The Buck Contest kicks off Friday night at the Men's Club, same as it has for decades: dinner, live music, a $35 ticket that gets you a seat at a table full of people you've probably known for twenty years. By Sunday morning, Bell Street will be closed for a mile so a parade can pass through it, as it has for decades. If you live in Los Alamos, none of that is news. You've watched this weekend arrive on the same three-day schedule for as long as you've lived here.
What's actually different this year has nothing to do with the schedule. It's what's now open two doors down from where the parade turns.
The Same Three Days, Year After Year
Los Alamos Old Days is organized entirely by the Los Alamos Valley Men's Club, the nonprofit founded in 1946 that has run the event for decades. The format hasn't changed in living memory: a Friday night Buck Contest with dinner and live music, a Saturday that stacks a classic car show, an artisan mart, and an open-pit barbecue contest with categories for tri-tip, chicken, and pork ribs, cooked Santa Maria style with no smokers allowed. Sunday belongs to what organizers call the Greatest Little Small Town Parade, a procession that in past years has started around 11 a.m. and run the length of Bell Street.
Ray Williams, whose family has been involved with the Men's Club since his parents joined in the late 1970s and early '80s, has watched the weekend from both sides, first as a kid hanging around the club and now with his own children pitching in. Asked what he looks forward to most, he didn't point to the parade.
"Saturday night for me is always the fun one," Williams told the Santa Maria Sun.
That's the kind of answer only a resident gives. The parade is for spectators. Saturday night, with the live music and the cook-your-own-steak dinners at the Men's Club, is for the people who actually live here.
Closing Bell Street for the parade isn't free, either. Williams has said the club spends tens of thousands of dollars each year just to shut the street down for the morning, with 40 to 50 entries typically filling the route. It's a detail that doesn't show up on any flyer, but it explains why the weekend feels like it's been paid for by the town itself, because it has.
The 80th Annual Celebration
The 2024 event was the club's 78th annual celebration, followed by the 79th in 2025 and the 80th this weekend, September 25 through 27.
The 80th annual celebration is run by the same volunteer club on the same street. The Men's Club has kept a flag-carrying tradition going since 1966, when the King family first led the parade procession, a role the family has held onto since. Grand marshals get picked from among people who've spent decades in town. In 2024 it was Dan and Charlene Chabot, residents since 1973.
None of that changes this year. What changes is what's now standing open a few doors from where all of it happens.
Bell Street's Wine Calendar Learned to Sync Itself to Old Days
Pico Los Alamos, the restaurant occupying the town's historic 1880 general store at 458 Bell Street, launched its Fresh Wine Festival back in August 2023 as its own standalone event, an evening built around small producers who mostly don't have tasting rooms of their own. Wine director Kace Sarvis capped the guest list at sixteen vintners on purpose.
"I want people to have time to connect with these winemakers," Sarvis told the Santa Maria Sun.
By 2025, the festival had done something worth noticing: it moved. Instead of running on its own August date, Pico's third annual Fresh Wine Festival was scheduled for the first night of Old Days itself, timed deliberately to open the weekend rather than compete with it. The restaurant's own team has described the event as a way to kick off the town's signature celebration with a glass of wine in hand before the Buck Contest even starts.
That's a small thing, but it's the kind of small thing that tells you how a town's calendar actually works. The wine festival didn't ask Old Days to move around it. It rearranged itself to fit the older tradition.
The Landmark That Finally Reopened
Here's the part that's genuinely new, and it has nothing to do with Old Days directly, which is exactly why it changes how the weekend feels.
The 1880 Union Hotel, at 362 Bell Street, has been closed to overnight guests for more than a decade. It's one of the oldest buildings on the street, built in 1880 by Wells Fargo agent J.D. Snyder as a telegraph office and stagecoach stop, burned down in 1893, rebuilt in 1915, and restored again in 1972 with aged wood matched to the original facade. Johnny Cash once played there in the 1950s. It's Santa Barbara County Landmark #39. It's also the building where Michael Jackson and Paul McCartney filmed the music video for "Say Say Say," and the room McCartney is seen getting ready in has since been renovated with a clawfoot tub you can now book.
As the Santa Barbara Independent reported, the property was taken over by Voyj Travel last fall, a hospitality company that has previously worked on properties in Joshua Tree and Paso Robles. This was their first major acquisition as a group, and this spring they used it to bring the hotel back with four consecutive winery weekends: Lo-Fi Wines, McKinney Family, Koehler, and Demetria, each pairing overnight stays in the nine restored rooms with a winemaker dinner and vineyard tour.
Creative director Kyle McCarthy put it simply when asked what comes next.
"We hope to do a lot more," McCarthy told the Santa Barbara Independent.
The saloon now opens to the public a couple of nights a week, with weddings and private events filling most weekends, nine rooms and all, already booked out through much of the fall as of this spring. It's not a full return to the everyday hangout it might have been decades ago. But it's open, which it hasn't been in over ten years, and residents have noticed. One local reviewer summed it up plainly.
"There are no words to describe how excited I am that the saloon is open again."
The Street You'll Actually Walk Down This Weekend
Put those two threads together and you get something worth paying attention to if you already live here: this Old Days weekend, the town's oldest tradition and its oldest reopened landmark are both running on the same three days.
If you walk Bell Street this Thursday evening before the Buck Contest, the saloon at the Union Hotel will likely be open for a drink, something that wasn't possible for over a decade of Old Days weekends. Friday night, Pico's Fresh Wine Festival opens the celebration the way it's now designed to. Saturday brings the car show, the artisan mart, and the barbecue contest to Bell Street the same way it always has. Sunday, the parade runs its mile, past a hotel that used to sit dark behind boarded windows every year this weekend came around.
None of the schedule changed. What changed is what's now standing open around it.
- Friday: Buck Contest at the Men's Club, and Pico's Fresh Wine Festival kicking off the weekend on Bell Street
- Saturday: Classic car show, artisan mart, and the open-pit barbecue contest, with steak dinners and live music that night at the club
- Sunday: The Greatest Little Small Town Parade down Bell Street, historically starting around 11 a.m.
At its 80th annual celebration, Los Alamos Old Days is still exactly what it's always been. The street it happens on isn't quite the same street you walked last September, and that's worth noticing even if you've seen the parade forty times before.
If this is the kind of detail that makes you think about what it would actually mean to put down roots on this side of the valley, Dianna Zlaket has spent nearly two decades getting to know these streets one season at a time, and she's happy to talk through what living here really looks like, Old Days and all.
