Bass Canyon 2026: The Gorge Weekend, Done Right

The campgrounds open Wednesday at one in the afternoon, and where you sleep for the next four nights is settled by the order the cars come in. Bass Canyon’s camping FAQ says it plainly: “All camping spaces are allocated as you arrive. Spaces cannot be held or reserved for vehicles arriving later.” There is no saving a patch of dirt for the friends who wanted to finish out the work day first. If your group is rolling in two cars, you convoy or you camp apart.

That’s the weekend’s first real decision and it happens two days before anyone plays a note.

Bass Canyon comes back to the Gorge August 14 through 16, the eighth one, Excision’s festival on the best-looking piece of ground in American live music. Below is what it takes to get there and get in, plus the sets worth building a day around. Save the cards; they read fine in a parking lot with one bar of service.

The fixed stuff

• August 14 to 16, Gorge Amphitheatre, George, WA. The festival is 18+.
• Campgrounds open Wednesday, August 12 at 1pm PDT. Everyone is out by noon Monday the 17th.
• Amphitheatre doors are 2pm, Friday through Sunday. The Thursday pre-party opens around dusk and is a separate ticket.
• As of this week, GA sits at $379.75 and VIP at $549.85 on Frontgate.
• You can re-enter the amphitheatre as many times as you want across the weekend.
• One camping pass covers a whole vehicle or group. Buy one per car. Four people in a Subaru need one pass between them.

On camping: Premier, Front Yard, and Terrace Glamping have all sold out. Standard camping, Grove RV, Terrace, the Vineyard and Oasis glamping tiers, and accessible camping were still open when we checked on August 7. Waiting costs you a tier rather than the whole weekend, but the good tiers are going.

Getting there from Seattle

It’s I-90 east for about 150 miles, which is two and a half to three hours if the road cooperates. The road usually does. What eats the afternoon is the queue at the campground entrance, and that queue is a direct function of when you left, since the spot you get depends on where you are in it. Leaving Seattle mid-morning Wednesday is a different festival than leaving after work on Thursday.

If nobody in your group wants to drive the Gorge Road back on a Sunday night, Bass Canyon runs official shuttles with Bus.com out of SeaTac Airport and Lumen Field, starting around $75. They’ll take one large bag, standard camping equipment, and a cooler per person, and the buses have proper luggage compartments underneath. Departure times weren’t published on the festival’s own FAQ when we checked, so book off bus.com directly and read the times there.

What the gate takes off you

The camera rule is the one that catches people, and it is stricter than most festivals. From the official list of what you can bring:

“You may bring your small non-professional still camera. No removable lenses, flashes, tripods or other professional attachments.”

The Gorge counts a camera as professional if the lens detaches, and also if the lens extends more than an inch out of the body. That rules out every mirrorless and DSLR body, and most superzoom compacts too. GoPros and video cameras get named directly: not allowed inside the venue. Realistically your phone is the camera you’re shooting the weekend on.

The rest of the gate:

• Bags must be clear and no bigger than 12” x 12” x 6”. A clutch or fanny pack under 6” x 9” can be opaque. An empty Camelbak can be non-clear.
• Water: one factory-sealed bottle up to a gallon comes through. Empty reusable bottles are encouraged and the refill stations inside are free.
• No folding or camping chairs in the amphitheatre.
• Totems top out at seven feet including the pole, the pole has to be under an inch thick, and the head can’t exceed two feet diagonally. Flags cap at four feet.
• No glass anywhere in the campgrounds. Alcohol is fine inside your own campsite if you’re 21+, and not on the roads or in common areas.
• Quiet hours start an hour after the amphitheatre music stops. No outside sound systems, so leave the camp rig home.

Showers are free and run 6am to 2am.

Who to plan a day around

The official daily lineups are out. Set times are not, which means everything below is about days rather than clock slots. The full bill, day by day, is at the bottom of this page.

Friday is the old-guard dubstep day. Excision plays solo, and Mersiv has the sunset set, which at this venue is the slot worth clearing your schedule for; the canyon lights up behind the stage and does half the work. FuntCase, BADKLAAT, and Dodge & Fuski stack the UK end of the day. Virtual Riot, Pegboard Nerds, and Barely Alive are the known quantities. The names to get there early for are further down the poster: Level Up, HEXXA, USAYBFLOW, Emorfik, Capochino, STOOG3S, and Ivory all play before the hill fills in, and USAYBFLOW in particular works a slower, weirder register than most of what surrounds him.

Saturday is the day that splits hardest by style. Ganja White Night takes the sunset set. ILLENIUM b2b Dabin is the melodic anchor and will pull the biggest crowd of the weekend outside of Excision. Underneath that sits a genuine drum and bass block: Culture Shock, Sigma with Armanni Reign, Kanine, Justin Hawkes, and Dirtyphonics, which is the DNBNL takeover that Brownies & Lemonade are running. Ravenscoon b2b Jantsen and WANKDAT, which is Crankdat b2b Wooli, are the two b2bs worth catching. Austeria, Crumb Pit, PHRVA, Siren, Smith., Tripp St., Paper Skies, and Neotek are the undercard.

Sunday belongs to Excision twice over. He plays b2b with Slander, and separately a set the poster calls a “detox set,” so budget for both. ATLiens and SVDDEN DEATH presents: VOYD are the other two big rooms of the day, with INZO, Ghastly, Hekler, and WHIPPED CREAM under them. The bottom of Sunday’s poster is the deepest of the three days: Luci, Machaki, Otsukare, Z3LLA, Nikita The Wicked, Pretty Sweet, Rossy, Avello, GHENGAR, IZADI, KLO, Flozone, Dream Takers, Seth David, Richard Finger, All The Reason, TWOPERCENT, DØMINA, YOSUF, and EAZYBAKED.

One credit in the poster’s small print: the late-night silent disco is presented by White Rabbit Group, a Seattle promoter whose summer otherwise runs off a retired WSDOT ferry docked at Lake Union. A hometown name on the Gorge’s late-night billing is not something the national writeups will mention.

What’s still missing

Set times. There’s no clock and no stage assignment on anything Bass Canyon has published, and the daily lineups graphic is alphabetical within each day, so it tells you nothing about who overlaps. The schedule usually lands in the festival’s app in the days before gates.

When it does, we’ll put the full running order on this page, along with lock screen wallpapers of each day you can save to your phone before you lose service on the drive out. That’s the part of this you’ll actually use at 11pm on Saturday.