Wells hosted the first Humboldt Hideaway music festival, and everyone 'just loved it'

Herndon launched the Schellraiser music festival in the small town of McGill, Nevada in 2022, and it was held in that town’s pool park for three years, but in 2025 the festival took a hiatus while Herndon looked for a new location. He decided he had found the perfect spot when he visited the Wells city park, and he moved to Wells and set to work on organizing the 2026 festival, which was rechristened Humboldt Hideaway.

After this year’s festival Herndon said, “Everyone I've talked to so far who attended Humboldt Hideaway and previous Schellraisers, everyone I've talked to has said this was far and away our best event yet.”

“And I personally feel that way as well.”

Herndon said he was actually a little surprised that this year’s festival felt like the best one yet, because Humboldt Hideaway was a scaled-down version of the festivals in McGill. For the first three years, Schellraiser was a three- or four-day festival with two stages and more than 30 bands. Since the attendance at Schellraiser was smaller than he had hoped, Herndon decided to move to a new location and scale back Humboldt Hideaway to a two-day festival with one stage and 17 bands. But the scaled-down festival had a lot of fans.

“Everyone who was there, from bands to attendees to volunteers to the vendors I've talked to, they just loved it,” Herndon said.

He said the sound quality and the audio mix throughout the festival was clear and crisp and was just outstanding.

Herndon said the Wells city park turned out to be a beautiful setting for the festival, just as he had envisioned when he first visited the park. The park also provided plenty of space for the festival.

“The soccer field, if you're just driving by and there's nothing set up, it doesn't look that big, but it's immense,” Herndon said.

They set up two shade tents in the park – one for the artists, and one for the general public.

There was some good weather during the festival, but they also got hit was some blasts of strong winds.

“That was really unfortunate,” Herndon said.

Everything withstood the winds except for one projection screen. A visual artist came from Denver to provide the visuals for Swervedriver’s concert Friday night, and he set up his big screen before the show, but it was damaged by the wind.

“My heart sank when I saw that, but he was understanding,” Herndon said. “He said he had a wonderful time nonetheless, and he was appreciative for our support.”

One of the nice benefits of having the festival at the Wells city park is that they were able to use the Boys and Girls Club across the street as an artists’ lounge.

“The bands loved that venue, because it's basically just one huge basketball court. So as I'd hoped, sure enough, the band members were shooting hoops during their downtime. And yeah, they just had a blast.”

“Everything I've heard so far is that all the bands had a wonderful time,” Herndon said. “They appreciated the hospitality. They loved the experience.

“Many of them aren't familiar with rural Nevada, especially not northeastern Nevada. And many were pleasantly surprised.”

This year the festival featured a variety of food trucks from Elko and Spring Creek and other towns in the region, and a food truck from the Wells Bakery. The Nuts Under a Buck food truck from Elko and the Korean Balance food truck from Spring Creek were back for their third year at the festival.

“We just love them to death,” Herndon said.

Festival music

As Herndon puts together the festival, he works on bringing in bands that he loves, and he works on booking a variety of different kinds of bands that lots of people are sure to enjoy. This year’s Saturday night headliners were two of his favorites, Camera Obscura and Ivy.

He said that Camera Obscura’s “set list was just perfect” and spanned the length of their career, from their first album which came out 25 years ago to the most recent album from two years ago.

Talking about Ivy, Herndon said, “I'm an obsessive music lover. I just love so many bands, so many different genres and styles of music. There are so many bands I love, but then there's a different category of bands that I worship and adore, and Ivy definitely falls into that latter category.”

The festival’s name, Humboldt Hideaway, was inspired by Ivy’s song “Hideaway.”

After a key member of Ivy, Adam Schlesinger, died from Covid in 2020, the group thought they might disband, but they found lots of unfinished material Schlesinger had worked on, and they put together a new album. This year they went on a mini tour with just five stops – in Palm Beach, Florida; Chicago, New York, Los Angeles, and Wells.

Herndon was surprised by what he learned when talked to their tour manager.

“He said this mini tour after a 15-year hiatus never would have happened if I hadn't talked to their agent about them performing at Humboldt Hideaway. So that was truly special. I felt overwhelmed when I heard that, in a good way.”

Herndon said one of things he has found while working on the festival is that “sometimes my favorite bands also turn out to be the nicest, kindest people one could ever hope to meet. And talking to Ivy for a short while, they were just such lovely people.”

