built around a professional rodeo, and it belongs to the valley: five April days of livestock, exhibits, midway lights and arena dirt in a town of a few thousand people.
The 2026 edition ran from April 8 to April 12 under the theme “Red, Wild & Blue,” with the rodeo as its headline and a carnival, livestock shows and a three-county exhibits programme filling the grounds around it. Because so many other states also have a Clark County, coverage of this fair is easily polluted by summer fairs elsewhere sharing its name. This article keeps Nevada’s record separate and carries the fair’s own two versions of its history side by side rather than blended.
A Spring Fair in the Moapa Valley
The Clark County Fair & Rodeo is operated by Clark County Fair Inc., a nonprofit Nevada corporation based at Logandale. One distinction matters throughout: the corporation runs the fair, while Clark County Parks and Recreation, a county government department, operates the fairgrounds property itself through the year, including rentals outside fair week. The two bodies are partners in practice, but they are not the same organisation, and the department should never be named as the fair’s operator.
The fair’s home is the Clark County Fairgrounds at 1301 West Whipple Avenue in Logandale, a site of roughly one hundred ninety acres beside Grant M. Bowler Elementary School, holding a rodeo arena and grandstand, an exhibit and fine arts building, and livestock facilities. The fair counts nearly five hundred volunteers on its own pages. Las Vegas, the county seat, plays only supporting roles here: many visitors drive up from it, and exhibitors may use a drop-off point there, but the fair itself is Logandale’s.
Quick Facts
| Item | Detail |
| Fair name | Clark County Fair & Rodeo |
| Fair town | Logandale, in the Moapa Valley |
| County seat | Las Vegas, about fifty miles southwest of the grounds |
| Grounds | Clark County Fairgrounds, 1301 West Whipple Avenue, Logandale |
| Operator | Clark County Fair Inc., a nonprofit corporation |
| Grounds property | Run year-round by Clark County Parks and Recreation, a separate body |
| 2026 edition | April 8 to April 12, 2026 |
| 2026 theme | Red, Wild & Blue |
| Headline | PRCA and WPRA professional rodeo |
| Admission | No 2026 price ladder published by the fair; the last published ladder belongs to 2024 |
Two Tellings of One Beginning
Both of the fair’s own history versions agree on the starting point. The fair began in 1965 as the Moapa Valley Fair, held at the community center in Overton, the valley’s other town. From that base it grew by accretion, adding a carnival midway, a livestock show and eventually a rodeo. Through the nineteen seventies and into the early nineteen eighties it lived a wandering life, staged at scattered parks, schools and churches while it searched for a permanent home.
For a useful comparison, see the Churchill County Nevada Fallon Cantaloupe Festival & Country Fair Festival for another county festival.
Where the tellings divide is the sequence that followed. The fair’s older, more detailed history records that in 1981 the fair committee, working under Grant M. Bowler, obtained the one hundred ninety Logandale acres from the Bureau of Land Management. In that version, the name officially changed to Clark County Fair in 1986; the fair was first held on its new permanent grounds in 1988, before the venue was even complete; and in 1997, carried by the rodeo’s popularity, it took the name Clark County Fair & Rodeo. The fair’s current story page compresses that journey into one step, crediting visionary locals in 1988 with rebranding it under the full rodeo name at once.
This article does not blend those accounts, because the fair itself publishes both. What can be said without choosing between them is firm: the fair began in 1965 as the Moapa Valley Fair, and it has been at Logandale since 1988. That year is the fair’s Logandale-era billing — its homepage describes the town as hosting a premier professional rodeo since 1988 — and never a founding year. The fair publishes no edition number, so none is derived here. No fair was held in 2020 or 2021 during the pandemic years, and the fair returned in 2022.
What to Expect
A Professional Rodeo at the Center
The rodeo is the fair’s headline and the reason for its April date. Sanctioned through the PRCA and the WPRA, it draws the professional circuit into a small-town arena, and the fair’s homepage bills more than six hundred of the world’s top professional athletes among its competitors — a claim carried here as the fair’s own billing, not an audited count. The four stock contractors named for 2026 were Macza Pro Rodeo, Legacy Pro Rodeo, Western Rodeos, and Sankey Pro Rodeo & Phenom Genetics. The events documented in the 2026 Logandale results span the classic programme: bull riding, bareback riding, saddle bronc riding, steer wrestling, team roping and tie-down roping, joined by barrel racing and breakaway roping. Older fair copy describes nightly performances building to a Sunday finals round, the traditional shape of the week rather than a verified 2026 timetable.
