Nowoodstock Ten Sleep Music Festival

At five o’clock on Friday, August 7, 2026, The Piney Islanders opened Nowoodstock XXV on the Vista Park stage, and Elana Hayden and the Sugar Daddies closed the night at eleven. Ten acts played across the weekend. Saturday ran from Jackson Holte at ten in the morning to Goldpine at eleven at night. Sunday began with Jena Spriggs and ended in mid-afternoon with a ninety-minute set by Jalan Crossland. Dynamic Sounds & Lighting of Casper provided the sound. A weekend pass cost $60, and children twelve and under got in free.

Vista Park in August

Vista Park lies in central Ten Sleep, a town on the western flank of the Big Horn Mountains. The park has playground equipment, a splash pad, and Ten Sleep Creek. Visitors bring their own lawn chairs. Coolers and carry-ins are not allowed, and a town ordinance keeps dogs out of the park. Area food trucks set up on the grounds alongside the Ten Sleep Brewing Company, which sells food and drink. Local artists and crafters sell handmade goods, and there is a massage trailer.

WyoFile covered the 2018 festival, when the temperature reached 103 degrees. It reported a crowd that moved between the sun and the river from 9 a.m. to midnight, and fans pressed against the stage in the late evening light. In the last hours, festival director Pat O’Brien went through the grounds with the news that “all beer is now $1.” In 2021 the festival streamed live on YouTube, and Grady Kirkpatrick of Wyoming Public Radio broadcast all or part of Saturday’s performances on the Wyoming Sounds network.

O’Brien has ranked his audience plainly. He said the festival is for the residents of the Bighorn Basin and the artists first, the rest of the state next, and then everybody else. Everybody else comes all the same. WyoFile found tourists who had been driving between Mount Rushmore and Yellowstone, and motorcyclists on their way to and from Sturgis. Randy Gerard and his wife Jody had made the festival a regular stop on their ride to Sturgis. “We heard about it because we are Jalan fans,” Randy Gerard said. “Jalan is the gateway drug,” Jody added. Terry Vaughn, a first-time visitor in 2018, said, “I did not have this view of the Wyoming music scene before this.”

For the bands, an invitation counts for something. “Nowoodstock is a nice feather in your Wyoming music cap,” said Annie Claussen Scott, upright bass player for the Lander-based Low Water String Band. “It’s a sign you are in the scene.” Holly Qualm of Prairie Wildfire, a folk trio whose members were still in high school in 2018, said, “Nowoodstock approached us, which feels really nice.” Shaun Kelley, former bassist of the Jalan Crossland Band, described the pull of the event: “It’s like we’re salmon. We have to return to Nowoodstock every August.”

Crossland’s porch

Jalan Crossland had played every year of the festival as of 2018, and he draws both attendees and other musicians to it. O’Brien put the connection directly: “His career and the success of this festival are intertwined.”

Crossland lives a few blocks from the festival grounds. Many musicians camp in his yard during the festival. WyoFile described his porch as looking and smelling like a family reunion, with talk about the previous night and old stories told again. A favorite is Crossland’s uncle Dan’s portrait of his own father as “the greatest detective in all of Mexico.” Kelley pointed to a mark on a post at the house, made when his son was a small boy fifteen years earlier, and then to the son, by then six feet tall. Joe Lefevre of the Low Water String Band explained how a musician sleeps there after a late night: “A little Sudafed and an ear plug, you can sleep through a bomb dropping.”

The festival’s name traces back to the same man, according to WyoFile. It reported that the name comes from keg parties Crossland threw in the Nowood river valley in the 1990s. A 2014 piece by Tee Roy of Rock 96.7 in Casper gave a looser account: “It seems that Nowoodstock is the name of a river in Ten Sleep.”

A jam session at the Perk Up

The festival began in 2001 at a jam session at the Perk Up Coffee shop in Ten Sleep. O’Brien described the moment: “the words just fell out of my mouth. We should do a little music festival.” Jana Hampton, then the owner, answered, “One day or two?” “She didn’t even blink,” O’Brien said, with a chuckle. They decided Ten Sleep was more of a destination than Worland, and that with enough work they could hold the first festival that same summer.

Mike Bayauck, then director of the Worland/Ten Sleep chamber of commerce, joined them. In August 2001 they presented around 15 Wyoming musicians to 650 attendees. Tickets were $7 for the entire weekend. The town’s response settled whether there would be a second year. “By the end of the second day I had heard ‘thank you Pat’ so many times, I was ready to slap the next person who said it,” O’Brien said.

Twenty years and a yin-yang

O’Brien kept booking. Tee Roy’s 2014 piece credited him with bringing in regional bands for three days each summer for the past 14 years. That year’s acts included John Kirlin and the High Plains Drifters, the Tremors, and Crossland. By 2018 O’Brien called the festival a challenge: keeping it going, finding new music, and keeping a wide range of styles. “Primarily what I look for is artists, someone writing their own music,” he said. He named his muse as the Chicago singer-songwriter Steve Goodman. O’Brien turned 70 on July 25, 2018, the same day Goodman would have turned 70.

That summer O’Brien, who called himself the “chief cat-herder,” was looking for an apprentice. Many people had offered to help, he said, but when he tried to keep one “in my back pocket during a festival, they can’t stick with it.” He said, “it would be awful if it died when I do,” and then: “I am gonna be here for as long as I can. Even if I have to start runnin’ around on a Rascal.”

The twentieth festival was set for August 7–9, 2020. In July of that year O’Brien postponed it. “The current public health situation is trending the wrong way to responsibly hold Nowoodstock XX as scheduled,” he said. He had told the Northern Wyoming News the year before that he might be close to retiring. In 2020 he said he would be ready to organize the festival the next year, and he invited every band booked for 2020 to return.

Nowoodstock XX was held August 13–15, 2021, with support from a Wyoming Cultural Trust Fund grant. The lineup included Prairie Wildfire of Buffalo, Lacy Nelson of Ten Sleep, Low Water String Band, Rob Weimann of Thermopolis, and Quinn Cerovski & Black Mountain Blues of Lander. Bands also came from Billings and from Brooklyn, New York. Melissa Christmas of Ten Sleep drew that year’s logo, a yin-yang shaded with the roster of every band that had played the festival over twenty years. She suffered numerous hand cramps making it.

In 2023 the Town of Ten Sleep received a $15,000 Cultural Trust Fund award for the festival. At the town council meeting on January 2, 2024, O’Brien explained how the festival’s funding would change. Mayor Ernie Beckley said that groups such as the Wyoming Arts Council had been required to route their donations to Nowoodstock through the town, which served as the “financial sponsor.” The Northern Wyoming News ran the story under a headline calling 2024 O’Brien’s final year as organizer. By the twenty-fifth festival in 2026, the festival’s website directed questions to Kurt Steinke.