L C B F

Lake Champlain Bluegrass Festival

Many thanks to our volunteers in 2009!

Your help and continued support is greatly appreciated...

April 30, 2009

Wow, it’s hard to believe almost a year has passed since the 2008 Bluegrass Festival!  Our 2009 festival is fast approaching.  After enduring our most challenging weather year ever, we have been working on a lot of projects and improvements in response to your comments and suggestions.  Needless to say, it has been a VERY busy time.  In fact I just returned from spending the weekend in Alburgh where we were working on site improvement projects all weekend .

Many of these improvements are in response to our very trying weather last year.  We had somewhere in the neighborhood of five inches of rain between Wednesday morning thru  Friday night.  This is twice the rain that we typically get during the entire month of August on top of a very wet summer leading up to the event.   According to Joy, the good news is that the girls were able to sport their “fashionable” rain boots! Obviously, this much rain created some HUGE logistical issues for us particularly with regard to getting hundreds of large campers in and out and moving people around the site.  We were able to get everyone in an out regardless of the challenges.  Frankly it was by far the most challenging festival in the eight years we have ever put on!  We had a great volunteer crew  and somehow we found a way to overcome every issue that was thrown at us.  Most of our customers were extremely patient and understanding (thank you).  We pulled most of our volunteers from their normal jobs to assist with the shear logistics of getting people in and out and finding “dry” spots for them to park.   Having a skeleton crew up front apparently created some issues at the stage.  We heard your complaints and we’ll make some adjustments to correct the complaints that we had.  Although the conditions were horrible, most folks we spoke with somehow ignored the weather and simply enjoyed the experience.

We gained a lot of knowledge from the many weather challenges and difficulties.  A number of you gave us some good suggestions which we took to heart.    The largest suggestions were: create a better ways to move folks around the site (in any conditions); tractor hitch improvements; and better site drainage.  As for moving people in and out, over the winter we have been working on building a “people mover”.   The people mover is basically a wagon that is designed to move people and items back and forth from the parking areas to the stage area.  The people mover should handle about 15-20 passengers when complete.  Steve took and old hay wagon frame and tore it down completely and rebuilt it over the winter.  It is all new from the ground up.  Steve’s friends Joe and Rick are helping him complete the deck and seating.    We have also custom built some 3-point attachments for our tractors so that we can better move bumper hitch and 5^th wheel trailers in and out should conditions ever be that horrible again.  The most significant changes however are site improvements.    

Last fall we plowed approximately 15-acres along the east side of the site (tent area).  Our friend Rich from New Hampshire came up two weekends ago and helped us harrow the area several times.  Dad has been doing some grading this week with a bulldozer and our goal is to re-harrow and plant grass in early May.  We are also going to be installing under-drainage later this summer after the grass seed takes hold.  Dad has also done some additional clearing along the railroad bed and cleaned out a number of stumps and made more room for camping.

All in all it's been a very busy time.  We will be spending every weekend from now until the festival getting the site ready.  It takes thousands of hours of time not to mention the many hours we put into organizing the event.  We hope in the end all of this work adds up to a better experience for everyone.   We appreciate all of our friends and family’s help in putting this together as we could not do this without all of your efforts and hard work!!   Looking forward to seeing you all in a few months!

The LCBF Family & Friends

Please contact us if you are interested in becoming a volunteer LCBFinfo@gmavt.net