Dierks Bentley’s Seven Peaks Music Festival will return in 2022, scheduled for Labor Day Weekend, September 2-4. The festival will be in a new location, however, moving to Villa Grove, Colorado from its original home in Buena Vista.
“I can’t overstate how much it means to be able to say that Seven Peaks is officially coming back,” shared Bentley. “We’re excited to have found the perfect new location for the festival in Villa Grove. We love Colorado and it was important to us to find a home for this special event that encompasses all the magic of the beauty of the state. I can’t wait to share what we have planned for this year’s festival in the coming days.”
A full lineup is expected to be announced on April 13.
Previously, Seven Peaks had been held in Buena Vista, Colorado, a mountain town of approximately 3,000 residents around 95 miles west of Colorado Springs. Villa Grove is about 45 miles south of Buena Vista in a different county. Plans to relocate the festival stemmed from the cancellation of the 2021 edition of Seven Peaks, which happened when county officials in Colorado would not allow the festival organizers to exceed the maximum of 5,000 that local health rules allowed at the time.
“Seven Peaks Music Festival is being cancelled for 2021 due to current capacity restrictions in place by local health officials,” read the event website at the time of the cancellation, which dashed plans for appearances by artists including Bentley, Keith Urban, and others. “We are already planning for 2022, and a new location will be announced in the coming months. Stay tuned for details.”
Some fans have questioned the choice of location, as Villa Grove is a very small community with limited infrastructure.
“I’m very concerned about the impact this will have on a town that doesn’t even have a gas station,” writes Laurie Schwed on the Facebook thread under the above video. “It has very very limited facilities and little to no infrastructure and a short staffed Sherriff’s Dept. Where exactly where will the Festival held? Why are there no specific details being released?”
Other similar comments were left, but the majority of fans in the thread seemed thrilled for the event’s return, and confident that organizers would be able to mount a successful event. Many also expressed their happiness at the relocation after feeling the sting of the cancellation last year by the local health authorities.
Seven Peaks debuted in 2018, featuring Clint Black, Miranda Lambert, Brothers Osborne, Elle King, Dan + Shay, and Bentley among its performers. It returned in 2019 with Bentley and Luke Bryan co-headlining and Maren Morris, Travis Tritt and Jon Pardi among the other performers. An estimated 13,000 turned up for the 2019 show, nearly double the attendance of the inaugural event, according to media reports at the time. Organizers had hoped to draw 20,000 to the 2020 and 2021 events, but capacity restrictions spiked both.
Tickets have not yet gone on sale for Seven Peaks 2022, but it is likely they will be announced alongside the lineup when that is released.