The Midway and the Show Rings
Around the arena, the grounds run at full stretch. A carnival midway lights the evenings, with ride passes sold separately from gate admission. Livestock shows anchor the agricultural side, and fair-era reporting counts more than two hundred livestock competitors. Volunteers run through everything: with nearly five hundred of them, the fair operates less like a commercial event and more like a valley-wide work week that happens to have a grandstand.
Exhibits Open to Three Counties
The exhibits programme reaches well beyond Clark County. Under the fair’s 2025 exhibits book — the most recent in the record, used here for the programme’s shape rather than for any 2026 dates — competition was open to residents of Clark, Lincoln and Nye counties, with entry drop-off points in Bunkerville and Las Vegas as well as at the grounds. Its divisions covered Fine Arts, Home Science, Home Arts, Industrial Arts, Photography, Horticulture, Science, Creative Arts and Small Livestock. That breadth makes the exhibit halls a regional showcase rather than one county’s display.
Stages, Stunts and Older Favourites
The stage bill previewed for 2026 mixed music and novelty acts: Radio Ready, the hypnotist Tyzen, the Doo-Wah Riders, The Imaginaries, and Mad Chad the Chainsaw Juggler. Those names belong to the 2026 edition specifically. Pig racing and mutton bustin’ appear in earlier descriptions of the fair as long-standing midway fare, but neither is confirmed in the 2026 line-up, and neither should be promised to a visitor planning around them.
Planning Your Visit
Getting to Logandale
Leave Las Vegas on Interstate 15 heading northeast, and the city gives way to open desert before the Moapa Valley opens out around Logandale. The fairgrounds sit beside the elementary school named for Grant M. Bowler, the man the detailed history credits with securing the land. The approach roads serve a town, not a city, so patience at arrival and departure times is worth packing. The fair’s own handbook credits the event with approximately one hundred thousand visitors, while older fair copy put the figure above eighty thousand patrons. Both numbers are the fair’s own claims, carried here as claims; either way, a very large crowd descends on a very small town.
Money, Honestly Stated
No 2026 admission ladder was published on the fair’s own site in the record behind this article, so no 2026 gate price is printed here, and resale listings quoting far higher averages are mark-ups, not evidence. The last ladder the fair published belongs to 2024 and is useful only as a sense of scale: advance admission was twelve dollars for any one day, with a season pass covering all five days at forty dollars; at the gate, general admission for ages thirteen to fifty-nine was fifteen dollars, seniors and children from five to twelve paid twelve dollars, and children under five entered free. Rodeo tickets and carnival passes were separate from admission. Parking and fair-week camping prices for 2026 are likewise unpublished, and the motorhome rates circulating online for these grounds come from an unrelated dog show’s paperwork, not from the fair.
A Sample Day at the Fair
Begin in the exhibit and fine arts building while the light is good, working through photography and horticulture before the halls grow crowded. Cross to the barns late in the morning, when the livestock shows are in full swing. Take lunch from the midway vendors, then claim grandstand seats in good time for the rodeo, because the arena is the day’s centre of gravity. Finish under the midway lights after dark, when the April desert air cools.
April in Logandale, August Elsewhere
The most useful comparison for this fair is with its own namesakes. Clark County, Washington holds its fair in August, and Clark County, Ohio holds its fair in July at Springfield; Kentucky, Indiana and Wisconsin run Clark County fairs of their own in the summer months. Nevada’s fair shares nothing with them but the county name — not their dates, not their prices, not their history. Anyone checking details for a Logandale trip against a summer Clark County fair elsewhere is reading the wrong record. Nevada’s version is a five-day April rodeo fair, and that spring slot shapes everything from its weather to its place on the early-season professional circuit.
