We love furry little guys as much as the next festival, but be your dog’s best friend and DO NOT BRING THEM TO THE FESTIVAL! We can confirm your pet will not have as great a time as you. (Unless they can play banjo and love loud noises — in that case, please email our booking department because we may have the next sensation on our hands.)
Bona fide service animals, as defined by the ADA, are welcome at the Strawberry Music Festival. Pets and emotional support animals are not granted admittance to any part of the festival and/or Fairgrounds, including but not limited to camping areas, as per Nevada County Fairgrounds policy. All service animals must be trained for a specific function, related to a disability, housebroken, leashed, and under the direct control of their handler at all times. It is a crime to misrepresent a pet as a service animal (California Penal Code Section 365.7 PC).
No craving will go unsatisfied at the Strawberry Food Court! Featuring delicious cuisines from across the globe, and several vegetarian, vegan, and gluten-free options, your rumbling stomach is sure to thank you.
Bill Wollner (right) and Craig Brautigam at the Strawberry Spring 2023 Festival
Many Strawberrians are grieving the loss of dear friend and fellow staff member, Bill Wollner. There are very few amongst us who have a longer work history than Bill, having started with the Garbage and Recycle crew at Strawberry’s second festival at Camp Mather in 1983.
Garbage and Recycle Crew Members, Fall 2009
Bill met Mitch Third (Strawberry’s beloved Festival Manager of nearly 40 years) while visiting Stockton in the late 70’s after having just moved to California from Kansas. They bonded instantly over Mitch’s time playing college basketball for Kansas State University. Not long after, Mitch told Bill that there was a job opportunity working with him in the groundskeeping department at San Joaquin Delta College. Bill retired from Delta College approximately 30 years later as the head groundskeeper.
Joni Leonard, Mitch, and Bill at the Fall 2012 Festsival
Meanwhile, Bill had been invited to come and work at the first Strawberry at Leland Meadows in 1982, but could not make it because of a family reunion. To our knowledge, he never missed a festival from that point forward. He spent the vast majority of his time at Strawberry in a leadership role with the Garbage and Recycle crew.
Members of Garbage and Recycle have always been tight and share a rich and meaningful crew culture. They camp and hang together. This is true now of 2nd gen family members, along with new friends, just as much as it was back in the day, with legacy members we lost along the way. Many will remember seeing Bill pal around Camp Mather with his dearly departed friend and co-lead, Bob Smith (who always wore a red clown nose), along with Bob’s partner Joni Leonard. Our hearts are with the many other longtime crew members who are active to this day and are especially affected by this loss, including Bill’s dear friend and cohort of many years, Craig Brautigam.
Craig and Bill at the Spring 2024 Festival
Keeping Strawberry clean has always been an important part of our shared ethos. The location of each refuse station was chosen to best serve our collective needs and Garbage and Recycle crew members service them diligently throughout the festival. They enjoy being together so much that you may not even realize how hard they are working when you see them moving large bags of garbage and recycling around the grounds. As we approach the first festival without our dear friend and maestro of refuse removal, let’s all remember to say hello, thank you, and let the Garbage/Recycle crew know that they are loved.
We certainly hope that Bill knew how much he was loved at Strawberry and beyond. He will be missed by many, including fellow members of the Port Stockton Motorcycle Club where he was an active member of AMA District 36 for many years. Please join us in sending Strawberry love and this offering of our deepest condolences to Bill Wollner’s vast circle of family and friends.
Garbage and Recycle Crew Members, Spring 2025
Please stay tuned for more stories and photos from friends as well as information to be posted when a memorial service has been planned.
A FOND MEMORY BILL WOLLNER FROM TURD’L ED
“I’d like to share the following photographs of Bill Wollner, who I loved dearly. In fall 2003, I pitched in to collect garbage and at the end of the festival was put in a photograph and given $50 gas money. In spring 2004 when Bill asked me (in front of about six bystanders) if I wanted to officially join the crew, I took three large steps across the circle and planted a big kiss on his right cheek, nary a word spoken. I’ve been back ever since!”
Thank you to Turd’L Ed Larue for sharing this story and the photos below.
We celebrate the memory of Kathy Barwick. She was a beloved member of the Strawberry and Grass Valley music communities, having performed at the our Fall 2014, Spring 2017, and Spring 2018 festivals with the powerhouse duo Barwick and Siegfried.
The Strawberry community extends its collective heart and deepest condolences to Kathy’s family and wide circle of friends.
A banana popsicle, that is, from the popsicle cart at the Strawberry Music Festival—a core childhood memory for the Harvey girls! Bonus points if you get it dipped in chocolate and nuts.
