It was a record breaking weekend for the Coombs Bluegrass Festival last weekend, with twice as many campers as well as people through the gates as last year.
“I haven’t got the total gate numbers but it’s a record,” said organizer Linda Thorburn. “I’m sure we had over double what we had last year.”
Thorburn said last year there were maybe 450 campers and this year there were over 1,000. This was made possible by moving the day parking down the street and utilizing all the space at the grounds for camping.
Highlights of the festival included headliners Mark Phillips and IIIrd Generation, Thorburn said, who played over an hour past their required time because people wanted to dance.
“There were people from one corner of the Rodeo Grounds all the way to the other end, dancing,” said Thorburn.
“I have never seen as many people dancing in my life ever at Coombs, it was unbelievable.”
Following this the group moved over to the hall where Thorburn said they entertained until the wee hours of the morning.
The other headliners, Special Consensus, also gave a great show, she said, and performed an all-star jam.
There were a lot of newcomers to the festival this year, and Thorburn thinks the website helped attract many of them.
The website, which was finished only a few months before last year’s festival, had 4,800 hits following last year’s event and this year there was nearly 13,000.
“That’s a huge jump and that makes me understand why (there were so many more people).”
Thorburn is looking forward to what next year’s event will bring, and said although organizers have a few ideas of who will be playing, they won’t say … just yet.
To share photos and learn more about the Coombs Bluegrass Festival, visit www.coombsbluegrass.com.
