Laketown Rock

The ranch does not ask for a Minnesota racetrack. It asks for a British Columbia valley. In 2017 Wideglide Entertainment planted Laketown Rock at Laketown Ranch, Lake Cowichan, from 19 to 21 May, with a Canadian-rock ear and a hundred-and-seventy-two-acre site beside Meade Creek, on Youbou Road. Anyone arriving in search of Lakes Jam has the wrong country. The lake here is Cowichan and the bill is Sam Roberts Band, Loverboy, Trooper, not a Brainerd paddock.

Greg Adams, owner of Wideglide and of the ranch, picked the bands. Erin Richards, speaking for marketing, told the Lake Cowichan Gazette they expected about four thousand the first year and that ticket response made a larger scale thinkable. Figures circulating around ten thousand are cited with caution: the ranch can absorb them; the town does not see that density every day. Anyone who treats Laketown Rock as a festival born small and left small skips the size of the grounds and 100.3 The Q, which presented the debut with Wideglide.

The ear is rock, plain. The 2017 bill says it without metaphor: Sam Roberts Band and Matt Mays on Friday; Loverboy, Trooper and Prism on Saturday; Honeymoon Suite and Headpins on Sunday. Then came Glass Tiger, Streetheart, The Wild! and valley bands. That is not a country festival adding a guitar. It is a May long weekend for a crowd that recognises Canadian rock-radio hymns. Anyone picturing a compound of urban novelties has the wrong contract. The contract here is a known song and ranch grass.

Wideglide already produced Sunfest, the province’s largest country gathering. Laketown Rock is not Sunfest under another name. It is the other thesis of the same grounds: the rock the ranch had not yet put at the centre. Adams wanted Laketown Ranch to stop being a secret of one festival and become a soil other promoters could also use. Anyone who confuses the two brands because they share acres mixes a country ear with a rock ear. The ground is the same. The bill is not.

The audience experience follows the real format. People camp on the ranch. There is food, artisan stalls, family activity. Children under twelve entered free at the debut. Anyone arriving from Victoria or Duncan does not find a club street. They find a valley site, a Youbou road, May dust and a stage that sounds against the woods. The weather can be island weather: cool at dusk, a spring shower, a jacket in the bag. Cowichan Lake is nearby; the ranch is not a beach. It is a field that for three days fills with wristbands.

This ranch must not be mixed with Lakes Jam. Laketown Rock is Wideglide’s, the 2017 one, the Lake Cowichan one. Mixing it with a Minnesota festival because both sell rock beside a lake name is mixing a British Columbia valley with a racetrack. The ground is Laketown Ranch. The ear is rock of a weekend that fits between a campsite and a Trooper hymn.

Local coverage does not turn the debut into an attendance trophy. It turns it into a town argument: Adams hires in the valley, people come from outside the province, the long weekend fills Youbou Road with cars. That fact matters more than a headliner. Laketown Rock is understood through a ranch that wanted another season, not through a Vancouver office that rents a park and leaves.

Getting there is already part of the site. Anyone coming from Victoria crosses the island; anyone coming from outside the province arrives by ferry or by road and understands that Lake Cowichan is not a club street. The May long weekend lends the bridge; the ranch lends the grass; Youbou Road lends the jam. Local coverage speaks of people arriving even from another province. That journey is not a marketing inconvenience. It is proof that a hundred-and-seventy-two-acre site can become, for three days, the centre of a valley that the rest of the year does not hear rock at that scale.

Anyone who walks from the camp to the Rock Pit when the sun drops understands why Sunfest was not enough. Between Adams and Richards, between Sam Roberts and Loverboy, between the country of the grounds and the rock of the long weekend, Lake Cowichan had a rock festival that did not borrow the ranch from Minnesota. Wideglide Entertainment lends the craft; Laketown Ranch lends the grass. What remains is a Laketown Rock told as the other voice of a valley, not as a Lakes Jam with another stamp.