Once a year, a remote town with less than a thousand residents quadruples in size for a weekend. With all-night softball games, a live concert, wild West barn dancing, the world’s largest melon on wheels, a melon carving contest, and nearly 100 food and craft vendors, Green River comes alive during the annual Melon Days festival.
This year the festival takes place on September 15 and 16, with all-you-can-eat, locally-grown melon slices just an hour drive north from Moab. The free fruit and hyperlocal varieties are great, and certainly reason enough to visit, but the main draw for many is the culture around melon eating and growing.
“It’s an unofficial town reunion for anyone who’s ever lived here,” said Robin Hunt, the city’s event planner and member of one of the historic melon-growing families. Her great-grandfather, Homer Nelson, started growing melons around 1942, and always seemed to enjoy “experimenting with the melons” and sharing them too.
“Homer was really a people person,” Hunt said. “If he met someone who had never tried a Green River melon before, he would crack a melon open and give them the heart, the center, to eat.”
According to Hunt, there’s been a growing number of first-timers coming to town to try these one-of-a-kind fruits, traveling from as far as Germany, France, and Australia. Since the first Melon Days in 1906, these crowds have come for the variety. Crenshaw, casaba, canary, and honeydew are popular, as are the classic red-flesh watermelons. Hunt prefers Israeli melons because “[they are] absolutely delicious—sweet and flavorful” and she uses the classic Crimson Sweet watermelons in her current favorite drink: lemon juice, seedless watermelon, and ice in a glass-lined with Tajín.
The three other Green River melon families, the Veteres, Thayns, and Dunhams, will be handing out free slices all day after Saturday morning’s Main Street parade at 10 a.m. These juicy fruits make a refreshing snack in between other activities like the Melon Run 5K walk/run, pony rides, shooting range fun shoot, and golf tournament. On Friday evening before the main day, you can also peruse the children’s entrepreneur market in the city park or carve your own melon down the street at Epicenter.
Tourists, locals, birds, and raccoons aren’t the only ones that come to town for melons; black bears have been known to come down from the Book Cliffs for a taste close to harvest time. Green River’s elementary school, whose mascot is a bear, even used to display a taxidermied bear eating a watermelon. According to local legend, this very bear was found feasting in the Thayns’ melon fields not too far from the current route of the Melon Run. A discerning bear would look for a brown, dried-up curly cue vine and decent bleached spot to find a melon ripe for harvest. They might also consider the shape: oblong melons are especially watery whereas compact fruit is sweeter.
If you want to follow the bears and celebrate a 117-year-old tradition, come to Green River this September 15 to 16. You can see the full schedule, sign up for the Melon Run, or learn more about the melon grower dynasties and history, at www.Melon-Days.com.
