In 2020, this event was born as a secret festival called “RockyGronk”. We started it as a way for musicians to gather in the wake of festival cancellations due to COVID. That first year, we brought fourteen bands to the ranch for one night of music, celebration, and reconnection. There were no tickets, and the festival was not advertised. It was, very literally, a festival by musicians, and for musicians.

We will never be able to recreate the exact feeling of that first gathering, but the spirit of RockyGronk lives on each year in The Colorado Bluegrass Festival. Everything about this gathering is the same as it was that first year except for one thing: we now want to use this event as a way to expand community and collaboration in the Colorado Bluegrass community.

There are over 30 annual Bluegrass Festivals in Colorado, each with its own magic. The magic of this gathering begins with how we structure the live music.

At this festival, you will see fantastic bands in a single night. Each band will perform only three of their favorite songs, and then they will spend the rest of the night with you in the audience, hanging out, catching up, and pickin'.

This structure was born of necessity at the first "RockyGronk" because of how many bands we packed into a single night, but it has remained at the core of this gathering because we love the spirit of collaboration, community, and experimentation that arises when the musicians don't feel the pressure to produce a full "set" of music.

This festival itself is an experiment. We don't know of anyone else doing it quite like this, so we are learning as we go. We continue to run this experiment each year because we want others to bear witness to the magic that occurs when you bring a community of artists to a venue, hand them the mic, and say "The pressure is off - have some fun."