Chapter 14 of 15 · about 11 min read · updated October 2026

14The valley and the season

In the spring of 2017, the drive into Palm Springs had billboards that showed you the mountains they were blocking. Jennifer Bolande put photographs of the ranges ahead on a run of boards along Gene Autry Trail, each one placed so its horizon lined up with the real one at a single point as you drove toward it.⁴⁶⁹ They were not advertising Coachella. They were part of Desert X, an art show, and they stood through festival season.

That is the valley in April: the festival is the loudest thing in it, but not the only thing.

Stagecoach, the week after

By January 2007, Goldenvoice had a country festival on the calendar. The first Stagecoach ran May 5-6, 2007, at the Empire Polo Field, the week after Coachella, with George Strait and Kenny Chesney on top and Willie Nelson, Emmylou Harris and Brooks & Dunn on the bill. Goldenvoice co-produced it with The Messina Group and Moore Entertainment Group.⁴⁷⁰

It has grown up on the same grass. In 2016, Indio raised its cap from 75,000 to 85,000 a day, alongside Coachella's raise to 125,000.⁵⁴ In 2025, the state alcohol regulator counted daily peaks of about 82,000 at Stagecoach, against nearly 110,000 at Coachella.⁶⁹

And sometimes it wins. For 2024, Indio counted 89,003 Stagecoach tickets. Coachella's first weekend had 81,690 and its second 80,148.⁵⁵ That was the year Coachella's sales sagged, but the country crowd was the biggest of the three weekends.

The changeover starts as Coachella's Sunday crowd leaves and runs through the week, until the grounds are a country-western venue.⁸⁸ The grounds chapter has the full list of what gets renamed. What doesn't change is the weather.

On Saturday, April 25, 2026, at about 8 p.m., with gusts of 50-65 mph forecast and sustained winds of 25-35, Stagecoach was paused and the grounds cleared.⁹⁰ The screens read:

"The festival has been postponed until further notice. Please move quickly and calmly to the nearest exit."⁹⁰

It restarted at about 9:30 p.m. with a cheerier screen: "Back in the saddle." Journey and Riley Green were cancelled, Lainey Wilson moved to 10:30 p.m., and the night ran until 1 a.m.⁹⁰⁴⁷¹

The fall trips

The 2013 deal with Indio allowed up to five festivals a year on the site.⁶⁶ For a while, Goldenvoice used the extra slots for something Coachella would never book as a whole lineup.

Desert Trip, October 2016. Two weekends of the Rolling Stones, Bob Dylan, Paul McCartney, Neil Young, Roger Waters and the Who. Stereogum's headline called it "Oldchella." Tickets ran from $199 for a single GA day to $1,599 for a reserved seat for the full weekend, with 150,000 people expected and 1,000 flushable toilets, against the usual 300.¹¹⁴ Tollett told The New York Times it would gross about $160M.¹¹⁵ The money chapter puts that next to Coachella's numbers.

Power Trip, October 6-8, 2023. The same idea, for metal. Iron Maiden and Guns N' Roses on Friday; Judas Priest, standing in for Ozzy Osbourne after he cancelled for health reasons, and AC/DC on Saturday; Tool and Metallica on Sunday. Up to 80,000 a day, with GA from $599 and the pit at $1,599.¹¹⁶

When Goldenvoice took over the polo club year-round in 2021, the lease allowed two more large three-day festivals a year on top of the spring ones.⁴⁵⁵

Desert X and the billboards

Desert X was meant to give the valley a different reason to visit. Its founder, Susan Davis, editorial director at Sunnylands, said in 2016 that people come for mid-century modern architecture, tennis, polo and music, but not for contemporary art.

"I'd like this exhibition to change that."⁴⁷²

It is produced by a nonprofit, the Desert Biennial, and puts site-specific installations by international artists across the valley.⁴⁷³ Four of its works have been billboards, three of them on one road: Gene Autry Trail, which runs from the I-10 into Palm Springs.

2017: Jennifer Bolande, Visible Distance / Second Sight. The landscape boards described above, at Gene Autry Trail and Vista Chino. The title nods to Burma-Shave, the shaving cream whose roadside signs were placed in sequence so the message only read from a moving car.⁴⁶⁹ She planned six double-sided boards and ended up with three, after complications with Lamar Advertising, whose inventory she used.⁴⁷⁴

2019: Cara Romero, Jackrabbit, Cottontail & Spirits of the Desert. Romero is a Chemehuevi photographer. Her five billboards showed enlarged photographs of four young Chemehuevi boys as time travelers returning to ancestral land. One stood in front of the Palm Springs wind turbines. Another showed all four in headdresses under the words "NO WALL."⁴⁷⁵ Desert X's map places the work in Palm Springs.⁴⁷⁶

2021: Xaviera Simmons, Because You Know Ultimately We Will Band a Militia. Billboards on Gene Autry Trail in plain ad typography, with lines like "California once tried to ban Black people" and "Rupture your guilt amnesia."⁴⁷⁷ Across the road stood a Rocky's Pawn Shop board reading "Make America Great" over the Stars and Stripes. PBS SoCal's writer wondered if the pairing was on purpose.⁴⁷⁷ That spring, Coachella was cancelled.⁵¹ Desert X went ahead.

