Alongside Bass Coast, Shambhala is one of the northern strongholds of the fabled West Coast transformational festival circuit, which runs roughly from Southern California up the coast, across the Nevada border to Burning Man and then up to here. (The festival doesn’t sell it.) You can swim in the river, do yoga, dance until dawn and well past then as well.Īnd for the past four days that’s essentially what we’ve all been doing out here, in the roughly middle of nowhere festival site located on a 500 acre ranch in the Kootenay Rocky mountain region of southwestern British Columbia. The song serves as both a non-official wake up call for the 12,000 campers dozing in their tents and a rhetorical question for all of us who’ve spent the last three days partying in the woods here at the Canadian electronic music festival Shambhala.Īt this festival you can spin a giant wheel to find out what spirit animal you are, you can eat a hamburger made from cows raised on the property, you can party at a secret stage - “the Berghain of Shambhala,” I’m told - if you promise not to tell anyone where it is. You can stand in line to get your drugs tested, but you can’t buy alcohol. It’s noon on a rainy Sunday, and in the woods a classical cover of the Pixies’ “Where Is My Mind” blasts through the trees.

Shambala 2019