Eastern Nevada music and arts festival draws international, national acts

Photos by Mary Claire Boucher and Bob Conrad

MCGILL, Nev. — The spike in social media check-ins the weekend of June 3, 2023 from McGill, Nevada was, undoubtedly, happening at unprecedented pace. People from as far away as Wales, but primarily from the West, visiting the small eastern Nevada town were likely record-setting in their diversity. 

The Schellraiser Music Festival was why. It had live art, an author chat and back-to-back bands spanning three days. National and international acts performed, bands that normally play large clubs and stadiums. 

At Schellraiser, held in McGill’s park, they played to about 300 people, depending on the day and time. 

Dinosaur Jr.’s “Green Mind” major label debut saw the noise rock trio touring with a band called Nirvana opening in the early ‘90s. They headlined Schellraiser Saturday. But beneath them in the lineup were about three dozen other bands with styles ranging from country to punk to alternative rock to cumbia-punk. All came from out of state.

“Cow, meet punk. Punk, meet cow” is how the festival’s website brands the event. It was not only stylistically diverse, but also culturally. Straying from the eons-long trend of some other, similar events, Schellraiser was not a sausage fest overly represented by Caucasians. Fortunately.

Rudy Herndon, Schellraiser’s organizer, has brought to eastern Nevada the kind of music and art fest places like Reno still clamor for. Between Thursday, June 1 and Saturday, June 3 Schellraiser, now in its second year, blew minds.

More below the photo gallery.

Day one photos

Wait, where?

McGill’s history is much like the rest of Nevada’s. White colonizers came in claiming historically indigenous lands as their own, mined ore, established ranches and so forth.

A rancher in the late 1800s set up shop about 11 miles north of Ely, in the Steptoe Valley, on the ancestral lands of the Western Shoshone to help serve copper mining interests. The town developed from then. The unincorporated town has a population of 1,010 as of 2020.

Being on the far eastern part of the state, Ely, and McGill just to the north, is about a five-hour drive plus or minus an hour or two from Reno if you stop to dip into one of the state’s open hot springs, hike for petroglyphs or just to stroll through the small towns Austin or Eureka on the way. 

The lonely Highway 50 gets you there, and this year, unlike years past, a plentiful amount of moisture blessed the landscapes with super blooms of desert wildflowers. Bright blues, yellows and orange flowers were strikingly visible along the way. The landscape was the greenest I’ve ever seen this time of year.

Geographically, the closest large city is Salt Lake City, followed by Las Vegas then Reno. It was folks from the Biggest Little City, more than five hours away by car, that disproportionately showed up. More on them later.

White Pine County, where McGill resides, is no stranger at playing host to entertaining and slightly bizarre events. The bathtub races at Cave Lake State Park, once sponsored by the local brothel, are one example.

The annual Fire and Ice event is a snow sculptor’s opportunity to shine, headlined by a sonically intense fireworks show either off a moving train or within the Cave Lake canyon. Subfreezing temperatures should be expected. 

There’s outdoor recreation year-round in the county: fishing, ice fishing, biking, hunting, snowmobiling, backcountry skiing, dark sky photography and camping. White Pine County is a recreationist’s dream destination, especially if you like minimal traffic and solitude. Add Schellraiser to the mix, and there are now regular reasons to visit Ely and its surroundings.

“White Pine County has always loved live music and supported musicians.” That’s according to Kyle Horvath, White Pine County’s tourism director. “The Schellraiser festival not only provided a great weekend of music and community but also filled our hotels and restaurants.”

So it’s kind of a huge deal with people from as far away as New Jersey or Wales (UK) staying at the Hotel Nevada, along with dozens of others, and descending on the town like an amorphous cultural anomaly. Few White Pine County locals appeared to attend; one who did told This Is Reno’s Mary Claire Boucher she loved it. Upon departing on the second night, lights from McGill’s street lights illuminated a group of kids on BMX bikes and skateboards, cruising from town to the park like a scene out of “E.T.”

Locals, at the least, were Schellraiser-curious.

“​​We’re offering the community a great bargain,” Herndon told me. “It’s not only a chance for locals to discover all these great bands who rarely perform in rural communities like White Pine County, it’s also bringing people out of the area here, getting them to discover just how beautiful Nevada as a whole is.”

“The town (Ely) was packed with people who were clearly here for the festival but who took time to explore the community and all we have to offer,” Horvath added. “Those are the visitors we love.”

More below the photo gallery.

Day 2 photos

Art, vasectomy donuts, a full moon 

Many festival goers were set up at Schellraiser’s 80-acre private campground, which is designed like something you might see at Burning Man. It has solar power, numerous glamping tents, rentable structures, “delightful” showers and a flooded dirt road to travel over in order to sleep there each night. That’s due to runoff from the Schell Creek Range, the festival’s namesake, which still had snow. 

