At dawn, at Roaring Camp, up yonder in the mountains of Felton, the foggy mist swirls around the wooden railroad tracks and vintage trains. The fabricated Old West town arises like a ghost, catching glints of a new day, making it appear as if it is the late 1800s.

Early visitors feel like time travelers, walking down Main Street with an active print shop and general store. There’s an air of magic. First on the scene, and last to leave, for over a decade, is operations manager Tyler Armstrong—the only thing missing is his spurs and a sheriff’s badge. Behind the scenes of three of Santa Cruz’s premier festivals—the Redwood Mountain Faire, the Locomotion Festival and Santa Cruz Mountain Sol Festival—Armstrong keeps the peace.

If you attend a music festival and have a fantastic, revelatory time, little thought goes into the mechanics behind the experience. Or the hundreds of hours of human power needed to make it happen. From an audience member’s vantage point, festival bands come on stage, play and leave; then another band starts playing. It looks so easy. What isn’t seen is the army of people who have been working for a week straight to create the illusion. The legion of riggers, vendors, stage hands, food preppers, sound technicians, security, volunteers and dreamers who manifested the original idea.

Easier Than Learning Your ABC’s

From his perched office at Roaring Camp, Armstrong explains how the Redwood Mountain Faire (which most recently took place June 1-2) comes into existence. Armstrong and Hallie Greene, director of the Redwood Mountain Faire Steering Committee, start off on Monday and Tuesday before the weekend event, “walking the grounds and talking it out. Some of the stage guys will start dropping off platforms and risers on Wednesday at 7am, and all of a sudden, just like that, the festival begins to take shape,” he says.

“The stages get built, the sound gets installed and the tents are put up. This is before volunteers or anyone else is here,” Armstrong continues. “There are probably 10 people on site, but with those 10 people we can set up the bones of the whole event.”

When Redwood Mountain Faire started more than 30 years ago, at Highland Park in Ben Lomond, it soon expanded beyond that park’s boundaries. Since 2010, the new Redwood Mountain Faire has evolved into a multi-day event with over a dozen bands and thousands of attendees.

Green, who joined in 2014, is vocal about the crucial relationship between Redwood Mountain Faire, Armstrong and Roaring Camp. “The actual planning of the event and all operations run through a committee,” says Green, who is already working on next year’s event. “The Steering Committee is just a group of five volunteers. So, I pulled Tyler in a couple of years ago. He was there all the time anyway, so now he’s part of the planning of the event. He knows everything about Roaring Camp, and it’s great to have him there alongside us.”

For Green, and everyone involved in Roaring Camp festivals, it’s about building community.

Co-director Traci-lin Burgess Buntz, agrees that unity is one of the committee’s goals.

“I believe that what makes the Redwood Mountain Faire so special is the sense of community,” Buntz says. “You can put up a stage and tents, but ultimately it’s the people who make our event so special. We are celebrating our community and the beautiful place where we live and all of the local talented artists and bands, while also raising money for some very important causes.”

This year, Redwood Mountain Faire raised $60,000 for 15 nonprofits. But everyone agrees it’s also, primarily, about the music. “My favorite moment of the 2024 fest is a tough call. I would say it was the final set of the event on Sunday night with Melvin Seals and the China Cats. Melvin and the band all looked so happy up there, smiling and playing their hearts out. I looked out from the stage and saw everyone smiling and twirling and dancing together as the sun was setting on the redwoods. And I was thinking, ‘This is what it’s all about. This is what makes it all worth it.’ Our community and the kindness never cease to amaze me,” Buntz says.

A Brand New Dance

The Locomotion Festival, occurring Aug. 2–4, is the new kid on the block.  This brand-new festival is an expansion from the minds of beloved Pulse Productions, which also puts on Mountain Sol (Aug. 24-25). Pulse Productions, of course, are hardcore Santa Cruz producers Michael Horne (Palookaville) and Steve Wyman (Boulder Creek Brewery).

“It takes us eight to 11 months to plan Mountain Sol, so we figured time to add another festival,” Horne says with laughter. But it’s true: What only lasts a few days for festival fans takes a year to plan.

So without further ado, remember to keep your hands inside at all times, and hold onto your hats. Fresh out of the train terminal, on its first run around the tracks, it’s the first Locomotion Festival.