That said, we first learned about the festival several years before any Harvey girls appeared on the scene. While trying to get home from the New Orleans Jazz Fest in the early 90s, Michael got stranded in a small hotel by a storm of epic proportions. The first floor flooded, roads were impassable, and all flights were grounded. (As far as we know, no bodies in any local cemeteries floated to the surface, although that does actually happen in New Orleans during major floods!) In one of those serendipitous encounters that keep life so interesting, Michael struck up a conversation with a stranded Jazz Fest couple who told him about Strawberry. It immediately went on the “must go someday” list.
Nestled in the Sierra Nevada, the Strawberry Music Festival launched in 1982 and has been going strong ever since. For decades, the festival was held twice a year over Memorial Day and Labor Day weekends at Camp Mather, near Yosemite. Then, in 2013, the largest wildfire in California’s history to that point broke out near enough to the festival grounds that organizers were forced to cancel the event. Although Camp Mather itself was spared, San Francisco County authorities and festival organizers realized that inviting thousands of people to a remote mountain retreat with only a narrow road in and out would make safe evacuation in the future too risky.
The disruption and relocation to a new venue might have tanked almost any other event, but the festival proved amazingly resilient thanks in no small part to its founding ethos—the Strawberry Way—an ethos that deeply permeates the festival to this day. The commitment of staff, volunteers, and a diverse audience allowed the festival to rebound and thrive. Long before Burning Man, the Strawberry Way emphasized kindness, community, and a strong leave-no-trace sustainable mindset. Given the focus of this newsletter, you will not be surprised to learn that the Strawberry Way and Leaving a Clean Wake have much in common… More on that in a moment
The Harveys first attended Strawberry in the fall of 1997 when Vienna was three and Rhiannon had just turned one. We flew from Seattle to Sacramento, rented a car, and—with only a vague idea of what to expect—joined nearly 7,000 attendees in the night-before lineup along the winding road in.
Once inside the festival grounds, the hunt was on for a campsite. Experienced attendees headed for their favorite spots. We followed our noses to a flat area under trees near a meadow and pitched our tents. (Actually, “tent,” singular. Ginny and the girls enjoyed the tent while Michael slept in a bivy sack!) We found ourselves next to an experienced father and daughter camping in their van and quickly struck up an enduring friendship.
For the next several years, that same spot and those same friends became festival touchstones for us and we attended regularly until we set off on our boat trip. (As it turns out, getting from Central America to northern California is a lot more challenging than getting from Seattle to NorCal!)
Almost immediately, we found ourselves ensconced in “The Strawberry Way.” Everyone gave a warm “hello” to everyone. In addition to the music unfolding on multiple stages, programming included non-stop activities for families with toddlers and young kids: face painting, arts and crafts, nature walks to find frogs, a parade, swimming in the lake. Teens got to set up their own radio station to broadcast during the event alongside the official festival “Hog Ranch Radio.” Impromptu acoustic jams wafted through the air into the wee hours of the morning. As dusk settled over the venue, free-range kids of all ages played with glow sticks in the meadow adjoining the main stage with parents generally confident that their children would find them before dark.
No surprise, families with young kids remain Strawberry mainstays, and years later those kids return as adults with kids of their own. Couples have gotten engaged and babies have been made at Strawberry (although as far as we know, no babies have actually been born there!).
And the music, oh the music! For the same reason that reading a print magazine is so much more satisfying than reading an algorithmically generated selection of digital news, attending a music festival curated by a creative team with a strong vision always delights and surprises. Alongside the well-known headliners over the years—John Hiatt, Emmylou Harris, Bela Fleck, Mary Chapin Carpenter—we listened to countless acts we never would have heard of otherwise. That first year, for example, we were blown away by Nickel Creek, already virtuosos at ages 16 and 17, opening the evening set on the main stage. Ours were not the only jaws that dropped during their set.
After many years away, we made a glorious return to Strawberry in 2024. It was our first time at the Nevada County Fairgrounds, but the new-to-us location proved to be lovely and the spirit of Strawberry had carried over uninterrupted. We spent five glorious days in an RV, reveling in our return. We discovered new bands and revisited some we knew and loved (the Banana Slug String Band, anyone??). We ate lots of popsicles and tried not to melt in the heat of the day, only to layer up for the much cooler nights.
Like Leaving a Clean Wake itself, the Strawberry Way isn’t a prescriptive checklist—it’s a way of being in the world that informs how we show up. It’s grounded in awareness, care, and mutual responsibility. And like Leaving a Clean Wake, its flexibility and adaptability help explain why it has endured so long and so well. It is hard to overstate how deeply affirming and restorative it is to spend time enmeshed within a community deeply committed to a shared ethos that prizes a genuine regard for your fellow beings and the world around you. While our Clean Wake maxim may not be known, its spirit lies at the heart of Strawberry and is fully embraced by organizers, attendees, and musicians alike.