Your Logandale Checklist
- Confirm the edition’s April dates on the fair’s own channels before booking travel
- Allow generous time for the Interstate 15 drive between Las Vegas and the Moapa Valley
- Budget using the fair’s own current announcements, not resale listings or other states’ prices
- Plan the day around the rodeo performance, and take grandstand seats early
- Leave room in the schedule for the exhibit halls and the livestock barns, not only the midway
- Give the exhibit halls a slow visit; competition reaches into Lincoln and Nye counties
- Dress for desert spring weather, warm in the sun and cool after dark
- Treat any price printed without a year as suspect until the fair confirms it
Beyond the Fairgrounds
Overton, where the fair began in 1965, remains the valley’s other anchor town, and the Moapa Valley’s farming landscape — fields watered in the middle of the desert — explains why an agricultural fair took root here. The elementary school beside the grounds carries the Bowler name, tying the land story into daily town life. Las Vegas lies under an hour away for beds and flights, but the fair’s geography points the other way: toward a small valley that kept its fair and rebuilt it into a professional rodeo stop without surrendering it to the city down the highway.
Why This Fair Matters
The Clark County Fair & Rodeo is proof that scale and setting need not match. A nonprofit corporation and an army of volunteers in a town of a few thousand sustain an event the fair itself credits with six-figure reach, a professional rodeo of national standing, and an exhibits programme shared across three counties. It is also a survival story: a fair that began in a community center, wandered between parks and churches, won its own land and paused for two pandemic years is still setting its April dates. In a county defined worldwide by one city’s appetite for spectacle, the valley’s quieter achievement — keeping its own fair its own — is the more remarkable record.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is the Clark County fair held in Las Vegas?
No. The fair takes place at the Clark County Fairgrounds on West Whipple Avenue in Logandale, roughly fifty miles northeast of Las Vegas in the Moapa Valley. Las Vegas is the county seat and a source of visitors, but the fairgrounds, the rodeo and the event itself are all in Logandale.
What does admission cost?
The fair did not publish a 2026 price ladder on its own site in the record used for this article, so no current gate price can be stated honestly. Its most recent published ladder was for 2024, when advance admission cost twelve dollars, the five-day season pass cost forty dollars, and walk-up general admission cost fifteen dollars, with lower rates for seniors and children and free entry under five. Treat those figures as history, and confirm current prices with the fair before travelling.
What is the difference between the fair’s operator and the county’s role?
Clark County Fair Inc., a nonprofit corporation, operates the fair itself. Clark County Parks and Recreation, a county government department, operates the fairgrounds property through the year, including rentals when the fair is not running. The county runs the venue; the corporation runs the fair.
Which counties may enter the exhibits competition?
Under the fair’s 2025 exhibits book, competition was open to residents of Clark, Lincoln and Nye counties. The divisions ranged across fine arts, home science, home arts, industrial arts, photography, horticulture, science, creative arts and small livestock, with entry drop-offs in Las Vegas and Bunkerville as well as at Logandale.
What to Expect From the Next Clark County Nevada Fair & Rodeo Festival
How often is the Clark County Nevada Fair & Rodeo Festival held?
It is held once a year, in spring. The modern fair’s documented editions fall in April across five days, a pattern visible in the 2024, 2025 and 2026 editions alike, and the April slot sets it apart from the summer fairs held by other states’ Clark Counties. The interruption of 2020 and 2021 stands as the exception that proves the annual rhythm.
When is the next Clark County Nevada Fair & Rodeo Festival?
The fair has announced its next edition for April 7 to April 11, 2027, billed with the theme “Kick the Dust Up.” That places the coming fair in the same early-April window as its recent predecessors, running Wednesday through Sunday in Logandale. The fair’s own channels remain the authority if plans are adjusted closer to the date.
Will the dates change?
The fair’s recent history suggests stability within a narrow band rather than fixed calendar days. The 2024 edition ran April 10 to 14, the 2025 edition April 9 to 13, the 2026 edition April 8 to 12, and the announced 2027 edition steps one day earlier again, to April 7 to 11. The season, the five-day length and the Wednesday-to-Sunday shape have held steady; only the exact dates drift, so checking the announced dates for the specific year remains essential.
The Clark County Fair & Rodeo asks one thing of its visitors: come to where the fair actually is. Leave the city, drive the desert highway, and arrive in a valley town that has been building this event since 1965. What waits there — a professional rodeo, three counties of exhibits, and a midway glowing against the April dark — is not a smaller version of anything in Las Vegas. It is the Moapa Valley’s own fair, on its own ground.
One Comment