Back to the Forest: Day 2
Electric Forest, Double JJ Resort, Rothbury, Michigan • June 26, 2026
Friday morning at Electric Forest does not really begin. It fades in. You wake up with yesterday still ringing around the edges, some ghost-whisper version of the last set you heard still knocking softly inside your skull. Camp sounds return first: tent zippers, distant laughter, someone explaining a story that absolutely requires hand gestures, the low shuffle of people trying to remember where they left their water bottle, phone, fan, shoes or whatever tiny piece of themselves got misplaced between Ranch Arena and the walk back home. Day 1 is arrival. Day 2 is when the Forest starts recognizing you back.
For us, Friday carried the buzz of everything we had already unlocked: the overnight drive, the inTENTion, the Time Travel Agency, the mechanic tune-up room, Pearly’s Dentistry, the Luminaria story and Excision’s lasers cutting over Ranch Arena. But Friday had its own strange little creature waiting in the grass. Actually, several of them.
Hope had traded the previous day’s Umbreon energy for Bowsette, which somehow made perfect sense inside Electric Forest. This is one of the few places where that sentence does not need a warning label. It was playful, chaotic, bold enough to stop traffic and exactly the kind of character choice that made every side quest feel like it had a boss-level companion attached.
The Forest does not ask people to be subtle. It asks them to mean it.
Pokémon in the Forest
Our first real mission Friday was meeting up with the latest unofficial Forest side quest: Pokémon.
That made almost too much sense. Electric Forest and Pokémon both run on wandering, discovery and the very real possibility that something wonderful is hiding just off the marked path. Both bring together all kinds of creatures, some costumed, some carrying tiny treasures, some surviving on loyalty, snacks and the belief that one more detour is probably worth it.
At the meetup, we interviewed Ryan, a 3D printing artist from Austin, Texas and the founder of the Pokémon and Poké Ball finding side quest. For him, the idea came straight from the Forest itself. He talked about the giving culture at Electric Forest, the way people make little gifts, trinkets and creative offerings for strangers simply because it might brighten somebody’s day. After his first Forest last year, Ryan said he knew he “couldn’t show up without some cool stuff.”
Pokémon fit the mission. He has been a fan his whole life, and the idea of printing small Pokémon and Poké Balls to hide around the grounds clicked with the Forest’s scavenger spirit almost immediately. It was not an official activation. It did not need a stage, sponsor wall or flashing sign. It worked because the idea felt native to the place.
The project has also grown beyond one person with a backpack full of tiny creatures. Ryan said the team is mostly made up of friends he has gone to festivals with over the years, along with newer friends and enthusiastic people who reached out after seeing the project at other events. The more people who help hide and gift them, the more little sparks of joy make it into the Forest. His goal was simple: make as many people’s days better as possible.
For Electric Forest this year, Ryan personally brought around 250 pieces. He also estimated that about 1,000 had been sold to people before the festival, with many of those likely brought into the grounds to hide, gift or trade. By his rough math, there could have been somewhere around 500 to 700 Pokémon and Poké Balls scattered through the weekend. Somewhere in the trees, someone was probably finding an Eevee while someone else was finding a Poké Ball and deciding whether to keep it, gift it or send it back into circulation.
The craft behind them was not accidental either. Ryan is an architect by trade, still licensed in Texas, and he designs the models himself using CAD. A full plate of small Eevees can take around eight hours to print, while a Poké Ball averages around four hours once all the parts are made in batches. It is a funny kind of Forest math: hours of modeling, printing and packing, all for a stranger’s five-second gasp when they find something tiny and unexpected in the wild.
Eevee, he said, gets the biggest reaction online. That tracked perfectly with our weekend. Hope had dressed as Umbreon on Day 1, Ryan’s girlfriend had also dressed as Umbreon and suddenly the whole conversation felt like the Forest had rolled a critical hit on coincidence.
By then, we were operating somewhere between press team and shady Squirtle: following clues, looking for shade, trading stories and getting pulled toward every strange little thing rustling in the tall grass. Hydration, thankfully, was one part of the weekend we did not have to gamble with. Thanks to our hydration sponsor, RaveRunner, we had a hydration bag built for exactly this kind of wandering: long walks, hot stretches, stage-hopping and the sudden decision to chase a Pokémon side quest across the Forest. At a festival where one more “quick detour” can turn into another mile before you notice, having water on your back is not a luxury. It is part of the loadout.
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Media lounge and the language of nerds
After discovering the media lounge the day before, we finally made it back with enough time to enjoy it properly. Free drinks, shade, conversation and a little breathing room go a long way when the festival has already started turning your legs into folklore.
