Maybe you had a similar experience.
Your skin was peeling from the sun. You were covered in sunscreen, bug spray, mud, festival sweat, and four days of grime. We had just survived a four-day music festival—and a flash flood that dumped nearly seven inches of rain on us in a single night, forcing people to move their camps in the darkness.
And then, suddenly, it was over.
On my way home, I stopped at a gas station. I was barefoot, with dirt between my toes, looking like I had just emerged from the forest.
Inside, people were simply living their normal lives. Getting coffee. Buying gas. Going to work. And standing there dirty, sunburned, and exhausted, I was struck by a profound feeling:
I am not the same as these people.
Not better. Just different.
For four days, we had stepped outside ordinary life and built a little village in the forest. We ate together, made music together, slept on the land, and depended on one another. Food, water, shelter, weather, fire, friendship, and community suddenly became immediate again.
Standing barefoot in that gas station, I felt more connected to the land and to the people I had just shared this experience with.
We went into the woods to have a music festival.
What happened out there became something much bigger.
Nothing Went According to Plan
Of course, as festival organizers, we had plans.
Lots of plans.
And almost none of them went quite right.
But despite everything—or maybe somehow because of everything—the spirit of Lost 40 was still there. In some ways, it felt more available than ever. Stronger. More visible.
By Sunday, people were talking about the weekend as if it were the best festival they had ever attended.
That's a pretty incredible thing to hear after a flash flood.
But behind that incredible experience was another reality.
Our bus was stuck in the floodwaters, and we weren't able to set up many of the things we normally depend on to keep the festival financially sustainable. Our ordinary kitchen operation, vending booth, T-shirts, merchandise, and other sources of festival revenue simply didn't happen the way we had planned.
And that revenue matters because a large part of it ultimately goes toward paying the artists who make Lost 40 possible.
Many of those artists came up to us afterward and said some version of the same thing:
Don't worry about us. We understand. You don't have to pay us.
That generosity meant a lot.
But it also didn't feel right.
These artists still showed up. They performed. They shared their music and creativity with us. They helped create the experience that everyone was still talking about on Sunday.
They deserve to be compensated for that.
So We Made a Shirt about it.
We survived the flood.
And, to say the least, it was an epic experience.
So we created a commemorative WE SURVIVED Lost 40 Flash Flood T-shirt—not only as something to remember this ridiculous, beautiful weekend by, but as a way for our community to help take care of the artists who helped make it happen.
Every commemorative shirt sold generates $10 that we can put toward paying an artist.
So we're asking everyone who was there—and anyone who believes in what this little community is trying to build—to consider buying one.
It's a T-shirt, but it's also a piece of the story.
Someday, you'll pull it out of a drawer and remember the rain. The mud. The camps being moved in the middle of the night. The music. The people who helped each other. The exhaustion. The laughter. And maybe even that strange feeling when you finally returned to civilization and realized that something about you felt a little different.
We went into the forest to build a music festival.
For four days, we built a village.
Then the rains came.
And we survived it together.