Remembering the Testicle Festival

By Ben Olson
Reader Staff

The early days of the Sandpoint Reader were wild. Editor Zach Hagadone owned the paper then. I was just a lowly writer seeking out adventures to fill these pages, and I was always looking for something interesting to write about.

Somewhere along the line, Zach and I found out about a phenomenon called the Testicle Festival, a five-day debauchery that used to take place at the Rock Creek Lodge, located about 20 minutes east of Missoula, Mont.

We gathered forces, including high school friends Lawson Tate and Lindsay Nance, and planned to attend the gathering to cover the story, for good or ill, and perhaps shed light on this gathering of bikers, nudists, drunks and lowlifes. 

It didn’t exactly go to plan.

With tape recorders, drawing pads, cameras and notebooks in hand, our hopeful crew rolled into the Rock Creek Lodge early one morning and found our way over to a swamp next to the freeway where people were supposed to set up tents. The swamp was about a foot underwater, but that didn’t seem to deter the hundreds of eager festival goers from pitching tents in the flood and heading over to the main event to begin drinking.

If there was a central draw to the Testicle Festival, it was, of course, testicles. Bull testicles, to be exact. Rod Lincoln — who liked to be called the Baron of Balls — founded the festival in 1982 as an annual event where people would gather to drink, party and eat copious amounts of bull testicles, also called Rocky Mountain Oysters. I remember interviewing Lincoln behind the bar one night as all hell erupted around us; his deep, gravely voice just barely registering in my tape recorder, telling us he named it the Testicle Festival because he “liked the way it rolled off your tongue.”

Day after day, we careened from one crazed group to another, trying to find out why they were at the Testy Festy — what it meant to them. If anyone knew, they weren’t sharing.

Along with the incessant drinking that took place, the Testy Festy also drew a strange mix of nudists, hippies, bikers, Grizzly Adams-types and college kids. There were wet T-shirt contests, live bands playing behind actual chicken wire and an event called Bullshit Bingo which featured a scantily-clad woman (whose name was, simply, Bitch) in her late 50s leading a bull around a dancefloor. Whichever square the bull pooped on was the bingo number called.

One afternoon, we stumbled into a crowd of people and made our way forward only to find two older festival goers copulating right on top of a picnic table still festooned with plates of bull balls and beans nearby.

The testicles themselves weren’t anything to write home about. They were thinly sliced and heavily breaded, tasting like chicken strips that were mostly fat. I didn’t like the flavor much, but Zach was so hungry he ate all of our portions, licking the plates clean of any leftover ball juices. I have refused to let him live it down.

It must’ve been the second night when I noticed the tape recorder I had been using all weekend wasn’t running. The microcassette tape was missing, and the only place I remembered taking it out was inside the Sweet Pea porta-potty where I hid for several minutes for peace and quiet while switching the tape around.

Sure enough, I returned to the honey bucket and found my microcassette tape inside the toilet, resting perfectly atop a mound of what was likely bull testicles and beans not too long before. Mustering all of my drunken courage, I leaned far into the hole and retrieved my tape, washed it off and was back recording in no time. Zach never let me live that one down, either.

In the end, the four of us left the Testy Festy in shambles, destroyed after drinking hard for about 36 hours and interacting with the worst people on Earth. No matter how hard we tried, neither of us could write an account of the trip that did it any justice. We simply returned home and fell into our respective beds, hoping to forget about the Testicle Festival forever.

We did return the year after, hellbent on covering the story that we couldn’t cover the first year. However, upon arriving, we realized we were too late. We had missed it. The only thing that remained was an acre of trash, beer cans, broken glass and a burned-out van in the field that was still smoldering.

The Testicle Festival lasted 35 years until 2017, but the owner who took over from Lincoln finally shuttered it after a series of incidents, fatal crashes, stabbings and lawsuits made it rather inhospitable, even by Montana standards. The only thing that remains today is a scar where the Rock Creek Lodge used to sit, and Baron of Balls Rod Lincoln held court behind the bar while thousands of people drank their body weight, fought, got arrested and ate plates filled with breaded testicles.

It was the most Montana thing I’d ever seen. Is it strange that I miss it?