A crowd formed early at the gates to get into the Stagecoach Country Music Festival on Friday, April 24, at the Empire Polo Club grounds in Indio.
Many of those lined up had to brave the sun with little shade to be found as they hoped the gates would open sooner than the scheduled 1 p.m.
Judy and Jeff Basquez attend Stagecoach every year with about 20 family members, including their 73-year-old mother, Vera. They come to remember Jesse, Judy’s son and Jeff’s nephew, who died of cancer.
“We have been coming here every year since 2015, since the year he passed,” said Judy Basquez.
Jeff lives in a city next to Indio, whose name was adopted by the Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival, the two weekends before Stagecoach.
When people ask where he lives, he says, “You know where ‘Coachella’ is?”
Several other groups were attending the festival with their families, including Arianna Wolford and her mother, Stormy Snider, who traveled from Cañon City, Colo. Snider and Wolford are attending the festival together for the second time. Wolford had hoped to attend last year’s Stagecoach, but was pregnant with her son, Kelce.
The family waited in the shade from the harsh sun beating down just past noon, waiting for the gates to officially open. Kelce, now 11 months old, sat wearing a Kansas City Chiefs T-shirt while Woldford sat on the red-and-yellow Chiefs blanket, each of them also sporting some of the team’s memorabilia.
“I’m hoping he’ll enjoy it as much as I did when I was younger,” Wolford said.
Others, such as April Ellwood, traveled from England with her husband and five-year-old son for the first time to experience a country music festival.
“There’s nothing like that, nothing like this in England,” she said. “I always bring my child to festivals. I saw this one has water refilling stations, shade and a good kids’ section with an indoor area that’s going to be air-conditioned, so we know where that is, and just keep him there.”
While Stagecoach has cultivated a more child-friendly atmosphere than its sister festival, Coachella, there were still large groups of friends also there to enjoy the music. Jeffrey Thompson and Michael Solis from Phoenix were excited to watch Cody Johnson and Post Malone, but also to meet some of their friends from California they haven’t seen for more than a year.
“Country is good barbecue music and always reminds me of the summer, so this heat doesn’t bother me much,” Thompson said. “It’s also cool to have that music be the background of our friends hanging out, but also all the other people enjoying themselves and having a good time.”