Badger Music & Arts Festival

Badger is a small, community-built bass and electronic music-and-arts camping festival on remote high-desert ranch land near Hartsel, in Colorado's South Park Valley at about 9,000 feet. Born from the earlier Badger Bass Camp, it is deliberately intimate and DIY, with 'radical participation' values drawn from burn culture, attendees are encouraged to bring art, theme camps, costumes and installations rather than simply spectate. The programming centers on underground bass music across multiple stages, with projection mapping, theme camps and participatory art under some of the darkest night skies in Colorado

Attendees repeatedly describe Badger as a 'homie fest' with warm, welcoming vibes and a tight-knit crowd, and several call it their favorite festival of the year. The music curation and sound quality draw consistent praise, along with the intimate scale, theme camps, projection mapping and the wide-open high-desert setting under dark skies. Newcomers and returning campers alike single out how much the small, community-built atmosphere stands out

The most recent edition ran in mid-August 2026 on the high-desert site near Hartsel and sold out. First-time attendees and volunteers praised the musical lineup, the excellent sound and the slick projection mapping and stage designs, the intimacy of the small crowd, and the theme camps and vendors. Common critiques were a thin food selection (about two food vendors), portable toilets that ran out of toilet paper and needed more frequent servicing, some confusion directing cars in general-admission camping, and requests for more lasers and lighting. As always it was a strict pack-in/pack-out event with no on-site water