CHUGWATER - The Chugwater K9 Festival was the first of its kind to the Chug and included pet talent shows, a half-marathon, a 10K, a 5K, food, vendors, sidewalk chalking competition and a classic car show with the original school bus that ran from 1953 to 1977 in Chugwater when it was PCSD #2.
The organizer of the festival was Amber Ash who is the daughter of Chugwater mayor, Carol Ash.
The half-marathon began at 6:30 a.m. and that was followed by the 10K runners and then the 5K runners. All runners were actually bussed out to their prospective starting lines on Iron Mountain Road.
There were over 130 runners who finished their races and of those, 50 of them had dogs. Some runners even had two dogs on leashes.
One of the features of the car show was the school bus which was a 1953 International which was most likely purchased in the town of Chugwater from the International dealer that was once doing business on Main Street.
Aaron Pullmann, the current owner of the vintage school bus is from Kearney, Nebraska.
“I found the school bus on Facebook marketplace in 2015,” Pullmann said. “It was in Scotts Bluff. It’s a thrill to come here to Chugwater with this school bus that was here in the ‘50s and ‘60s. I knew when I got it running that I would have to come back here at some point. I got it ‘streetable’ in May and then tried to figure out what was going on in Chugwater.”
Pullmann found the Chugwater Facebook page and messaged them about the bus and that he’d like to drive it up.
“A week later I found about this K9 festival and I thought, great, the kids will actually enjoy some of the events here and they won’t be totally bored at a normal car show setting,” Pullmann said. “We just decided to make it a weekend vacation.”
Pullman kept a running tally as to what it cost him to begin the restoration, and figured he had over 1400 hours into it. He did all the work himself.
“I pretty much rebuilt everything but the exterior body,” he said. “I’ve got $40k into it. It’s a different engine. It had a straight six in it and so what I did was I found a wrecked Chevy Express on one of the salvage auction website and it’s a 6.0 liter engine with a six-speed automatic that came out of a 2013 Chevy Express.”
According to Pullman, they “shoehorned” it in and chipped away at the firewall until the engine fit where he wanted it.
“The floors from door back was all plywood,” Pullmann said. “I ripped that all out and as for the engine, I have a cherry picker so getting the old one out was not all that bad. The most challenging part was putting the engine in and building the frame rails to fit since it was a different height. So yeah, trying to figure out how it was all going to fit was a head-scratcher.
Along with the races, there were over 30 vendors that had set up a craft fair in the park and off to the south there was a ropes obstacle course set up and also a zip line for people who wanted to be adventurous. The Chugwater Economic Development group brought in that entertainment for those who came to the festival.
