Falcon Ridge Folk Festival

Yes, it's that time of year again. Time for us to spend a weekend camping on a farm, getting all kinds of dirty, and listening to good folk music. This year we went up on Thursday night. The weather was pleasant at dusk when we arrived at the festival grounds. But it had rained enough before we got there to make the makeshift roads (think, lanes sectioned off by caution tape) muddy and impassable. So we had to park in one of the lower lots and carry in all of our gear.  The lot wasn't that far away, but we carried in only the basics on Thursday night. This picture was taken on Friday morning when we made the next several trips to the car. A few hours after trekking in all the gear, they reopened the roads.

Dodd's Farm is the location of the festival.

The garage by the farmhouse was steaming in the early morning sun.

This is the mud we slid through for the first half of the weekend.  We tromped through it  Thursday night in total darkness. I wish there was something in this photo for scale, most of those ruts were at least ankle deep. I ditched my flip flops almost immediately and Joe was wearing crocs. This meant our feet were completely covered in mud for about two days. Regrettably, I never had my camera on me to catch these moments.  More regrettably, I had unbelievable self-restraint that weekend and did not leap on Joe in some variety of flying tackle to drive him, and most likely myself, into the sloshy mud.  He owes me, I think.

This was our neighborhood in the dozens of acres that comprise Falcon Ridge's tent city.

Our spot.  Just to our right of Joe, you can see the speakers for the main stage in the background.  On the right you will see our tent.  

Ranger Joe, scoping the scene.

This is the workshop stage, the smaller of the two music stages at Falcon Ridge.  We usually spend about half of our time there.

That four-peak tent in the distance is the dance tent.  This is by far the craziest spot at the festival and dancing (square, swing, contra) goes on until the wee hours of the night.  We never go in there.  Joe is not a fan of dancing, and it's usually 750 degrees during the day.  Not ideal for any high-energy activity.

This little village is where the food and merch vendors are.  

This is the main stage.  At the ass-crack of dawn people line up at the bottom of the field.  At precisely 7am, they are released and bound up the hill in all directions to lay down a tarp/blanket/shower curtain/you-name-it to reserve their spot for the day.  Joe and I are not generally awake to take part in these few minutes of insanity, and anyway the rule at Falcon Ridge is if you come across an empty tarp, you are welcome to sit on it until its rightful owners come back.  People are generally really good about respecting other people's belongings, and in the past we've even been invited to stay on strangers' tarps, share in their food, and enjoy the festival with them.  Otherwise, we just carry our chairs around with us all day and just grab any spot that seems good at the time.

This year we were actually really disappointed in people.  Some folks would move other chairs out of their way to get better seats, they would slide blankets and bags over that were not their own just to make themselves more comfortable.  Worst of all, they would plop themselves down in their chairs that were already so tall you couldn't see over them, and then open an umbrella to shade themselves from the sun!  This happened with complete disregard for anyone whose view they were obstructing!  This year was the 20th anniversary of the festival, so we are hoping that these rude umbrella monsters were just day visitors, and not tried and true Falcon Ridgers who go every year.  We shall see next summer.

Also, while I am ranting, everywhere we seemed to sit this year had us near some idiot who would not shut up.  I get it's a social setting and people like to interact.  But I need to tell you about one guy in particular.  We unknowingly sat within earshot of him and his friend on Saturday (I think).  We first sat near them during the early afternoon.  He talked to his friend (I say "to" and not "with" because he left no spaces between his words into which his friend could interject their own.) for like three hours straight.  About frozen pizzas and some guy named Bob and his family who comes to visit him at his house and ten billion other things that had no relevance to anything folk.  We got up and went to go make ourselves some dinner back at our tent.  We ate.  We took a nap.  We wandered around the vendors.  We went back to where our chairs were and THE GUY WAS STILL TALKING.  He talked through every act.  During the day he was at least drowned out by the music.  At night he apparently felt he had to talk louder to make up for the darkness (?) and we heard more of him than the people on stage!  Joe turned around at one point and was shouting over the music to tell the guy to be quiet and he didn't even hear us!  Several people around us did, but not Chatty McTalksalot.  I put in earplugs at one point because I had a headache and the act onstage was a saxophonist and I could hear the guy over the sax and through the ear plugs!  Thankfully he finally left and we were able to enjoy the music the rest of the night.

