This morning's gratitude is for the visual presentation of Mountville. Over the years we've learned that the Mountville experience is really the confluence of several things - the music of course, and the people, but also the delightful visual ambience of the big sky over the gently sloping hill, the pond, the gardens and chicken coop, and of course now the beautiful pavilion. Around the solstice, the "Golden Hour" of lowering angled light changes the colors subtly almost from minute to minute - a visual delight in itself.

Inside the pavilion the look changes too, and that is in no small part due to the incredible vision and artistry of Bob Sneed. As he said in his pre-festival video invitation, he came 15 years ago and saw that our lighting needed an upgrade, and so for the past 15 years he has designed, built and added more and more visual magic - both by daylight and as the evening takes over. This year he had to overcome extra challenges - a system failure right as the opening set Friday began, having to light for the video cameras as well as the ambience, and operating all this sensitive digital tech in near 100° heat. Every picture we've seen of the pavilion this Mountville has been absolutely beautiful, a testimony to his dedication and resourcefulness at overcoming those challenges in real time.

And of course, lights need things to illuminate! Back in 1994, Karin Franklin and Drew McKnight tie-dyed the original backdrop, and subsequently a larger one two years later. Those backdrops have been a fixture at every Mountville since. When the pavilion was finished, we were able to use a beautiful light blue heavyweight theater curtain, that Lisa and Jim Taylor have saved for many years, to help keep our backdrop stable in the wind and add a general air of class to the whole operation.

This spring Karin painstakingly ice-dyed a spectacular new mountain sunset backdrop, and installed an element of our beloved ancient mountains on the bottom. With every change of the lighting, the new backdrop showed marvelous new moods - and even after the Main Stage had ended, the softly lit glow of the stage in the pavilion overnight was just magical to behold.

When Rich and Dana's longtime dream of building that pavilion finally came to fruition in 2022, with the spectacular array of five woods each holding their own special story, we knew that we'd want to bring the rest of our visual presentation up to match it. And this year, it happened.

LOTS of people do ENORMOUS amounts of work to make this labor of love come to life each June, including helping us put up and take down all of the visuals. Bob and Karin deserve a very special thanks for their collaboration on the visual delights we all enjoyed so very much this year! It was magic, and you could see it yourself with your very own eyes.

Thursday night's “calm before the storm”