There is a particular quality to the light in the Catskills at the end of June — long and golden and slow, the kind that makes you forget you drove two and a half hours to get here. It was that light, filtered through hemlock and birch at the base of Belleayre Mountain, that greeted the seven thousand or so people who showed up in June 2025 for Mountain Jam’s return. For many of them, it had been six years. For some, closer to a decade. And for Gary Chetkof, the Radio Woodstock founder who started the whole thing as a one-day party back in 2005, it must have felt like finally exhaling.
Mountain Jam’s story is one of the more instructive tales in the modern festival landscape — a parable about scale, identity, and the rare courage it takes to make something smaller on purpose.
A Radio Station’s Birthday Party
The origin is almost too good: a local FM station turns twenty-five, and its founder throws a concert. That was 2005, when Chetkof booked Gov’t Mule, Medeski Martin & Wood, and Robert Randolph to play a single afternoon at Hunter Mountain. Roughly 3,300 people came. It was supposed to be a celebration, not a franchise. But the Catskills have a way of holding onto good ideas, and by the third year, when Phil Lesh made his post-transplant return to the stage, the crowd had tripled to ten thousand and it was clear that Mountain Jam had become something larger than a birthday party.
For fourteen years, Hunter Mountain was home. The festival grew steadily through the late 2000s, fueled by the jam band circuit’s deep loyalty and the kind of word-of-mouth that only camping festivals generate — the stories told around fires, the sets that ran long into darkness, the particular fellowship of people who will sleep in a tent to hear moe. at midnight. At its peak, Mountain Jam drew close to forty thousand. The Allman Brothers Band played. Robert Plant played. Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers played. It had become, by most measures, the Northeast’s premiere rock and camping festival.
The Corporate Chapter
In 2013, Townsquare Media came aboard as a partner. The machinery got bigger. By 2019, Live Nation was involved, and the festival moved to Bethel Woods Center for the Arts — the actual Woodstock site — for what felt like a coronation. Willie Nelson headlined. The Avett Brothers. Phil Lesh and Friends. It was a remarkable lineup on sacred ground, and it was also the last Mountain Jam anyone would see for half a decade.
The pandemic arrived. Live Nation restructured. And somewhere in that silence, Chetkof regained independent control of the festival he had started with a handshake and a radio station’s mailing list. What he did next was the interesting part.
Coming Home Smaller
When Mountain Jam returned in June 2025, it was not at Hunter Mountain, and it was not at Bethel Woods. Chetkof chose Belleayre Mountain — an ORDA-managed alpine resort deeper in the Catskill Park, with a natural amphitheater at its base and a single main stage. He capped attendance at 7,500. He booked Khruangbin, Mt. Joy, Goose, Joe Russo’s Almost Dead, Trampled By Turtles, and moe. — sixteen acts across three days, a fraction of what the corporate-era lineups had offered.
The message was unmistakable: this was a deliberate return to intimacy. No secondary stages pulling the crowd in four directions. No VIP tiers that made the general admission feel like an afterthought. Just a mountainside, a stage, and enough room to actually see the people you came with.
Belleayre’s setting helps. The Catskill Park surrounds the venue on all sides, and the ski lodge infrastructure means the basics — parking, facilities, shelter if the weather turns — are already in place without the temporary-city feel that larger festivals require. It is, in many ways, the kind of site Mountain Jam should have been looking for all along.
The Gap Year
Mountain Jam will not take place in 2026. Chetkof announced the decision publicly, noting only that “after much thought” the festival would take the year off, with a 2027 return already in the planning stages. No specific reasons were given, and no details about the 2027 edition — dates, location, lineup — have been confirmed.
A gap year is not unusual for independent festivals recalibrating after a relaunch. What is notable is Chetkof’s willingness to pause rather than push. The festival industry is littered with events that scaled too fast, returned too soon, or tried to recapture a previous era’s magic by throwing money at the problem. Mountain Jam’s trajectory — from a 3,300-person afternoon to a 40,000-person corporate production and back to a 7,500-cap indie camping festival — suggests that Chetkof has a different kind of patience.
What Mountain Jam Means Now
Twenty years in, Mountain Jam occupies a specific place in the Northeast festival ecosystem. It is not the biggest. It is no longer trying to be. What it offers instead is a particular Catskills experience — the elevation, the air, the unhurried quality of a weekend spent on a mountainside with music that rewards close listening. The jam band and roots community that has supported this festival since its Radio Woodstock origins is still here, still showing up, still willing to sleep in a tent for the right lineup.
Whether 2027 brings Mountain Jam back to Belleayre or somewhere else entirely, the festival’s recent chapter suggests that Chetkof has found something more sustainable than scale. He has found the right size.
We will be watching.