2023: Tyre Nichols, Originals. Six photographs Nichols took in Memphis, among them the Hernando de Soto Bridge at night, a sunset and the Tom Lee monument, on billboards along North Gene Autry Trail.⁴⁷⁸ Nichols, a photographer originally from California, had been beaten to death by police in Memphis earlier that year.⁴⁷⁸ The work was supported by the City of Palm Springs Public Arts Commission and stayed up until May 7, through both Coachella weekends.⁴⁷⁹⁴⁷⁸

The schedule is about to change. Desert X's tenth-anniversary edition, curated by its artistic director Neville Wakefield and curator Kaitlin Garcia-Maestas, runs October 30, 2027 to May 7, 2028, opening in the fall instead of late winter.⁴⁷³ It runs into May 2028, so it should overlap the festival if 2028 keeps the usual April dates.

The billboard chapter covers the other kind of board on these roads, the paid ones.

The parties

Some of the most talked-about nights of Coachella week happen somewhere else.

Neon Carnival. Brent Bolthouse's party, run with Jeffrey Best, is invite-only and sits "near (but not affiliated with) Coachella," in TheWrap's phrasing. It starts after the headliners, runs to 4 a.m., books nightclub DJs, and in 2014 held about 2,000-3,000 wristbanded guests at a private airfield past Indio.⁴⁸⁰ Its age depends on who is counting. Bolthouse dated it to about 2007 in 2014.⁴⁸⁰ BizBash called the 2012 edition, in a Thermal airport hangar, the "third annual."²⁸⁸ By 2024 it was at the Desert International Horse Park in Thermal, for about 10,000 people, with Liquid I.V., Patrón El Alto, Levi's and Heineken as sponsors. You "can't buy" your way in, Bolthouse says.⁴⁸¹

Revolve Festival. Revolve first flew influencers to Coachella in 2013.²⁸⁹ Its invite-only influencer event began in 2015, according to WWD, at the Avalon in Palm Springs; Business of Fashion dates it to 2016.²⁹⁰²⁸⁹ It peaked at about 5,000 guests in 2022.²⁸⁹ That year, at the Merv Griffin Estate in La Quinta, invited influencers waited two to three hours in the heat without water for shuttles, and the internet compared it to Fyre Festival.⁴⁸² Creator Averie Bishop called it "a difficult and unsafe situation that could have been easily avoided."⁴⁸² Revolve apologized, saying shuttle access was limited as the festival reached capacity.²⁹³ Two years later its festival was one day, with about 1,200 guests, and Revolve's marketing spend had fallen from $181M in 2022 to $171M in 2023.²⁸⁹

Pop-up events celebrating the festival still run across the valley on both weekends; NBC Palm Springs reported them again in 2026.⁴⁸³ But the big branded houses that used to line the circuit have mostly given way to activations inside the festival fence. The money chapter has that story.

Splash House, in August

Splash House, a weekend of DJs at Palm Springs hotel pools, was started by locals Kelly McLean and her brother Tyler. In August 2013 it ran across three hotels, the Saguaro, Caliente Tropics and The Curve, with shuttles between them.⁴⁸⁴ The Coachella Valley Independent's preview that year hoped it might "become yet another popular annual event."⁴⁸⁴

It did. In 2026 it ran two August weekends, August 7-9 and 14-16, at the Saguaro, the Hilton and the Renaissance, with after-hours sets at the Palm Springs Air Museum.⁴⁸⁵ It now appears on Goldenvoice's own festivals page.³⁰⁸

The count is slightly off. Visit Greater Palm Springs called 2026 the festival's 13th year, which would point to a 2014 start, while the 2013 preview describes an event that summer.⁴⁸⁵⁴⁸⁴ A skipped pandemic year would explain the gap, but nothing found here says so.

Coachella, the city

The festival is not in Coachella. It is named for the Coachella Valley and has always been held in Indio.⁴

The name itself is a mistake. In 1901, railroad man Jason Rector proposed "Conchilla," for the little fossil shells in the area, as the name of a new townsite. The printer set it as "Coachella," and the founders kept it rather than hold up the announcement. The valley took the name later, and the town became a city in 1946. The historian Jeff Crider told NPR the word means nothing in Spanish or English beyond the place itself.⁴

The city of Coachella is its own place, and 97.5% Latino.⁴⁸⁶ Its motto was once "The City of Eternal Sunshine." Type coachella.com and you get the festival.⁴⁸⁷

The place name and the trademark have met in court. In December 2021, a New Year's Eve event called "Coachella Day One 22" was planned at Coachella Crossroads, next to Spotlight 29 Casino in the city of Coachella, produced by the Twenty-Nine Palms Band of Mission Indians.⁴⁸⁸ The tribe has sovereign immunity, so Goldenvoice sued Live Nation, Ticketmaster and the web host instead.⁴⁸⁸ FOX 11 reported that a judge granted a temporary restraining order; Festival Insider later reported the order was denied and a preliminary injunction let the case go on.⁴⁸⁸⁴⁸⁹ The case settled in August 2022, terms undisclosed, and the tribe said the venue keeps the name Coachella Crossroads.⁴⁸⁹

