Fish Days – Lake Andes

The Fish Days festival at Lake Andes in Charles Mix County, South Dakota, has been running since the 1930s, making the 2026 edition one of the genuinely long-tenured small-town lake festivals in the northern Great Plains. The event transforms the community each year across June 5–7, 2026, with a program that reflects the specific social culture of a South Dakota agricultural town built around a 4,700-acre glacially formed lake: practical, unpretentious, and organized by the community institutions — the Andes Central Honor Society, the Lake Andes Fire Hall, the ABATE motorcycle club — that constitute the town’s civic fabric without the nonprofit infrastructure that larger festivals require.

The “SUMMER FUN” parade down Main Street opens the festival on June 5, with the parade’s floats and marching units drawn from the surrounding Charles Mix County communities. The Andes Central Honor Society fish dinner at the Lake Andes Fire Hall is the culinary centerpiece, serving fresh fish in a format that has made the dinner itself a reunion destination for former Lake Andes residents who return for the festival each summer. The bean bag (cornhole) tournament at City Park runs alongside family-friendly games and activities through the weekend. The ABATE Motorcycle and Car Show and the street dance provide the Saturday evening programming that closes the festival’s most heavily attended day. Admission throughout is free.

Lake Andes and Charles Mix County

Lake Andes, the town’s namesake water body, is a natural glacial lake at 1,590 feet elevation on the Missouri Coteau plateau, covering approximately 4,700 acres when at full pool in wet cycles. The lake’s water level has fluctuated dramatically over the past two decades with the hydrological variability that characterizes prairie lake systems in the northern Great Plains, ranging from near-full pool to severely depleted in drought years, which has complicated the fishing-centered identity the festival’s name implies. The Lake Andes National Wildlife Refuge, south of the lake on the same drainage, provides protected habitat for the Canada geese, mallards, and shorebirds that use the South Dakota prairie pothole country as both breeding and staging ground through the seasonal migration cycle.

If You’re Going with Kids
The South Dakota Discovery Center and Aquarium in Pierre, 100 miles west on US-18, is the most complete family science and natural history destination within a half-day drive of Lake Andes, with interactive exhibits on South Dakota geology, prairie ecology, and the Missouri River system that provides the geographic context for Charles Mix County’s landscape. The drive west on US-18 through the James River valley and the Missouri River breaks passes through a landscape that rewards observation at highway speed in a way that the interstate system west of Sioux Falls does not.

The Missouri River and the Regional Water

Lake Francis Case, the Missouri River reservoir behind Fort Randall Dam 20 miles west of Lake Andes on US-18, provides the regional large-water fishing and recreation destination that the festival’s glacial lake setting cannot match for scale. The lake extends 107 miles upstream through Bon Homme and Charles Mix counties, with walleye and northern pike fishing that attracts serious anglers from across the upper Midwest. The Fort Randall Casino Hotel on the Lower Brule Sioux Reservation’s tribal land on the lake’s east shore provides the closest full-service lodging to Lake Andes for visitors who want a lakefront property in the immediate area. Look on Lake.com for vacation rental properties in the Charles Mix County and Lake Francis Case corridor.