The RD Mac team gets dirty during a mud volleyball tournament at the 2016 Huckleberry Festival in North Powder. The festival returns this year with socially distanced activities after going on hiatus in 2020 due to the coronavirus pandemic.

NORTH POWDER — A major North Powder event is coming back this summer.

North Powder’s annual Huckleberry Festival, which like most events was canceled in 2020 due to the COVID-19 pandemic, will return in July due to falling infection rates in Union County.

The event, in keeping with tradition, will be July 31. This is the last Saturday in July, the day the festival has been conducted in past years.

Activities at this year’s festival again will include a breakfast, a parade, a car show and a street dance, said Lindsey Thompson, chair of the Huckleberry Festival. Some events, including a huckleberry dessert contest, will not be run this year to help the festival conform to social distancing standards. Thompson said events such as the dessert contest will be added back in future years once the COVID-19 pandemic ends.

Thompson is impressed with how people are stepping forward to offer to work as volunteers.

“We have a lot of new people with lots of energy,” Thompson said.

The Huckleberry Festival started in 2007.

The festival recognizes the historical significance in the North Powder area of the popular fruit. Huckleberries were a staple for American Indians who summered in the area and for the pioneers who arrived in the mid-1860s, according to a July 24, 2008, article in The Observer.

The Huckleberry Festival joins the ranks of other spring and summer events rebounding this year, including the Eastern Oregon Livestock Show, the Elgin Stampede, the Union County Fair, Union’s Grassroots Festival, Elgin’s Riverfest and the Eastern Oregon Beer Festival.