But it’s not just us who feel like something magical happens at Strawberry. From the beginning, we’ve been particularly struck by the fact that just about every single act gives some kind of acknowledgment during their set that Strawberry is and has something special. Performers consistently gave shoutouts to the festival organizers, sound engineers, staff, and volunteers; the audience; the location; and the overall feel of the whole thing. Meanwhile in the audience, we cheered enthusiastically for everyone on stage, and everyone got a standing ovation at the end of their set.
This year, possibly the most enthusiastic audience participation, though, was for the Banana Slug String Band as they returned to the Strawberry main stage to celebrate a whopping 40th anniversary as a band. The Banana Slugs are known for kids’ songs that spread positive environmental messages and science lessons disguised in funny lyrics and costumes.
Adults in the audience had made signs: “Need a hug? Hug a slug!,” “SLIME ME,” and the like. Everyone, no matter the age, committed to dancing the Water Cycle Boogie (and, based on our personal experiences, we can guarantee that a lot of people had it stuck in their heads for quite a while afterwards). People (including us) reminisced about seeing the Banana Slugs years ago, including some fond memories from many adults of being among the kids who got to go on stage with the band.
Beyond the Slugs, the performers over the past two years have continued the sterling music quality that Strawberry is famous for. Headliners like Dan Tyminski and Aoife O’Donovan & Hawktail shared the stage with newcomers and lesser known acts like Yasmin Williams, Abby Posner, Brianna Mai Colliard & the Desert Marigolds, Rob Ickes & Trey Hensley, and Water Tower, this latter possibly the most energetic bluegrass band we have ever beheld. Their performance on the main stage rocked the house, but their set at Amy’s Orchid Lounge, Strawberry’s 21+ after-hours club, was absolutely over the top. If you get a chance to see any of these performers live, take it.
We could go on and on extolling the festival and the Strawberry Way: the “Strawberry Stroll” where it’s actually fun to wait in line early in the morning to claim your spots in the music meadow; a ubiquitous focus on sustainability (no single use plastics, encouraging attendees to bring their own reusable cups); the Straw-bar-ry daily happy hour hosted for free by a family who sets up near the entrance gate every year just because; adults without kids who nonetheless stay to cheer for the kids’ parade…
Not dissimilar to the readjustment we had to make when returning to life ashore after four years of sailing, with its leave a clean wake ethos, there is always a bit of a letdown when leaving the festival and returning to the real world. Rhiannon notes the culture shock when people don’t automatically smile as they wish each other “happy Strawberry.” But with more than forty years of history behind it, we are confident that the festival will endure—and that, at least twice a year, any one of us can get a glimpse of what life might look like if kindness, mindfulness, and leaving a clean wake were the norm rather than the exception.
If you ever get the chance, we promise that making the pilgrimage to Strawberry will more than repay the effort it takes to get there. If you’ve been to Strawberry (or a festival like it), let us know in the comments—we’d love to hear your memories. And if you decide to go, who knows? Maybe we’ll be there to wish you a “Happy Strawberry!”
Who likes having an RV Hookup Site at Strawberry? 🙋🏾♀️🙋🏻♂️🙋🏼♀️
Partial (electric & water) AND Full (electric, water, and sewer) Hookup Sites are still available for the Fall 2025 Strawberry Music Festival! Fill out an RV Hookup Site submission form here or call our office M-Th, 10am–3pm to make your reservation while sites are still available.
As a reminder, ALL camping tickets include DRY camping with any size or type of vehicle or tent. RV Hookup Sites are an additional charge to the camping ticket and require the purchase of at least one 3-Day camping ticket for the Fall 2025 Strawberry Music Festival.
If you’re looking for another joyful weekend of music, community, and camping under the pines — we’ve got just the thing!
Our friends at the California Bluegrass Association are celebrating 50 years of the Father’s Day Bluegrass Festival this June in Grass Valley! Three stages of music, featuring The Travelin’ McCourys, AJ Lee & Blue Summit, The Gibson Brothers, Rob Ickes & Trey Hensley, Junior Sisk Band, Laurie Lewis & Kathy Kallick, and so much more!
It’s a golden year for this beloved tradition, and we know you will feel right at home in the harmonies. Enjoy nonstop jamming, square dances, youth programs, free workshops & family fun for all. Find out more at fathersdayfestival.com.
