SUNFEST COUNTRY MUSIC FESTIVAL
Where: Laketown Ranch Music and Recreation Park, 8811-2 Youbou Rd., Lake Cowichan
When: Thursday, Aug. 1, through Sunday, Aug. 4
Tickets: sunfest.frontgatetickets.com
The weather forecast for Lake Cowichan’s Sunfest festival is warming up on cue, with temperatures this weekend expected to peak at 33 C. That’s a very good outlook for a country music festival whose name — literally and figuratively — was built upon summertime vibes.
“It looks perfect,” said festival manager Mike Hann of Wideglide Entertainment. “With an outdoor event, you’re going to have bad weather eventually, but this weekend looks perfect for the country-camping vibe.”
Sunfest heads into its eighth edition in 10 years at Laketown Ranch Music and Recreation Park with four days of activity on tap, highlighted by an appearance Friday from four-time Grammy Award winner Keith Urban. The Australian, who is married to Oscar-winning actress Nicole Kidman, was scheduled to appear at Sunfest in 2020, but that edition of the festival, and its 2021 installment, were eventually cancelled due to the fallout from COVID-19.
This weekend’s roster, which also includes Vancouver favourites Washboard Union (who headline the Friday festivities) and U.S. chart-toppers Lee Brice (Saturday) and Cole Swindell (Sunday), is set to tip the scales in Sunfest’s favour once more. The event situated between Lake Cowichan and Youbou has become hugely popular in recent years, tying an attendance record of 13,000 people in 2023. Sunfest is now Vancouver Island’s largest paid festival, in addition to being the biggest outdoor country music event in the province.
That is due, in a lot of ways, to the surging popularity of country music, Hann said. Some of the top artists today, such as Morgan Wallen, Luke Combs, and a genre-switching Post Malone, are country acts. “In an otherwise challenging time in the music industry, right across North America, country music seems to be one of those exceptions. There’s such a culture around it. Country fans are some of the most loyal on the planet, and we’re really seeing that.”
The festival’s active Lakenight stage, which is one of the biggest amphitheatres on Vancouver Island and one of four on site that will be in play throughout the festival, adds to the riches. But Hann and festival owner/founder Greg Adams rarely sit idle, despite their success. They constantly evaluate the functionality of the 172-acre site, which was a dense mass of rocks, trees, and shrubs prior to housing the largest permanent outdoor stage in B.C. Minor tweaks are made between editions in order to improve the customer experience, Hann said.
“We’re always adding things to make it more comfortable. We keep putting down more turf, we keep moving more washrooms into place, and added even more flush toilets and solar-powered lighting down our main street. There is no more infrastructure we will put in at this point, but we’ll keep adding.”
The festival’s camping component — featuring 1,700 sites which can accommodate up to eight people apiece — is what makes the festival crackle with energy for the better part of five days; not surprisingly, sites for this weekend are close to being sold out. The ability to offer that element, which is unique among large-scale mainstream music events on Vancouver Island, is what drove Adams to purchase the property in the first place. Transforming a somewhat unusuable parcel of land into what became Laketown Ranch was made possible by the revenue camping at Sunfest creates.
That was not an option until after 2015, when Adams moved the festival from its longtime home at the Cowichan Exhibition in Duncan, where stars like Sam Hunt, Alan Jackson, and Tim McGraw performed, to its current purpose-built home — which is considerably more hospitable to upper-tier U.S. acts. It has been a remarkable run for Sunfest since the relocation, with many of the country stars of the past two decades making appearances. Carrie Underwood and Dierks Bentley headlined in 2016, followed by Toby Keith and Little Big Town (2017), Eric Church and Midland (2018), Jason Aldean and Maren Morris (2019), Darius Rucker and Hardy (2022), and Blake Shelton and Lainey Hamilton (2023).
“We’ve had some pretty crazy acts come through here,” Hann said. “But the country fans get it, and there is a lot of them on the Island.”
Urban and Brice both played the pre-Laketown Ranch festival in 2015, but will be making their Laketown Ranch debuts this weekend. Steven Lee Olsen, Josh Ross, The Reklaws and a dozen others are also scheduled to appear. Sunfest is not exclusively a young person’s event, however. Hann said visitors up to 80 years-old attend Sunfest each year. “That’s the power of country. You’re not going to get that with hip-hop. Country music is an institution.”