The east valley

The valley's two big industries are agriculture, notably dates, and tourism and entertainment. The valley's first major farm labor strike was in 1965.⁴

In 2018, Gabriel Thompson reported on the east valley's farm towns for Type Investigations. Thermal, with about 2,396 people, and Mecca, with nearly 9,000, were each 99.9% Latino; Oasis was 98.2%. About a third of Thermal's residents lived below the poverty line, including nearly half its children. Drinking water on the east side contained arsenic, and there were illegal dumps. In grape season, some migrant workers slept in cars or parking lots.⁴⁸⁶ His summary of the festival's place in all this:

It "has little bearing on the lives of people on the valley's east side."⁴⁸⁶

Thermal is also where some festivalgoers land. In 2022, the flight company Blade expected to fly about 200 people from Santa Monica to Thermal for the festival, turning a five-hour drive into about 40 minutes.³⁴⁰

There is one point where the festival and the east valley's workers meet: the cleanup. Grape workers from these fields take the overnight trash shifts on the polo grounds, which the money chapter covers.⁴⁶²

In 2025, the TODEC Legal Center put up billboards of its own: ten of them, showing local farmworkers, around the valley during festival season, one of them featuring Pedro Zacarias of Thermal. TODEC counts more than 10,000 farmworkers in the valley. Its director, Luz Gallegos, said the festival pulls attention away from the east side, where the "real Coachella" is.⁴⁹⁰

Weather

The desert sets the calendar. The first Coachella, in October 1999, ran in temperatures over 100°F.³ Spring dates don't guarantee mild weather: in 2004, Saturday afternoon went past 100 degrees and was described as brutal.²⁷ Wikipedia's summary of 2012 gives a range across the two weekends from 43°F on April 14 to 106°F on April 21.¹⁸ Every year, JFK Memorial Hospital in Indio, the closest hospital, adds staff for heat illness and drug and alcohol cases. Its medical director, Dr. Andrew Cassinove, said "many of these emergency visits are preventable."⁴⁹¹

The bigger problem now is wind.

• 2018. A high-wind warning, with gusts to 60 mph, held the weekend-two campground closed for about 18 hours. Thousands of campers waited in a Walmart lot in Indio and called it #Walmartchella.³⁵⁸ In La Quinta, sheriff's deputies moved campers out of another Walmart lot under a ban on sleeping in vehicles.³⁵⁹ The cities ended up publishing a list of 12 places to wait, including store lots, two casinos, a lake campground and La Quinta City Hall's south lot.³⁶⁰
• 2019. On a windy April 21, a 120-pound light fixture fell from a tent ceiling and fractured a concertgoer's skull. She sued AEG and Goldenvoice that November.⁴⁹²
• 2026, Coachella. On Friday, April 10, wind knocked a piece of equipment into the crowd during John Summit's set at the Do LaB, injuring a festivalgoer, and the stage closed for the night.²⁴¹ Tents in the campgrounds were destroyed.⁴⁸³ Anyma's main-stage set was cancelled: "Due to strong wind conditions affecting Anyma's stage build, he is unable to perform tonight."²⁴¹
• 2026, Stagecoach. Two weeks later, the Stagecoach evacuation described above.⁹⁰

What the season leaves behind

Three weekends of crowds leave a lot on the ground. A City of Indio environmental report found that Coachella, Stagecoach and Desert Trip attendees produced 107 tons of solid waste a day, with about 20% of it recycled.⁴⁹³ For 2022, the two spring festivals diverted 141 tonnes of mixed recycling and 86 tonnes of compost. Lund University's Kim Nicholas said the emissions from attendees and artists traveling in are "way bigger" than anything on site.⁴⁹⁴

The festival's own figures, which it reports itself, are larger. Its sustainability page claims 616,278 pounds composted or recycled across Coachella and Stagecoach in 2024, plus 79,120 pounds of materials donated to the Galilee Center and 56,051 pounds of food to the Coachella Valley Rescue Mission.¹⁴⁰

The rest of the year

Since 2021, Goldenvoice has had the polo club year-round, not just for the festivals.⁴⁵⁵ And the land around it may not stay empty. In June 2025, the owner of Empire Polo Club proposed a mixed-use development on about 218 acres next to the festival grounds: homes, restaurants, shops and possibly a sports venue. County officials approved a key land-use change, but no designs or timeline had been released.⁴⁹⁵

The season, in other words, is getting longer. Desert X is moving into the fall. October has had rock and metal. August has pool parties. The festival is still the two weekends everyone plans around, but the valley has been filling in the calendar on either side.

Still open

• Splash House's first year. 2013 or 2014? The McLeans would know.
• Neon Carnival's first year. About 2007, by Bolthouse, or 2010, by BizBash's count.
• Desert X in 2027-28. Whether a fall opening means billboard works will be up for both festival weekends of 2028.