What was Mighty Mud Mania?
Every summer from 1976 through 2019, the City of Scottsdale took a backhoe to the lawn at Chaparral Park, dug pits, trucked in a hundred tons of dirt, added water, and invited the city’s children to throw themselves in. Mighty Mud Mania was free, it was enormous, and for anyone who grew up in Scottsdale in those four decades it was as fixed a part of summer as the first 100-degree day.
It started as an advertisement. In 1976 the event was the “Shout It Out Decathlon,” a promotion for Johnson Wax’s Shout spray prewash. The company handed out about 300 white T-shirts, the kids got them as dirty as possible, and the plan was to wash them clean and prove the product. The way the event’s longtime coordinator, Terry Erickson, told it in 2005, the Shout people tried for three years and the Scottsdale mud never came out, so they quit. The city kept the event, renamed it, and ran it for another four decades.
The first one drew about 200 people. By the mid-2000s it drew more than 10,000. The 44th annual, on June 8, 2019, was the last.
How it worked
The setup. City crews started digging weeks ahead, working from 6 a.m. until about 2 p.m. to stay ahead of the heat, and the event needed about 250 volunteers on the day. In 2003 the city brought in 100 tons of dirt for two mud courses and 80 tons of sand for kids who didn’t want to get muddy; by 2005 it was 120 tons of mud, with some pits four feet deep. The city budgeted about $15,000 in 2003 and covered most of it with sponsorships and a share of vendor sales.
The courses. In 2003 the event was for ages 1 to 13, with ribbons by age bracket on the main course and about fifty baby pools of mud, the “mud house,” for the under-fives. In 2006 the age limit went up to 17, because, as Erickson put it, she kept seeing kids with facial hair who claimed to be 13. By 2008 there were five obstacle courses split by age, and by 2019 the lineup was the Muddy Tot area for ages 1 to 3, the Mini Mud course for 4 to 6, the Original Mud Obstacle Course for 7 to 12, and an Extreme course, added in 2013, for 13 and up. The Original course had rope swings into the mud, a slide, a tube to dive through, and pits as deep as five feet.
The rules. A signed permission slip, a shirt, and lace-up, closed-toe shoes. Swimsuits were banned on the obstacle course in 2003. Parents were told to send old clothes and a spare swimsuit for the pool afterward.
The cleanup. Firefighters hosed kids off from a fire truck; in 2005 there were also mobile showers and water cannons, and the 2019 edition had wash stations. Days after the 2006 event, crews were still raking dried mud out of the grass and had collected more than 250 pairs of shoes, most of them singles, which they washed and kept for the next year.
The good cause. Admission was always free. Families were asked to bring nonperishable food for the Vista del Camino food bank, and in the 2000s, used eyeglasses for the North Scottsdale Lions Club.
When it ran
The calendar moved. In the 2000s it was a Friday in late July or early August, described in 2008 as the finale of the Parks & Recreation summer programs; one mother in 2006 called it the kids’ last hurrah before school. By 2010 it had moved to a Saturday morning in June: June 8 in 2013 (the 38th), June 6 in 2015 (the 40th) and June 8 in 2019 (the 44th). We do not know when the switch happened or why.
The park, the mud house and the neighbors
The event grew up with its park. Chaparral began as Jackrabbit Park and was renamed in 1971; the lake was filled in July 1973 and the aquatic center opened on Labor Day weekend 1974, two years before the first Decathlon. It is part of the Indian Bend Wash Greenbelt, the flood channel turned park system that defines central Scottsdale, and Mighty Mud Mania was among its biggest days.
In the mid-2000s the event had a guest crew from next door. In 2004 the Salt River Pima-Maricopa Indian Community built a mud house on the grounds, and in 2005 its firefighters and Scout Explorers came to teach the children how to build one. “We build a mud house to show children how Native Americans did it before everybody else got here,” Kevin Makil, a battalion commander with the Salt River Fire Department, told the East Valley Tribune in 2005. “We’ll assist them with setting everything up, but they’re the ones who will be stomping mud back and forth and making bricks.”
What we know, and what we don’t
The founding facts come from Scottsdale’s city historian, Joan Fudala, whose columns date the Shout It Out Decathlon to 1976, name Johnson Wax’s Shout prewash, count the 300 T-shirts, and record the event as annual through 2019. The event’s own numbering agrees with 1976. One 2005 East Valley Tribune feature said the Shout campaign began in 1975; we go with 1976. The coordinator’s 2004 claim that it was “the first of its kind nationwide” is hers, and we have not checked it.
Several things a full history would include are not in the published record we found:
- When the name changed from the Shout It Out Decathlon to Mighty Mud Mania.
- Attendance for most years, and the record crowd.
- The full list of coordinators. Terry Erickson had run it for twenty years by 2003.
- When and why it moved from a late-summer Friday to an early-June Saturday.
- Why it ended after 2019.
Scottsdale Parks & Recreation’s event files, the city’s 2010s Facebook archive, the summer issues of the Scottsdale Progress and Scottsdale Independent, and the Scottsdale Historical Society’s photo collection are where those answers would be. If you have a Mud Mania ribbon, a T-shirt from the Shout years, or a photo of the 1976 Decathlon, the Historical Society would like to see it. So would we.