Blue Mountain Rock Festival

In the early 1970s, peace, love, and understanding found their way to a place as remote as Moscow, Idaho, home of the University of Idaho. In 1971, UI students Gary Speer and William Schelly organized the first Blue Mountain Rock Festival as a fundraiser for the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU). Proceeds from the second festival, dedicated to the students slain at Kent State University, also went to the ACLU. Due to rain, the location of the 1973 festival alternated between two locations on the Moscow campus, Shattuck Arboretum and the Student Union Building.

The UI student newspaper devoted an entire promotional insert to the 1974 festival and even printed its May 3, 1974, edition in blue ink. According to the 1974 UI yearbook, “an estimated 10,000 people” from “all points in the Northwest and Canada” attended the event.

A year later, though, the festival had become so controversial that UI president Ernest Hartung banned it from the campus. While illegal, not to mention legal, consciousness-altering substances had been part of the festival scene from the beginning, consumption had become increasingly immoderate as the Me Decade blasted the Age of Aquarius to smithereens. - Julie

See images from the Blue Mountain Rock Festival in our Gem of the Mountains Digital Yearbook Collection.