MusicFest takes over Steamboat Springs, CO every year in early January with all the Texas/Red Dirt music fans can handle.
Steamboat MusicFest is the only festival that brings the finest Texas and Americana music to the snow swept Colorado Rockies for a full week of sport and song.
Eighteen bands perform over six days in the heart of the Rocky Mountains featuring free après-ski concerts, evening concerts and special engagements throughout the week including over 40 live performances, from an increasingly diverse line up of artists with styles ranging from country to rock, blues to bluegrass, folk and western swing, and everything in between. Six days, 40 bands-it is quite the festival!
It all started when a man named John Dickson wanted to ski for free. John Dickson was still a college student in southern Texas when he saw an ad in the local paper for a ski trip to Colorado: Bring at least sixteen people, the ad promised, and your lift tickets will be free.
That was in the mid-’80s, and Dickson knew he wouldn’t have trouble finding a crowd to accompany him to Colorado. He regularly hosted concerts at his house, passing around a hat for beer money while musicians jammed in the garage.
As it turned out, he brought 600 people with him on that first ski trip. Some of them were musicians, and the group skied all day and put together informal shows at night. Thirty years later, the trip is still an annual tradition, but it has grown somewhat: Now called MusicFest, Dickson’s retreat is a full-fledged week-long music festival featuring fifty bands on a dozen stages. Passes for the fest, which runs January 5-10 this year, are capped at 6,000 and include lodging at hotels and condos throughout Steamboat Springs as well as four days’ worth of lift tickets. The passes range from $239 to over $1,000 per person, depending on the accommodations, and have sold out more or less instantly for the past fourteen years. “It’s not a college trip anymore; there are people of all ages,” says Dickson. “The one common thing is that it’s a true community. It’s no-nonsense. It’s not over the top, and it’s not commercial.”