A giant steel dragon and other maybe mythical creatures, like what appeared to be a rooster, are embedded into the camp’s landscape, and steel signage quietly directs you into the private grounds. 

The campsites range from glamping with power to open camping with tents and in cars. The June 3 full moon dimly lit the expanse of sage surrounding everything. Creeks gently gurgled in the distance.

Temperatures at the fest ranged from the mid-40s at night to what felt like 90-degrees Fahrenheit. It rained, both water and seed pods, at the park each day. Nobody seemed to mind. Likely the opposite.

“Free” natural spring water was available during the festival, and food was plentiful from a handful of food trucks. My favorite: The “Nuts Under a Buck” truck was selling testical-looking donuts with menu items named “Strudel Deez Nut” and “Vasectomy Nut,” the latter of which I ordered and can confidently say was delightful and decadent in spite of, or maybe because of, its name.

Rides to hotels in Ely and back were provided by the “Canna-bus” provided free by the Ely Shoshone Tribe, which was also hosting a free stop at the Tribe’s Tsaa Nesunkwa (which means “feel good”) Dispensary. 

There was “kindness everywhere,” The Joy Formidable’s (from Wales) Rhiannon “Ritzy” Bryan said. “My favorite festival so far.”

Few of the acts did not comment on the festival’s feel-good vibe or the beautiful scenery or both. There were no fights, no egos and only one guy ended up drunk in the ditch on the third night – that we knew about. A dreadlocked poodle roamed the grounds and ended up on stage at one point.

The children in attendance loved it. Death Valley Girls got them on stage. They also got to bang a gong during The Joy Formidable’s set. They got free drumsticks and showed up the next day ready to rock, sticks in hand.

“Seeing those little girls yesterday, during Death Valley Girls and The Joy Formidable, was incredible,” Herndon said. “I’m going to remember that. More importantly, they’re going to remember that. Hopefully it changes their lives. I think it will.”

As many as a third to a half the crowd was from Reno, Tahoe and Carson City, Herndon estimated.

More below the photo gallery.

The people

The Reno contingent 

The sizable contingent from Reno drove the five hours across Highway 50 to escape being lonely in Reno to dance, drink and celebrate wild Nevada with like-minded friends, new and old.

The vibe was perhaps akin to what Burning Man was at the beginning. A super remote, high desert experience made great by the people there and the art they create. Today, I’m sure, that is still the case, but it’s at such a grand scale that money and hours long waits plus loads of rules to follow have radically altered the original tenor of the festival in the Black Rock Desert. 

Reno-native, guitarist for The Delines and novelist, Willie Vlautin, said Schellraiser was “one of the most beautiful festivals I’ve ever come across. The idea of getting to see Dinosaur Jr. here for maybe a couple hundred people is insane.” The Delines (Portland, Ore.) were one of the first bands to play on day one. They played McGill and were headed to tour Australia a day or two later.

Folks gathered in McGill with few preconceptions aside from great music, good food and an awe-inspiring mountain range seen from any vantage point at the McGill Pool Park. Desert rat Renoite Natalie Handler said Schellraiser was unlike any event she’s attended.

“Shout out to the Schellraiser  family – Rudy and all those guys for bringing it hard,” she said. “Amazing bands: Blonde Redhead, Dinosaur Jr., Tropa Magica – the best of the best.”

People back home were astonished at social media posts about the event.

“Titus Andronicus in rural Nevada?” Reno City Council member Jenny Brekhus asked. “Damn, I wish I knew about that.”

The Delines’ Amy Boone called McGill “a special magic place,” hinting that it will lose that quality the more people know about it. Like the not-so-secret swimming holes of Austin, Texas.

Schellraiser is such a great festival, in such an optimum location — far from a metro area but close enough to Ely and amenities — that it runs the risk of losing some of its charm the more people learn of it. The park itself will get very crowded when 1,000 people show up.

“It’s not easy putting on a festival like this,” Patrick Stickles of Titus Andronicus acknowledged. The New Jersey band was touring in support of their latest Merge Records release. The band dedicated their finale, a cover of Springsteen’s “Glory Days,” to what the early years of Schellraiser will be referred to by those who were there, then: an innovative, inspiring experience in one of the most unlikely places in America, one that will be remembered with a singular kind of reverie.

Packing up on Sunday, near a horseshoe-shaped dirt pit – looking suspiciously like an amphitheater-to-be and perhaps the future home of Schellraiser – I struck up a conversation with a tall, bearded young man. Turns out he came in from Carson City, traversing 50 especially to see Titus Andronicus.

“You coming next year?” I asked him.

“Oh yeah. It’s the best festival I’ve ever been to,” he replied, parting his red mustache and beard with a giant grin.

Day 3 photos