Anyway, I digress.

This was our view about 90 degrees to the right of the main stage.  Through those trees and a few dozen yards away was our campsite.

By Saturday afternoon we were burnt to a crisp despite numerous applications of sunscreen.

This is the easiest way for me to take a picture of Joe and I, so we have one just like this from just about everywhere we go. You can pretty much just swap out our clothes and the background.

Checkin' out the schedule.

Ouch.

Joe's fish got sunburned, too.

The main stage again.  With the giant umbrellas again.  Notice how one umbrella could block the view of almost the entire stage.  Gr.

I took this picture as I marveled at the uncharacteristically beautiful weather we had for the festival on Friday and most of Saturday.

We were so hot and sweaty and sticky from suntan lotion that I was able to stick honey-nut cheerios on Joe.  You can imagine his elation.

This is what rolled in Saturday evening. It only rained 

on us for five or ten minutes. Not enough to stop the 

music...just enough to get everybody's gear 

completely soaked.

Dar Williams!

Dar played around dusk on Saturday.  Check out that awesome chair on the lower right!

Sorry about the lighting. Dar is on stage playing Iowa 

and as is tradition, the entire crowd is waving around 

glowy things...a la lighters at a rock concert.

This is the weather we woke up to on Sunday morning after a horrible thunderstorm Saturday night. The walls of our tent were blowing in and out, you could feel the thunder in your bones, and the lightning was right above us, giving the inside of the tent a strobe light effect. But our good ol' tent stayed bone dry.

Our "kitchen".

Joe, modeling a climbing harness that was way too

 big for him that somehow ended up in our 

camping gear.

Waaaaaaay close up.

The weather on Sunday was terrible and bordering on dangerous, so here we are in the tarp igloo we hastily constructed to protect ourselves from the elements. Notice how the thunder and gusting wind and torrential rain and hail and lightning striking only a few hundred yards away from us in our metal chairs was not keeping us from grinning like idiots.

When we had to make our tent igloo we were at the workshop stage. Check out that weather. Notice how you can no longer see the ridge in the background. Go ahead and scroll back up to that other picture of the workshop stage in the sun. This was some VERY bad weather.

The wind was brutal.

That guy to the left side with the rainbow umbrella sums it up nicely.

I think I will put him on a t-shirt for next year, with the caption "I survived Falcon Ridge Folk Festival, 2008".

So we were huddled in our tarp-igloo, trying to figure out the likelihood of us actually get struck by lightning, when OW!  What the...

Hail.

HAIL!!!

It was marble sized hail that was pelting us through the tarp. This was the first hail I'd ever seen in person.

It hurt.

I think I do not like hail.

We kept peeking out of our tarp-igloo to make sure we weren't in Kansas.

This was our view. 

Notice that guy to the right, just standing there holding his umbrella. 

Standing.

Holding an umbrella.

Mere hundreds of yards away from where lightning was striking a nearby field.

Darwinism in action.

The merch tents did not fare as well as we did.

If you look carefully, you can see that the rain was coming down at a pretty steep angle.

The aftermath. The vendors tried their best to gather

 their wares between cells of the storm.

We had packed up all of our gear early that morning

 before it started raining. Our neighbor was not so

 lucky.

Us. 

At this point we were fleeing a weekend where the night air chilled us to the bone, the daytime heat nearly melted us, the sun fried our skin, the rain thoroughly doused us, the wind practically blew us away, the thunder tried to rattle our teeth right out of our mouths, the hail bruised us, the mud encased us, and the lightning almost ended us.

We LOVE falcon ridge. 

Really. :)