Camp Alderwild returns to Telluride Town Park this Friday and Saturday for its second and final run in the alpine venue, closing out a chapter that began just last year when electronic music returned to the box canyon after nearly a decade away. Organizers say the two-day festival, headlined by Of the Trees and Daily Bread, will expand to a larger, yet-to-be-announced location in the San Juan Mountains starting next summer, with more days and more stages planned.
The festival was created by Denver artist Of the Trees, the stage name of Tyler Coombs, and is co-organized with his longtime manager Jay Rogovin, who also co-founded Kompass Music Group. According to Westword, Of the Trees plans to announce the festival's new home from the stage Saturday night, telling fans directly where Camp Alderwild will land when it comes back in an expanded format. The festival is set for Friday, August 28, and Saturday, August 29, at Telluride Town Park, located at 500 East Colorado Avenue, according to Westword's reporting.
Getting the festival into Town Park at all required a rare municipal exception. Per The Colorado Sun, the Telluride Town Council voted 4-1 in March 2025 to approve a late-August concert permit submitted by Planet Bluegrass, granting a special exception to the town's May deadline for 2025 event applications. Camp Alderwild's debut that August marked the first electronic dance music festival hosted in Telluride Town Park in nearly a decade, ending a hiatus that began after Pretty Lights closed out a two-night run there in 2016, as noted by Ticketmaster.
A Fast-Moving Deal and a Town That Asked for More
The Colorado Sun's reporting on the 2025 permit vote also describes friction with local race organizers, including the Telluride Mountain Run, who noted that sharing Town Park and the surrounding weekend creates major logistical hurdles for their long-distance footrace. Despite that tension, per the Westword report, the Camp Alderwild team was invited back by the Telluride community and decided to hold the festival there again this year, reportedly after being offered an opening to commit with just a 4 p.m. decision deadline.
Camp Alderwild is co-promoted through a partnership between Planet Bluegrass and AEG Presents Rocky Mountains alongside Of the Trees and Kompass Music Group, according to Grateful Web. Planet Bluegrass brings decades of local Telluride event experience, while AEG supplies the national production scale needed to stage a bass-music lineup in a high-altitude town park more accustomed to acoustic and bluegrass acts.
What's on the 2026 Bill
Tickets for this year's two-day event range from $135 to $240, per Westword's reporting. The lineup includes Koan Sound performing a back-to-back set with Detox Unit, along with Eazybaked. Beyond the music, the festival offers mountaintop yoga, morning hikes, and fly-fishing classes, and a pop-up event returns to Mountain Village, a short free gondola ride from downtown Telluride.
Of the Trees is reportedly planning a surprise for the festival, and Camp Alderwild is set to debut a new production this year, according to Westword. The headliner arrives in Telluride fresh off the February 13 release of his concept album *Moonglade Park*, which featured collaborations with EARTHGANG and Elohim and was structured around themes of nature preservation, according to Exron Music.
Why Town Park Has Limits — and Why the Festival Is Leaving
Telluride Town Park's municipal rules classify events capping daily attendance at 2,999 as “medium festival events,” a threshold that requires town council reclassification and extensive barricade permits once crowds approach 6,000 to 8,000 attendees, according to the Durango Luxury Homes blog. Those constraints, paired with the park's strict noise curfews, help explain why Camp Alderwild is moving to a larger, still-unnamed San Juan Mountains venue rather than continuing to squeeze bigger crowds and more stages into the same canyon-bound park.
Of the Trees founded his independent record label, Memory Palace Records, in late 2021 alongside general manager Rogovin, giving left-field bass music producers full creative autonomy, per UKF. That same do-it-yourself ethos carried into Camp Alderwild's inaugural 2025 lineup, which featured Jade Cicada, Tycho, Ott, EPROM and Taiki Nulight alongside Of the Trees, setting a precedent for left-field electronic talent in Town Park that this weekend's finale is expected to build on before the festival moves on to bigger ground next summer.
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