Among the 10 bands playing at Locomotion—including the String Cheese Incident, Railroad Earth and Dirtwire—is the band Brokedown in Bakersfield. Back in 2011, Brokedown began as a side project of Tim Bluhm (Mother Hips), Nicki Bluhm (the Gramblers), telecaster gunslinger Scott Law, and most of ALO with Dan “Lebo” Lebowitz, Dave Brogan and Steve Adams. Now, with everyone living in separate states, the band has only made a few rare appearances during the last decade.

Brokedown is the perfect country soundtrack to an Old West town, because the band can bang out an authentic heartfelt twang, and the dynamics between Nicki and Tim, who are no longer married, are still electric.

“Nicki and I hadn’t seen each other in many years,” says Bluhm from his recording studio in SF. “Our first gig back was last year up at Mount Tam’s festival, Sound Summit. I wasn’t able to make the rehearsal. I hadn’t seen Nicki in all that time. And we just sort of walked out on stage together individually and started singing those duets, and it just sounded great right off the bat. It felt really good and perfect, at least for me.”

You Gotta Swing Your Hips Now

It’s heartwarming to see the connections and community that occurs between band members and the interplay between musicians. Lebo, who plays pedal steel guitar in Brokedown, is doing double duty at Locomotion, and is also playing with his band ALO (Animal Liberation Orchestra).

Growing up in Saratoga, he and future bandmates Steve Adams and Zach Gill were a young, ragtag group of seekers who found music wherever they could. “When we were growing up, Saratoga was just a mountain kind of orchard town,” Lebo recalls. “It had a real farm vibe to it. We would go to a little restaurant in Big Basin called Country Store Café, who had live music five to six nights a week. We didn’t know who the bands were. They were mostly from Santa Cruz and San Jose. We didn’t care. We would get a bowl of soup and sit there for four hours.”

Bringing people together to celebrate our similarities and cherish our differences is a theme that runs through all of the Roaring Camp festivals. There’s a strong counterculture vibe in the choice of lineups, with Grateful Dead songs often getting the loudest cheers from the crowd.

Lebo was lucky to have parents that took him to his first Grateful Dead concert at Shoreline Amphitheatre in Mountain View. “Zach and I were in seventh grade,” Lebo says. “That was my introduction to it. But in any cultural movement, kids tend to turn to different things than their parents. I was 13 and didn’t really understand what all these mostly older men were doing. But later on, I started coming back to that sound. At a certain point I realized it’s like the angle of the sun. The way the angle of the sun hits planet Earth created the music of the Grateful Dead. And that’s the same angle of the sun that I grew up under.

“You know what I mean?” he asks. “ It’s the music of the land that I love. It feels like home.” Lebo is now part of the Grateful Dead extended family, often playing with Dead bassist Phil Lesh. “It feels so comfortable to me.”

Do The Locomotion With Me

The Locomotion Festival’s biggest draw is three nights of Colorado’s String Cheese Incident. Expect the mighty redwoods to be inundated with tie-dyes of every hue, along with twisters, twirlers and trance dancers. Armstrong says that the festivals are just 8% of his total workload at Roaring Camp, and frequently the most rewarding. But the festivals are also the most taxing in terms of physical labor, dealing with attendees’ boundary issues, and trying to excel in mountain hospitality for all the visiting artists and bands.

“A few years back, we were supposed to have String Cheese Incident outdoors, but a hurricane swept through the mountain. Last minute we’re setting up inside Bret Harte Hall (next to the General Store) and String Cheese had the most killer inspired sets that I’ve ever seen. And that’s the only reason they’re coming back. The band has far outgrown Roaring Camp (they regularly sell out venues ten times as large), but they saw us grind, in the dumping rain, to create a space they could find magic in. They called us about playing again.”

At the end of the festivals, even before the last attendee finds the exit, bands will be packing up and walkie-talkies will be squawking Armstrong’s name. It will have been a long week, but Armstrong will be smiling, as he was at the end of June’s Redwood Mountain Faire. Even though he knows all the tricks about festivals—how everything is put together, and what musicians are like offstage—Armstrong is a music fan first. Looking around the empty field that just had several thousand humans celebrating humanity and community, Armstrong is quick to describe the whole scene with one word and admit that, in fact, it is “magic.”

Information and tickets about all the festivals can be found at these sites: locomotionfest.com, santacruzmountainsol.com and redwoodmountainfaire.com.