Festival crew

Putting together and running a music festival is a lot of work. Herndon commented that during the festival he unfortunately didn’t have time to shoot hoops with the bands.

“I was so busy with a million things and trying to enjoy as many bands as I could when I had the time,” he said.

Of course, he does not do it alone. Herndon credited the success of the festival to all the work put in by the volunteers, the production crew, the security team, the Wells city crew, and others, and he especially credited the work put in by the festival’s operations manager, Sarah Jaeger.

“None of this would have been possible without my amazing operations manager,” Herndon said.

Jaeger volunteered at Schellraiser in 2023, and she signed on to be the operations manager for Schellraiser in 2024, and she is back this year.

Herndon said he has read coverage of the festival saying it is a testament to the hard work of dozens and dozens of people, and he chuckles a little bit when he reads that, because although a lot of people do work on the festival, Jaeger on her own is also “literally doing the work of dozens and dozens of people.”

“She’s no nonsense. She knows how to get things done.”

Festival attendance

A week after the first Humboldt Hideaway, Herndon finalized the attendance numbers and found that, although the number of people who came to the festival was still smaller than he was hoping for, the number of tickets sold was higher than two of the three Schellraiser festivals.

For the first Schellraiser in 2022, 209 people came to the four-day festival. In 2023 the festival was three days, and a total of 450 tickets were sold, but Herndon said the attendance felt like less than that because some of the people came primarily just to see one band, such as Asleep at the Wheel, Blonde Redhead or Murder by Death. In 2024 the festival was again three days, and 286 people came to the festival.

Herndon said that this year, 318 people came to the Humboldt Hideaway festival.

The big difference this year, Herndon said, was the level of local support for the festival. Exactly half of the Humboldt Hideaway festival-goers – 159 people – were Elko County residents. He’s counting a handful of people from Wendover, Utah, as part of the Elko County ticket purchasers.

“We had people from all of Elko County, from Carlin to Elko, Spring Creek, Jackpot, both Wendovers and Wells,” Herndon said. “That's what's really heartening to me. We had local buy-in that, quite frankly, we did not have in our former host community, where we had what I feel was a wonderful event three years in a row.

“Just having that local buy-in means so much to me.”

Herndon said the people of Wells have been very supportive of the festival. He has become friends with Mayor Gary Pollock, who came out to the festival on Friday.

“He loved Swervedriver and Hotline TNT,” Herndon said.

Herndon said Wells City Manager Jason Pengelly is the first person he talked with about Humboldt Hideaway, and he has been supportive of the festival all along the way.

“Jason and his wife came out on Saturday, and he said they both had a great time,” Herndon said.

He said Wells Public Works Supervisor Glenn Shamblin and all of the public works department have been “amazing” in the work they put in to help with the festival.

“They went completely above and beyond what one would expect or hope for.”

The people who traveled to Humboldt Hideaway from outside of Elko County included more than 50 people from Salt Lake City and the Wasatch Front, 22 people from Reno, and 14 people from Las Vegas.

“We had no paying attendees from Twin Falls, unfortunately, but we did have a couple of volunteers from Twin,” Herndon said.

Herndon is hoping that Humboldt Hideaway will be able to bring in more people from Elko County and from throughout the surrounding region in the years ahead. He was hoping to sell around 550 tickets this year, but his goal for the festival is to grow to around 900 people. He feels that size would probably be the sweet spot. It is well below the Wells city park’s approved capacity of 1,500, but an attendance of 900 people could be big enough to keep the festival financially sustainable, while also keeping it a small, micro music festival that’s right for the city of Wells.

“I do feel that a micro-scale event in Wells can be financially successful because of the local support,” Herndon said.

Big music festivals bring in crowds of well over 100,000 people. Herndon said that is what some people picture when they hear that Wells is hosting a music festival, and he explains that Humboldt Hideaway will always be a micro music festival.

Now that the first Humboldt Hideaway is over, Herndon is hoping to keep the festival going, and he is, of course, thinking about which bands could possibly be part of the festival next year.

He is also thinking about the possibility of moving the festival to another time of year, possibly late September, to try to maximize the chances of good weather and minimize the conflicts with other events. This year the festival was the same weekend as the high school graduations in Elko County. Herndon will be talking with the Elko Convention and Visitors Authority about possible dates for the festival.