Hey Festivarians! From what I can tell a few years have passed since someone posted this topic so I’ll beg forgiveness if I need to dive deeper into the back catalog.
I am bringing a group of TBF noobs out to the fest this year (including myself). There is a bit of hemming and hawing about whether we should get some passes for Lawson Hill or try to beat the system by finding a proximal (~1hr) dispersed camping site. We will most likely be arriving Thursday afternoon and staying until Sunday morning.
Do we have a shot of finding a site? What is the parking situation for a commute for an offsite camp? Where are the best dispersed sites?
I’m hoping to garner any thoughts on this from TBF experts!
By that point any dispersed sites close will be taken. By close I mean 30min to 1 hour from parking in MTN Village. You won’t be able to drive into town after Wednesday unless you have a rental, are local, or are camping in a TBF designated camp site. If you find dispersed camping reasonably close, you will have to drive to park, walk 1/2 mile+ to gondola, wait in gondola line (with all your days gear chairs, coats, etc…), ride gondola into Telluride, walk from gondola to Town Park 1/2mile+, then enter the festival grounds. All in all it’s guaranteed that you’ll have a minimum of 2 hours from campsite to stage area. If you get Lawson, you have a shuttle running every 15-20 minutes which takes you directly to the Town Park entrance. You could go back and forth from Lawson faster than you could one way with dispersed, and no one has to drive mountain roads at night, or early morning! Plus you’ll meet lots of other cool people.
Tangential question: What can we expect at lawson hill if we arrive on Thursday night? How are camping spots assigned? Will we be able to find parking?