BEAVER, UT — As the COVID lockdown era slowly comes to a close, festivals are coming back with redoubled force. There are so many options to choose from, many of which offer huge stages and massive crowds. With inflation, rising rent, and a limited budget, it can be hard for ravers and festival goers to choose which events are worth it.
Don’t Trip Campout is a gathering in Utah that has proven to deliver something magical. It was birthed out of one man’s spiritual journey that led to multiple underground events and eventually blossomed into a boutique camping festival in the Utah forested mountains.
The campout offers an intimate getaway in the beautiful setting of Eagle Point Ski Resort. With quirky and rustic stage designs, top-notch sound, lasers and lights, a big focus on wellness, miles of forest and mountains to explore, and various workshops and shenanigans to participate in, this fresh new event quickly became my favorite festival of 2022.
We sat down with the founder of the Don’t Trip brand, Eric “Danger House” Barnes to talk about this inspiring, captivating collaborative passion project.
Tell us about your journey that led up to the fruition of Don’t Trip.
The roots of it all came from a life lesson and my spiritual self-seeking journey. Growing up I was raised in a Catholic home where we didn’t practice heavily, which left me questioning the religion and the higher power in a sense.
Later on in life I met friends who had a closer devotion to religion and their practices, and realizing I had a lack of one myself. A lot of people’s stability comes from their understanding of faith. So my spiritual journey started with seeking answers that were not universally found. Which led me to a lot of psychedelic use, and a spiritual awakening in 2018.
In the years leading up to 2018, I would take a couple of weeks off in January every year for my birthday and go to Mexico to chase a music festival called BPM. They had a chain of events down there through a 10 day period. Me and my friends would go down there and have a good time. I started noticing I was having a little more in-depth experience in my travels down there than I would back home. I was having very intense, vivid dreams, and I started noticing more connections with the people down there.
There was an ability to speak to people, even though there were different languages, and have a connection that was more heartfelt than what i had back home. I took notice to it, and every year I would go down to Mexico I felt a reset. I would feel more clear-headed and more focused in life.
Then in 2018, we had come back from a show at 7 or 8 in the morning, and I noticed I was having visuals and I felt more connected than usual. I came to find that I was having a connection to the “energy vortex” in Tulum. At first I thought I got slipped something or I got drugged, and I got a little concerned. So I separated myself from my friends and went to sleep. Then I had an experience which at the time I didn’t know was a kundalini awakening.
My body went into yoga poses and mudras that I’ve never practiced before in my life. I saw a lot of symbolism from ancient culture, such as the pyramids, the Jewish star, Ganesh, Jesus Christ, and ancient downloaded information about the big bang, the apocalypse, and the whole timeline of consciousness. It was like a massive matrix-style download of information.
This extremely beautiful and unbelievable experience I can only equate to as simple as I spoke to God. A lot of the questions about “why are we here?” were basically downloaded into my hard drive in an instant flash of overwhelming information.
What that did for me, and how it ties into Don’t Trip, is that I recognized a lot of my life and my path towards today are parts of me and my soul that have been reincarnated and lived through time. I realized that my artistic sense as a designer and my search for music is sacred. I realized that the tones and frequencies put out healing musical influence. Lastly I realized that my search for spirituality could tie these things together. To me that was the balance, the triangle, that made me who I am.
That experience ignited the message behind Don’t Trip. The message, to me, is a self-taught life lesson about letting go of over-analyzing, anxieties, the indoctrination of society, the things that shape you, your financial status, your looks, everything that’s not controllable. To really focus on the important things, the mission of life, which is to love, to learn to be loved, and to share that with others and create community.
Who are your business partners behind Don’t Trip?
Richard “RizKee” Lombardi from the Chicago area is my best friend, and the partner I originated Don’t Trip with in 2018. After the second “Please Don’t Trip” event in November 2020, I started speaking with Brett Rubin, who had DJ’ed the first event. He enjoyed it, and had reached out to me in December of 2020 with goals about doing a festival at Eagle Point, Utah. He had asked me if I wanted to build a stage at the event. I basically cut the conversation short and told him I wanted to build the Don’t Trip brand and go forward with Don’t Trip as running the festival.
Brett has background in the DJ culture in Vegas, in productions and promotions. We discussed the idea of Don’t Trip for a day or two, and he agreed that the brand is strong and that our qualities would be a good match to grow this into something special. From there we had the goal of hosting the third Don’t Trip in Utah as a 3-day campout.
Andy Spentzos from Phoenix also jumped in on the partnership in helping us produce the event. All of us are DJs and we play sets each year at Don’t Trip. I am also the artistic director and graphic designer for the event.
What were some of the biggest challenges in throwing Don’t Trip in 2022?
This year was definitely a little more of a challenge than the prior three events, mainly based on rising prices. Inflation really makes a difference in how much people can afford to travel. If you look at the big picture, travel is a luxury for a lot of people. If you’re one of the many whose rent went up by at least 20% this year, the first thing you’re probably gonna cut is travel expenses. I believe that really made our biggest hurdle this year.
A lot of our core following is from California, and when we’re paying 7+ dollars at the pump there for fuel, it made it a challenge to come out for the event. When it came to booking the artists we had the year prior, we had to increase our budget just based on travel alone. Flights doubled and tripled to what they were normally at.
The second main difficulty was still being a very fresh brand in the festival realm. In the infancy we’re at, it’s hard to compete with bigger mega festivals that have been established for a decade plus. There’s a lot of groundwork that happens with marketing, and capturing your crowd. It takes a bigger team to manage marketing as social media becomes more difficult and algorithms become more challenging to push through. Being a self-funded event, a lot of the work falls on our shoulders to keep the dream alive. We can’t compete with the marketing budget of other festivals that have big bucks and backers behind them.
In the nature of what we do, the word of mouth and the intimate experience we curate speaks volumes to who we are. As this brand grows, our marketing sense comes from the quality over the quantity. It takes time to build our brand, and we’re in it for the long haul, because our motivation is for the greater good.
I’d love for this passion project to be financially sustainable and take us away from the rat race of our daily jobs, but for now the enjoyment is the experience that people have. Hearing about the magic comes from it drives us to dig deeper and see the end goal as inspiring others.
Tell us about your plans for other events outside of the campout.
We’ve got plans for events later in 2022 and 2023 leading up to the campout next year. We have some strategic venues lined up in San Diego, Las Vegas, Salt Lake City, Denver, Chicago, and Phoenix that we have long-term relationships from our experiences in the DJ realm and culture. We want to spread the message and come up with seasonal events in every area that will help continue our growth in the western region.
We’d also like to expand on the campout idea to not just be strictly at Eagle Point. We’ve talked with some other locations. This next year will be a lot about building more personal and intimate crowds, and allowing that to create what we’re known for. That’s where we separate from more corporate festivals.
We will be releasing more info on these events as they unfold. We’ve partnered up with Syndicate, a promotional group in Salt Lake City, as well as The Block venue. There will be some boat parties that pop up this year. There’s also some exciting things coming to Vegas that I can’t quite announce yet but that will be really special. We plan to have our schedule released on our social media pages by end of summer 2022.
—
