Rain dampens attendance at Chinese lantern festival and Greenbluff’s Apple Festival

Day after day of rain has suppressed turnout at two of the region’s signature events this fall, keeping people from the eye-popping Chinese lantern festival downtown or going to Greenbluff to pick pumpkins and apples.

As of Thursday there have been 19 days of measurable rain in October and rainfall totals are inching ever closer to the record of 5.41 inches set in October 1947.

The lantern festival was so popular last year that organizers kept it open an extra two weeks. The first-time event drew about 80,000 people. But this year’s attendance has lagged heading into the final three days. So far about 36,500 people have strolled through Riverfront Park to see the handmade lanterns filling meadows and lining park paths, said park director Jon Moog.

While the rain is a big part of that, attendance is also down because the event is not being extended an extra two weeks this year, Moog said. “It’s a second-year event,” he said. “The popularity has waned a little from last year.”

Attendance can hit 4,000 on a dry day.

But the extended rain has not damaged the lanterns and neither did windy weather that swept through Spokane earlier this month, Moog said.

“They’re a lot sturdier than they look,” he said. “They look very light and very delicate.”

The Lantern Festival won’t be back next year because of the redevelopment of Riverfront Park. “They probably won’t come back until 2019, when construction is complete,” Moog said.

It’s been the same story at Greenbluff. The rain began falling on opening weekend of the Apple Festival in mid-September and there hasn’t been much respite, said Harvest House owner Todd Beck. “There’s been an impact on all of us this year, there’s no question,” he said. “We usually have nice fall days with the blue skies and falling leaves.”

Business boomed last weekend when the sun shone for a couple days, but overall attendance is down, Beck said.

“We still have people coming up,” he said. “It’s definitely not consistently busy like it was last year.”

Still, after two dry years the rain is good for the neat rows of fruit trees that line his orchard. Orchards report a bumper apple crop.

“It is what it is,” he said. “You can’t change the weather.”

Both the Apple Festival and Lantern Festival end Sunday. The National Weather Service is predicting a dry Friday followed by a weekend of rain showers.