Sonic Bloom happens every June in southern Colorado. I can't remember how I first found out about it; probably I saw it advertised at one of the many festivals I went to in the late 2010's. In 2021 I found out where and when it usually was staged, but also learned it wasn't happening that year because of the pandemic. One year later, though, Sonic Bloom was good to go and had a lineup confirmed so I bought my ticket as soon as I knew I could do it. Perfect timing, too, because it was happening on the weekend of June 17-19, exactly one week before the big event of the year, Electric Forest.

Friday morning I packed up everything and started the long road trip. I had, in fact, been up this way and a little further just a week earlier. The weekend before this one, I did two Spartan Races--one of the more famous obstacle race series--in Colorado Springs. On that Saturday I ran the eight-mile Super, and on Sunday the three-mile Sprint. That leaves the thirteen-mile Beast, and I'd registered for one in August near Seattle.

That last trip, a week earlier, had been my first visit to Colorado outside of the winter and not for snowboarding. I'd been a little surprised by the local terrain. I knew that the eastern half of the state was totally flat, but I didn't expect it to be thinly covered with dry, brown, brittle grass, just like eastern New Mexico. "Well, what were you expecting," I thought to myself then, "the Austrian Alps?" And I replied to myself, "Well, yeah," since all I'd ever seen of Colorado before then was snow-capped peaks and the villages in their shadow in the middle of January. But all of that was in the mountainous west; the eastern half is flat, dry, and arid.

Getting There

The festival was near a small town in southern Colorado, called Rye. For me in Clovis, New Mexico, this was about a six-hour drive, most of which was spent on rural highways stretching long, uninteresting distances between isolated small towns. The worst of this was New Mexico state highway 39, which runs through a barely-populated part of the state, including two little towns called Mosquero and Roy, which seem to be inhabited but every time I've driven through them I've almost never seen any signs of life. I often call that area "the Great Void."

The drive became less tedious after entering northbound Interstate 25 just outside of Springer. The next waypoint was Raton, then the Colorado state line at the Raton Pass, and then Trinidad, Walsenburg, and finally the exit to the venue south of Colorado City.

The Venue

There were five stages, with Bloom and Meadow being the bigger ones, and Starwater, Hummingbird, and the Yoga Dome taking up much less space. The space between the stages was filled with, as you might expect, merch tents and art installations. The food court was near the Bloom stage.

Just as I was walking in for the first time, the Bloom stage on the right, with the crowd gathered for Mikey Thunder.

The Meadow stage, while Messenger of Secrets was on.

The Reminders playing on the Hummingbird stage Friday evening.

So these festival grounds didn't take up too much space. With only four stages it obviously wasn't quite as big as next weekend's destination, Electric Forest. There were two entrances to the festival area from the camping area, and only really late in the weekend did I discover that the entrance by the Meadow stage was actually closer to where I'd set up camp than the entrance by the Bloom stage which I usually used.

There were the usual tiers of camping areas. I had a spot in the car camping area, so I could drive my car to a space and pitch my tent right next to it.

This festival was staged near the town of Rye, in the foothills of the Front Range, the eastern edge of the Rocky Mountains which runs north-south through the center of Colorado, dividing the rectangular state into a mountainous western half and a flat eastern half. This is what you see looking directly west from my campsite.

Turn around 180 degrees and this is what you see.

The Food Scene

The food court had all the deliciousness I expected. One place, Big Phan, which served Vietnamese street food, I remembered from Gem & Jam four months earlier. Some other great vendors included Soltribe Superfood Bar, which was a juice bar serving smoothies and coffee concoctions, Not-Cho Fish Tacos, which cooked up vegan equivalents of fish tacos, like the Baja Cauliflower tacos I got, and Dump City Dumplings, which made dumplings stuffed with meat and vegetables. There was also one other place I forgot the name of, serving various East Asian noodle dishes like Pad Thai which I really liked. Aliza's Grill, meanwhile, served up great breakfast sandwiches and omelettes, as well as coffee.

Big Phan and Dump City Dumplings

The Soltribe Superfood Bar served a couple smoothies that I liked, one called "Antioxidant Asskicker" containing mixed berries, banana, açaí, goji berries, and cacao, as well as the "Funky Monkey" with banana, cacao, maca, coffee, and peanut butter.

Another vendor I remembered well from Gem & Jam was set up in the Humming Bar next to the Hummingbird stage: Nohm Collective, who served up all kinds of non-alcoholic elixirs. Some of these were herbal, some contained CBD, others had a substance called ormus, but what I was interested in were their shots of drinking chocolate.

The beer found there was all made by Odell, a craft brewery in Fort Collins, Colorado. I mostly drank the Lagerado, but they also had an IPA available and a fruity sour called Sippin' Pretty. The bars also served liquor shots.

Experiences and Art

There were three spaces in the festival, Permaculture Action Hub, Alchemy Lab, and the Yoga Dome, which hosted a range of experiences. Yoga Dome unsurprisingly hosted various yoga sessions as well as other kinds of movement-related activities like belly dance, staff spinning, and hoop dancing during the day, before becoming a music stage at night. The other places hosted some interesting discussions.

