Sacred Acre Festival Gears Up In Alaska – Pollstar News

Sacred Acre is kicking off its 2024 festival with three days of music and exploration from Sept. 6 to 8. This year’s lineup features Peekaboo, The Glitch Mob, Wreckno, Zingara and more in the midst of the Alaskan landscape. While the event itself is quite isolated, the festival’s directors Chris Miller and Hannah Stearns managed to find a way to make it all happen. The two built off of their sister event, SalmonFestl, and its previous infrastructure.

“The challenge of marketing an event, especially in such a rural location, is a hurdle in itself,” Miller tells Pollstar. “Many people have this wanderlust they want to fulfill, but it’s really hard to make people take a leap of faith. This year, over 40% of ticket sales are from out of state, so I think we’re doing a good job at capturing that out of state market. It reminds me of when Jim [Stearns, festival director for SalmonFest] and Hannah were sitting around Jim’s table talking one year about, let’s book CloZee and LSDream, and we did it. But we got a lot of Fyre Festival comments right out the gate, it was really rough because we were in the middle of nowhere. There’s so many events that are popping up everywhere, and we have seen a lot of events that have taken a hard nose dive or had weather hit them really hard. People look at Alaska and they’re like, it’s going to be freezing cold or it’s going to be hard to get to. That hurdle has been a big one for us. Thankfully we had SalmonFest to help us with getting our foot in the door in a lot of regards on the lineup and artists and people to come work at the event. We already have a plug-and-play facility. It’s been really amazing to walk above some of those first-year struggles because of the SalmonFest team.”

The festival’s mission is to combat factory trawling, which damages the Arctic ecosystems. Factory trawling scrapes the ocean floor, which in turn harms ecosystems and leads to the capture and discard of unwanted marine life. Throughout the festival, Sacred Acre hosts workshops, including ones that focus on the harmful fishing practice.

The festival also features the biggest laser show in Alaska, performance art and fire dancers. Fans can also embark on excursions to see all the nature Alaska has to offer.

“We have helicopter flights leaving right from the festival site,” Stearns says. “You can go for 30-minute tours or half-day tours to a glacier. We have our Bumping on the Bay tour, which is a three-hour tour in Homer with a national DJ. There’s 24-hour programming in that space where you can go and do workshops and simply do self-improvement. Really getting in touch with yourself, that is something you can do without experiencing any of the bass music.”

In order to build the festival, SalmonFest will utilize steamships and semis. Sacred Acre uses much of the same setup as SalmonFest, making the build a bit easier. Load in takes 10-12 days, and they’ll use up to 53 semis. This year’s laser production is coming straight from Burning Man, making for a quick turnaround with the shipping process.

“SalmonFest has been able to parlay the challenges of getting here and the remoteness of it into a bit of a mystique,” Stearns says. “Last year, we sold tickets in 48 states and 17 countries. Sacred Acre has the same goal in mind, to make this a destination festival.”