By Steve Johnson, Public Information Officer, Bullhead City

The biggest festival in Bullhead City for the past seven years is the River Regatta in August, a nine-mile float down the Colorado River. It began in 2007 when about 900 people on inner tubes and rafts set off from Community Park and floated down to Rotary Park. In 2012, 27,000 people joined the Bullhead City Regatta!

The event requires a lot of support from the city, community and businesses. Local department stores, sporting goods stores, even hardware stores– that might not otherwise carry watercraft — offer tubes, rafts and life-jackets for this annual festival on the water.

Competition: teams, inspired by a different theme each year, create floats as wild as their imagination and as big as a bundle of inner tubes or Styrofoam will take them, compete for cash prizes and trophies. Over the years, the Colorado River has carried grass huts, birthday cakes, huge floating alligators, even pirate ships along its cool, rippling currents under the August desert sun.

Riverside residents are also encouraged to compete by decorating their homes and cheering on the floaters, many of whom are visitors from around the country.

Bullhead City River Regatta participants fill hotels, restaurants and stores, infusing hundreds of thousands of dollars into the local economy during the weekend event.

Regatta revelers hold parties and cheer on floaters

Thousands prepare to launch from Community Park

By Steve Johnson, Bullhead City Public Information Officer

April in Bullhead City, hundreds of volunteers in dozens of organizations will greet and cater to thousands of motorcycle enthusiasts for the annual Bike Fest. The Laughlin River Run has been a Tri-State tradition for 31 years. For the past two years, southern California Harley Davidson dealers have hosted Bike Fest in Bullhead City’s Community Park. The tens of thousands of visitors who come to the area for this exciting event are welcomed by our Kiwanians, Rotarians, Soroptimists, Boys and Girls Club members, girls and boys scouts.

Recently, the city of Bullhead City created a central, online, interactive calendar where all local service groups and non-profit organizations can post events. BullheadCityEvents.com provides a “Suggest Event” button on the front page of the calendar that users click on to open the submission program. Users fill in the blanks, describe the event in their own words and submit the request. A notification is sent to several city staff, anyone of whom can approve and post the submission from their office, tablet or smartphone. BullheadCityEvents.com receives about 5,000 pageviews per month from some 1,500 Web visits. And, the popularity is growing! For April, nearly 30 events are posted. The events calendar also provides local businesses an opportunity to advertise, thus offsetting the annual hosting cost and making the calendar community funded. Bullhead City regularly promotes the events calendar with a link the front page of the city’s website and a billboard on its government channel TV4. The TV4 Billboard is another way Bullhead City promotes community events and bringing awareness to the many volunteer opportunities in our area.