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Drumming Up The Sun 2025 Report

Drumming Up The Sun is a tradition on the Colorado Front Range that goes back decades. My first time was in 1995 and it had been going on for many years before that. It started as something that happened at Red Rocks, but there is a parallel event (the Northern Colorado DUTS) that I’ve attended the last half dozen years. I went to Red Rocks this year. It was the first time I’ve been there in about 10 years.

Gods, but there were a lot of people!

I brought my big barrel drum and played it for about 2 hours straight. I wasn’t the first person drumming, but I had some chances to assess how my drum and plastic claves sounded in the amphitheater without much else going on. I kind of liked the echo of the claves against the walls.

Some folks had a very long walk from their cars, parked along the road coming up. The access road goes about halfway up the hill where there is a gate that prevents access to the site proper. There is a small parking lot for will-call during usual events at the amphitheater. I got there at 3 am… straight from a club by way of a 7/11 where I filled my thermos with crappy coffee. They weren’t going to open the gate until 0620 but there was already a gathering of cars at 0500, so the dude let us in.

We filled up about 1/2 to 2/3 of the way down from the top, shoulder to shoulder practically. I have been out of touch with much of the Front Range Pagan Community, I only saw a few people that I recognized, but I didn’t exactly filter through the crowd. Shout out to Max Young of Rhythmetrix, whom I bumped into after I finally stopped about 20 minutes after the calculated sunrise. Max does some rather special drumming events that I have enjoyed quite a bit (links on his site).

The sun wasn’t actually visible until almost 45 minutes later because it was behind some clouds on the horizon. When I left, an hour after the sunrise at 0718 there were still some guys banging it out on djembes and a set of dunduns.

By the time this picture was taken, a sizable portion of the crowd had left. People started leaving right about 0718 even though we couldn’t see the sun. This pic gives an rough idea of how much of the amphitheater was filled.