On Saturday afternoon I listened to an interesting talk at the Permaculture Action Hub, called "Medicinal Mushrooms of Colorado." Later that day there was another one I wanted to catch, "A Step into the Mycoverse," but missed. Looking through the schedule I can see plenty more interesting presentations at both Permaculture and the Alchemy Lounge, like "Wild Edible & Medicinal Plant Walk" and "Legal Fictions & The Seven Seals of Sovereignty." I think I need to go to more stuff like this at future festivals. But there were, of course, more that I just couldn't take seriously, like "Sacred Womb Portal Journey" and, at the Yoga Dome, "Unified Field Theory" which I actually caught a few minutes of, and first thought it interesting but soon dove deep into overly-speculative "Ancient Aliens" territory.

There was, of course, plenty of art on display. Just like at nearly every other festival I've ever been to, there was a space where artists were painting at easels, next to a gallery of these paintings which were for sale. All throughout the festival one could find other kinds of art in various forms, including the cube of lights I saw at Gem & Jam.

I'm pretty sure I saw these at Gem & Jam, too.

And finally we can't forget about Frick Frack Blackjack. These folks set up at festivals all over the country, including Hulaween where I last saw them. Here you can play blackjack, but instead of betting money you're gambling with whatever hokey knick-knacks and curiosities you find lying around your home. Some of the more interesting items that people have gambled away here are on display on the back wall, as you can see here.

The Music

Being a lower-profile festival, the lineup was somewhat lower-profile than at the other festivals I went to that year. Not that that's a bad thing, of course. There were still a few of artists I'd wanted to see, while there were going to be a lot more new discoveries for me.

Friday evening I spent most of the time getting familiar with the grounds, eating dinner, and drinking some of the available beers. I'd wanted to see either Lettuce or Nala, who were both playing at the same time on different stages. Even though I decided on Nala, I walked back to my tent to drop some things off, thought "you know what, I just want to pass out here," and did just that, missing out on anyone else playing that night.

Friday night's lineup also included Wreckno, Lab Group, A Hundred Drums, Xenolinguist, and many others I never got to see.

Saturday I found some music worth experiencing...

Here's Wokezan at the Hummingbird stage. I stayed around here for the whole set since I liked their playing guitars over electronic beats and samples.

I tried to catch Daily Bread at Hummingbird on Saturday night, but the crowd was just too huge.

Saturday night I also stopped by the Bloom stage for Cut Chemist and Chali 2na. I'm not usually into hip hop but I really liked this.

Megan Hamilton was spinning a set at the Yoga Dome. This might have been my favorite of the weekend.

I couldn't make it to Daily Bread's set on Saturday night, but he did another one Sunday morning at the Starwater stage.

Finally, I caught Bloomurian at Hummingbird. For the most part this music was slow, dreamy, and psychedelic, not unlike CloZee. In the photo you don't see many people there, but the crowd grew as the set progressed.

The Premature End

Sunday afternoon I was at the Permaculture Action Hub listening to a somewhat interesting presentation called "Wisdom of the Bees." Then the rain started, and I was sitting on a chair that wasn't under any roof. The rain started falling harder and soon I was running for shelter, which I briefly found at the Alchemy Lounge. There was another somewhat-interesting talk going on there, dealing with grief. But I couldn't stay there too long, either, because before I knew it, safety people were telling us the festival area had to be evacuated because of the weather.

And so, next I was running out to the camping area, and after that spending about an hour or so sitting in my car waiting for the storm to pass. With what little cell phone signal there was, I spent some time catching up with the outside world. Eventually the rain let up, I stepped out of the car, and found the festival was open again.

Back inside I got another beer and walked around the grounds a bit. It wasn't raining anymore, but there was still a pretty strong wind. At the Bloom stage's sound engineering tent, I asked someone there when he thought the music would start back up again, since it was after 6pm and the first artist, Iterate, was supposed to go on at that time. He said that if the weather didn't get any better, there wouldn't be any more music. And so I had to miss more artists I'd hoped to see, Desert Dwellers and Moontricks, as they were scheduled for Sunday night. Notlö, who would've been on at the same time as Desert Dwellers, was also on the bill.

And then...safety people came riding through on their golf carts and John Deere Gators evacuating everyone yet again. I began to walk, then jog, and finally run as the rain returned with a vengeance. This time I wasn't going to even try to wait out the storm. Back at the car, I hurriedly pulled everything out of my tent and into the car, and then broke down the tent and stuffed it in the car. This was so much more difficult than usual because of not only the torrential rain falling, but the gale-force wind trying to rip the tent out of my hands. I quickly stuffed the pieces of the tent in the trunk of the car, no time to bother with rolling it up. After sitting down in the driver's seat and breathing a huge sigh of relief, I started up the car and got in the long-slow moving line of cars on their way out. This festival wasn't going to be starting back up again.

I spent the night at a hotel in Raton, New Mexico, just south of the state line. The next day--Monday, June 20--I would be back on the road to Clovis, just so I could pack up again and begin the long journey to Electric Forest the day after that.

So overall, looking back, I had a good time at Sonic Bloom. The size of the festival, combined with the not-so-high-profile lineup, reminded me quite a bit of the Euphoria festival, back in 2015 and 2016. I'd like to go back, although in 2023 I've already got a ticket for something bigger, Beyond Wonderland At The Gorge, happening the same weekend.