By the time the first riders roll out of Mercer on the morning of Thursday, October 8, the Northwoods will already be well into its slow autumn slide. The maples will have gone red and gold, the mornings will carry a bite, and the little Iron County town of Mercer will briefly become the staging ground for one of northern Wisconsin's largest off-road gatherings: the 24th Annual Pumpkin Run ATV/UTV Rally.
The premise is simple enough to explain in a sentence and rich enough to sustain four days of riding. Participants register with the Mercer Area Chamber of Commerce, pay $25, and receive a rally packet containing an ATV/UTV map of Iron County and a commemorative bandanna. Then they ride. At designated stops scattered across the county's trail network — businesses, taverns, resorts, and waypoints that have signed on as hosts — riders collect stamps on a poker sheet. Fill the sheet, and you get to draw a hand. Best five-card hands take cash prizes, announced the Wednesday after the rally wraps.
It is, in other words, a poker run on wheels, and it has been for nearly a quarter century. The event's longevity is a testament to a formula that has barely needed reinventing: give people a reason to ride somewhere specific, give the businesses along the way a reason to want them there, and let the trails do the rest.
The 2026 edition runs Thursday, October 8 through Sunday, October 11, deliberately straddling Columbus Day weekend — a holiday that, in this part of the state, has long functioned as the informal close of the riding season. Registration and packet pickup open at 8 a.m. Thursday at the Chamber of Commerce office, with late pickup available until midnight at the Great Northern in Mercer. The poker run itself runs 2 to 8 p.m. Thursday, noon to 8 p.m. Friday, noon to 8 p.m. Saturday, and noon to 6 p.m. Sunday. Registration and packet pickup are also being offered in Hurley, the Iron County seat about 20 miles northwest, at a time and location still to be announced.
This year's poker run gives riders a choice of two different sets of stops spread across Iron County, or the option to buy both sheets — $35 per rider instead of $25 — and double their chances at a winning hand. Riders must collect a stamp from every business on their chosen sheet to be eligible to draw. Extra cards can be earned through purchases and by participating in the Great Pumpkin Parade.
That parade is the rally's centerpiece and its most visible moment to anyone not on a machine. Lineup begins at 4 p.m. Saturday at the Mercer DNR Ranger Station, and at 5 p.m. the parade rolls through downtown Mercer — a procession of decorated ATVs and UTVs, many of them elaborately done up for the season. Afterward, from 5:30 p.m. until close, the Pumpkin Party takes over Cleveland's Clubhouse and Yukon 51, billed by organizers as "two parties, double the fun."
The scale of the trail system is what makes an event like this possible. Iron County boasts the largest ATV/UTV trail network in Wisconsin — roughly 200 miles of routes and trails threading through the county forest, past former mining and lumbering sites, lakes, and waterfalls. The county forest is open to ATV/UTV riding in all four seasons, with trails typically open from mid-May through March 31 or until winter closes them down. Mercer sits at the heart of it, connected to what the local club describes as the largest trail system in the state.
The rally is organized by the Mercer Area Chamber of Commerce, but it does not happen without the Mercer Dusty Loons ATV Club, a 100-percent volunteer organization that maintains trails, hosts group rides, and supplies much of the labor and local knowledge that a four-day event demands. The Hurley Chamber of Commerce, Iron County businesses, and a small army of volunteers round out the effort. The Dusty Loons' own calendar — club rides, parades, raffles, an annual picnic, and something called the Big Foot Hunt — reads like a portrait of a community that has organized itself around its trails.
That organization is not incidental. Winter sports built the area's tourism economy long before ATVs arrived, and the transition to warm-season riding was, in many ways, a matter of extending a seasonal economy across more of the calendar. The Turtle Flambeau Flowage, the sprawling reservoir between Mercer and Park Falls, draws anglers and boaters from Chicago, Milwaukee, and Minneapolis — all within a few hundred miles. The Pumpkin Run gives those same visitors a reason to come back in October, when the fishing has slowed and the snow has not yet arrived.
It is also, quietly, a business-development program. Every stamped stop on a poker sheet is a business that a rider might otherwise have driven past. The requirement that riders visit each location on their sheet to be eligible for prizes turns the trail map into a customer list, and turns a weekend of recreation into revenue for taverns, restaurants, gas stations, and lodges across a county with a small year-round population. For a town of Mercer's size, a few hundred riders over a long weekend is not a rounding error.
The $25 registration fee — $35 for both poker sheets — is modest by the standards of organized motorsport events, and it buys the map, the bandanna, and a place in the drawing. The winning hands are announced the Wednesday following the rally, with cash prizes going to the top five.
What the Pumpkin Run really sells, though, is harder to put on a registration form. It is the particular pleasure of a fall ride in the Northwoods — cold air, colored leaves, a machine humming under you, and a destination at the end of every leg. Twenty-four years in, that has proven to be a durable thing to build a tradition around.