Pickamania Acoustic Music Festival

The pavilion at the Black Range Lodge

The stage at Pickamania stands in the outdoor pavilion of the Black Range Lodge in Kingston, New Mexico. Listeners sit in chairs on the grass or on benches scattered under the shade trees, and many carry in their own camp chairs, pop-up tents, and picnic baskets. Since 2025 there has been a dance floor beside the stage. Kingston lies in the Gila National Forest about 30 minutes west of I-25. It was once a rich silver mining town and is now a quiet hamlet, and for three days each year in early September the lodge grounds fill with acoustic music.

Jim McNutt’s Caballo Grill food truck sells burgers, burritos, and tacos. Black Range Vineyards pours New Mexico wine and beer through the weekend, and there is apple pie, which in 2025 was announced as home-made from local apples. People who come early on Saturday can tour the Kingston Ghost Town Museum and see an art exhibit at the Historic Percha Bank. The Kingston orchard sells fresh-picked organic apples and fresh-squeezed cider. Weekend campers use the free primitive camping in the Gila or a small free Forest Service campground near Percha Creek, just east of town. Nine miles off in Hillsboro there is an RV park and a park with free camping.

The festival is a project of the non-profit Sierra County Arts Council, whose volunteers put it on. Catherine Wanek, owner of the lodge, organizes it.

Three days on the lawn, September 2026

The 2026 festival ran Friday through Sunday, September 4 to 6. On Friday the gates opened at 5. Tif & Mollie of Austin, Texas, played alt-rock originals; the year before, the Sierra County Citizen described their sound as guitar and cello mixed with loops and percussion. C W Ayon of Las Cruces followed with hill country blues.

Saturday’s music began at 2 with Jackal, a Las Cruces act playing folk and Americana originals. Chris Sanders and Steve Smith came next; both play in the Hard Road Trio, with Smith on mandolin and Sanders on guitar. Wil Maring and Robert Bowlin came from Nashville with folk, bluegrass, and country. Bowlin plays guitar and fiddle and is a Nashville session musician. Then came Peter McLaughlin, a flat-picking guitar champion, and Chris Brashear on fiddle and mandolin. They play what their billing calls “southwestern” bluegrass, “shaped by the landscapes and legends of the west.” At 8 the Super Jam closed the evening, with the Bluegrass All-stars on one stage.

Sunday opened at 11:30 with an open mic hosted by Gary Harvell, Deena Chappell, and others. After it came the Burt & Tim Show from Truth or Consequences, Pint & A Half with guest Jeff Forbes from Hillsboro, and Dusty Low, a folk-rock act from El Paso, who finished at 4:30.

Harvell lives at the lodge. He is Wanek’s life partner and works as the in-house massage therapist, breakfast cook, and handyman. He is also a songwriter and guitarist who often plays the lodge’s Starlight Concert series in summer and fall. In 2025 he and Kingston Main Street opened the festival on the Friday.

A lodge built for silver miners

The lodge dates from the 1880s. During the silver boom of the late 1800s, Kingston was one of New Mexico’s largest cities, and the lodge was built to house miners and their military escorts. It stands at 6,200 feet on NM 152, the Geronimo Trail Scenic Byway. The massive stone walls are said to have been repurposed from the ruins of Pretty Sam’s casino, across the street. A stone addition went up in the 1930s.

Wanek grew up in Las Cruces and worked in Los Angeles as an assistant director in film production. New Mexico Magazine says a “fit of naivete” led her to buy the lodge in 1984, meaning it as a writer’s retreat. She wrote screenplays and took directing jobs to pay for renovation until a Hollywood strike dried up the work, and then she opened a bed-and-breakfast. “I then sank some real roots, literally,” she told the magazine. “I planted trees.” The grounds now hold apples, pears, peaches, plums, figs, grapes, and mulberry. She built a straw-bale greenhouse in 1992, and she has since taught natural building at the lodge and written books and made videos on it.

Garlic underfoot on Animas Creek

Pickamania began with Bill Bussmann, and the accounts of its start differ.

Rus Bradburd, writing in New Mexico Magazine in 2013, puts the first festival in 1985 on Bussmann’s garlic farm near Caballo, a tiny town 14 miles south of Truth or Consequences. Bussmann dragged straw bales and wooden planks across the farm to build a crude stage. He invited a few dozen friends, neighbors, and musician pals to camp overnight. Leftover garlic cloves covered the dance floor, and once the tunes started, couples crushed them underfoot. The listeners whooped, cheered, and passed the hat, and each musician got $25. When an Albuquerque banjo player heard about it, he told Bussmann, “For that kind of money, I can get you the best folk musicians in the state.”

Bussmann told the Silver City Daily Press in 2015 that it started as a Halloween party at his house, where a local blues band came to play. Passing the hat then netted about $25 for each band member. The Daily Press dates the beginning to 1986 and places it at Animas Creek, on a private ranch off NM 152 near Hillsboro. Sierra County notices since 2022 say only that it began in the mid-1980s as a backyard party in a garlic shed.

In Bradburd’s account, 300 people camped at the farm the next year. Bussmann posted his two young sons at either end of the narrow five-mile road that ran from Caballo along Animas Creek to his place, to manage the traffic. Bussmann remembered two volleyball courts, half a square mile for camping, and a creek running through the music. “There were jam sessions all along the river and on other sides of the house. It just acquired a life of its own,” he said. “It was just a bunch of music lovers who came back year after year without any expectations, other than that there would be an audience.”

By 1992, Bradburd writes, Bussmann was expecting a couple hundred more campers and got seven hundred. Bussmann put it this way: “We did it for seven years and then it got too big. We didn’t have liability (insurance), the last year the size doubled, and it seemed like a lot of people who showed up, showed up because they thought it was the ‘scene.’” A plan to move the festival to the Hillsboro community center fell through, because the center was under a renovation that he said took 11 years.

A name lent to Silver City, and a tribute in Kingston

In the years after, Bussmann became known for his Old Wave mandolins, which Bradburd called probably the best in the West. By 2013 he had made his 500th instrument, including archtop guitars, basses, mandolas, octave mandolins, mandocellos, and a few fiddles. Bradburd describes him as “a playful eccentric from the bygone days of New Mexico’s hippie communes.”

In 2008 Faye McCalmont, director of the Mimbres Regional Arts Council, asked if she could give the name Pickamania to a music festival in Silver City. “I said, oh sure, why not?” Bussmann recalled. “I thought it was going to be up by Pinos Altos with a bunch of people picking underneath the pines.” The Silver City festival ran free of charge in Gough Park, with open jams after dark. Bussmann played double bass there and donated one of his mandolins each year for a raffle, to keep the festival from going dormant again.

Since 2017, Pickamania in Sierra County has been held in Kingston. In 2022 Bussmann served as master of ceremonies at the lodge, introducing the bands. He died in May 2023. For more than 40 years he and his wife, Susie, had lived along Animas Creek. The 2023 festival was a tribute to him. Its Sunday began with a Gospel Hour singalong, followed by a community potluck and memories of Bill. That afternoon his friends and former bandmates played, among them the Hard Road Trio, the Hassle Family, the 24/7 Blues Band, the Miner’s Garage Band, and his son Ezra Bussmann on fiddle, dobro, and mandolin.