Alpacapalooza celebrates gentle creatures, their beautiful coats

If the gruff, obnoxious personal behavior of certain media-grabbing presidential candidates is getting you down — but you do have a fascination with glossy, fluffy fiber that comes in an unlikely pile and simply cannot be real atop a human head — then this weekend’s Alpacapalooza is for you.

“Alpacas are very gentle, mild-mannered animals. They’re great to have around children,” said Randy Brealey, president of the Alpaca Association of Western Washington. “There’s not a lot of livestock that you can just let your children go wander around in a field with them and it’s fine.”

Well, OK, alpacas sometimes spit. Mostly at each other, though, and not at humans. There’s some presidential-candidate behavior for you.

Alpacas hail from the Andes mountain region of South America and countries like Peru, Bolivia, Ecuador and Chile. They resemble llamas, but they’re actually fairly different; alpacas are smaller (about 4.5 feet tall at the head) and more submissive. Unlike llamas, they were bred neither for their meat nor for their labor.

What they were bred for is producing “an amazingly fine, soft, dense fiber” that’s remarkably warm, smooth and pleasing to the touch, Brealey said — yet strong and weather-resistant, too. Crucially, alpaca fiber is even hypoallergenic because it contains no lanolin, a natural waterproofing agent in sheep’s wool that can really start people scratching.

Alpaca wool has been called “the fiber of the gods” and was reserved at one time exclusively for the costumes of Incan royalty. Spanish colonizers brought it back to Europe with them in the early 1800s, but it took years before an industry figured out how to work with it. When alpaca wool finally caught on, unsuccessful attempts were made to acclimatize the alpaca to England, the continent and even Australia.

Things have gone better in the U.S., where alpacas first started arriving in the early 1980s, Brealey said. Building an American alpaca population has been a long process, he added, with approximately 200,000 alpacas here today.

Fluffy, swishy

The vast majority of those are a breed called Huacaya alpacas — the ones that look like great big teddy bears, Brealey said, with fiber that’s “crimpy and curly” and irresistibly fluffy. (One alpaca breeder we found online compares touching Huacaya alpaca fiber to touching a cloud.) Exact figures vary, but Brealey estimated that Huacaya alpacas account for 97 percent of the global alpaca population and 85 percent in the U.S.

The other breed is the relatively rare Suri — which many American breeders, like Brealey himself, are trying to bolster. “We’re doing our part,” he said.

Suri fleece is shinier, silkier and “grows straight, not crimpy,” he said. “It hangs in dreadlocks on the body. It is really graceful and beautiful.” When’s the last time you swooned over a presidential candidate’s hair swishing romantically in the wind?

Swooning welcome

Expect swishing and swooning aplenty at this weekend’s annual Alpacapalooza at the Clark County Events Center — featuring contests and judging, vendors and seminars, silent auctions, alpacas for sale and alpacas soaking up a whole lotta love for free. Hundreds of alpacas and their owners will be on hand.

“The public is welcome. We love having people come see the alpacas,” Brealey said.

Brealey himself swooned, you might say, when he first discovered alpacas. He was a city guy working in land development and construction, he said — with a deferred childhood dream about farming — when he attended a llama farm open house for no special reason. That’s where he came face to face — or anyway, face to chest — with destiny.

“I hadn’t even heard of alpacas until I saw them. I liked their size and their different looks. I liked how gentle they were. It was like, ‘That’s the answer!’ ” Brealey and his wife opened Chelsea Farms, breeding “elite Suri alpacas” in Renton in 1998.

“I decided to become a farmer when I grew up,” Brealey said.