Joshua Tree Music Festival

A decade or so I have been attending this festival
Never again, May 2016 was the end for me
Its been ruined
Its now a capitalist adventure in greed
Vendors claiming to be helping poor families in Mexico selling overpriced merchandise purchased through Alibaba dot com and the like for next to nothing, $ 125 for a shirt over priced mind you
I was charged a $ 75 fee to have my car at my camp site.
Due to greed and over selling they ran out of parking Saturday night and parked the over flow in the camp ground next to me. Of course almost every car was still there the following morning because they all got too altered to drive home.
No camp ground security like in years past, just workers speeding through in golf carts kicking up dust.
Speaking of dust, no water truck anymore keeping dust knocked down and helping to cool people off in the heat of the day
Drug dealers wandering the camp ground showing up at your camp site to see if you want to buy anything
Other campers playing loud music and screaming all night in the camp ground destroying the peace and serenity that once surrounded this festival.
Nope, done
I can enjoy Joshua Tree Lake the rest of the year, when its not invaded by greed pretending to be something else.

Poorly curated Friday night.
Minimal music. With 3 stages, there was only one band playing at a time.
Minimal food. There were roughly 7 vendors, with typical quinoa wraps and vegan things, but no one was in line, which made sense why the $ 5 per slice pizza line was wrapping around tables. And there was no ice cream…
Not enough pot to cigarette smoker ratio so trying to enjoy my food while getting wafts of cig smoke was rather unappetizing. Perhaps if you want to smoke you should do it away from the food.
There was very little merchandise to buy. Typical flower of life T-​shits. Nothing special or super interesting. Nothing made we want to rush over to a booth to buy anything. Could have found more variety at a farmers market.
LACK of art also. There was one main wall that displayed some pieces… very unimpressed.
No other interactive activities, seemed like more yoga then music.
The stench from the diesel fumes was terrible everywhere. It was particularly hard to enjoy the «lake» and walk around.
$ 90 to watch 3 sets, and we mainly walked around and looked at the stars. Thank goodness for the telescope display. I would have left as soon as I got there if it wasn’t for him posting live pictures of space.

For an event in the desert, this place was a way too low on cooling off devices. I was pretty disappointed there were not any misting tents and only one «cooling off shower», way out of the way of the stages and center of the event. I have been to another event that did much better in this respect. It was almost 100 degrees!
I found out, only after I left (early), they actually sold ice…
If you like to be really hot this is the event for you.

Perfect amount of people in the perfect amount of space. Great bands and easy to get up close to each of the stages: I only hope it stays as such in years to come.
They setup lots of sails to provide shade, which was key.
They had some good food vendors, and we were happy to find some vegan options: among them, the pizza vendor would occasionally whip up a vegan pizza, and at the full bar they sold vegan ice cream by the pint.
Sierra Nevada had a great booth, with some awesome people manning it.
And we really liked the music. Pretty much every band on Saturday was fantastic. We also heard some great music on Friday and Sunday (Chris Pureka was one such fine talent), but the bulk of the great bands were on Friday.
Look forward to attending again… hopefully next time the morons in Congress won’t have the neighboring National Park shut down.
ONLY ONE THING I’D CHANGE:
I would ban the smoking of cigarettes, or at least limit specify /​mark off at least 50% of the seating areas for each stage as non-​smoking. I don’t care if people smoke marijuana, but regular cigarettes such as Camel and Marlboro just reek. It really ruined it for me when I would be sitting comfortably in my chair watching a band and then someone would plop down a couple of seats away and just start smoking… this happened repeatedly, forcing us to relocate multiple times. Most of the people there were non-​smokers, but it didn’t take many smokers to ruin it for all the non-​smokers around them. —- if they’d fix that, my rating would be 5 stars. :)