That is where we ended up talking with correspondents from SPIN Magazine, and the icebreaker was not some polished media industry line. It was Pokémon. Of course it was. Without much more than a blink, the conversation turned into shared enthusiasm, Pokémon Go friend requests and that instant little recognition that happens when adults find the same old beloved doorway back into play.
Those are the conversations that make festival media feel less like badges and more like campfire culture with better credentials. Everyone is covering the same giant organism from different angles. Sometimes the fastest way to connect is not asking what camera someone shoots on or what outlet they write for. Sometimes it is asking what they caught.
That is the thing about Electric Forest. The official schedule is only one version of the weekend. The other one is built out of tiny trades: bracelets, stories, water, shade, codes, trinkets, advice, directions and the occasional 3D-printed creature waiting to be found by someone who needed exactly that kind of joy.
Space Fruit, hammocks and a healthy miracle
Eventually, the body starts making demands. Friday needed food, shade and a horizontal surface.
Hydration was already handled thanks to our RaveRunner hydration bag, which became one of those sponsor items that stops feeling like gear and starts feeling like common sense by the second day. With water covered, the next mission was sustenance. No matter how many festivals we go to, and no matter how many vendor rows we walk through pretending we are still considering all options, we seem to magically gravitate toward Space Fruit.
It has become one of those festival instincts. When the day is warm, the body is tired and the Forest is still asking for miles, a smoothie starts sounding less like a treat and more like survival equipment with better branding. We grabbed an iconic Space Fruit smoothie and what turned out to be the best kale salad I have ever had in my life.
That is not a sentence I expected Electric Forest to pull out of me, but here we are.
Even better, I got to share it with Devin, who is not usually the first person sprinting toward the healthiest food vendor. Credit where it is due: Space Fruit made a kale salad persuasive enough to cross household eating habits. There are miracles in Sherwood and not all of them involve lasers.
Next came some well deserved hammock time.
There are few things at Electric Forest more necessary than giving yourself permission to stop. Not quit, not miss out, not fall behind. Stop. Let the trees do what they were planted to do. Let the noise become distance. Let the day slow down enough for the body to catch up with the spirit. We found our little pocket, ate, rested and let the Forest do one of its oldest tricks: turning a break into part of the story.
The land remembers
The longer you spend at Electric Forest, the more the land itself starts feeling like part of the lineup.
That is not just festival romance talking. The property has been gathering stories for more than a century. In 1914, George and Mary Stouch settled on about 80 acres near Rothbury, land that included Big Wildcat Lake and a farmhouse dating back to the 1890s. Their daughter Roma later used the setting for Cedar Shores, a girls’ summer camp where kids learned swimming, horseback riding, crafts, theater and outdoor skills. The Depression ended that chapter, but the idea of the land as a gathering place did not disappear.
By the late 1930s, the property had evolved into Jack and Jill Ranch, then eventually Double JJ Ranch and Double JJ Resort. Long before Electric Forest filled the grounds with bass, lasers and art installations, people were already coming there for horseback riding, campfires, dances, vacations and the strange alchemy that happens when strangers become temporary neighbors.
That history changes the way the Forest feels. A lot of festivals are built on open fields and blank fairgrounds. Electric Forest sits on land that had decades of memory before the first festival wristband ever clicked onto a wrist. Rothbury Festival arrived in 2008 and 2009, then Electric Forest launched in 2011 after a year off in 2010, turning the Double JJ grounds into one of North America’s most beloved festival landscapes.
So when people say Sherwood feels alive, maybe they are not only talking about the lights, actors, hammocks or art. Maybe they are feeling the layers: farmland, camp, ranch, resort, Rothbury, Forest. The place was already teaching people how to gather long before the bass drops learned the route through the trees.
That made Friday’s wandering feel different. The Pokémon side quest, the Space Fruit stop, the hammocks, the hidden rooms and the chessboard lore were not interruptions from the music. They were part of the older grammar of the land: come here, meet people, move through the woods, find the story waiting behind the obvious road.
The room behind the room
The maze kept proving that Electric Forest does not build its weirdness in a straight line. Sometimes the first room is only the waiting room for the real one.
After hanging around long enough, we found one of those openings that makes the Forest feel less like a festival and more like a living puzzle box. If you stayed present, if you played along, if the timing lined up, you could be invited behind the obvious room into a smaller secret space. Back there, the volume dropped. The lighting stayed warm and red. Small beds and soft places to sit turned the room into something halfway between a backstage lounge, a confession booth and a fever-dream parlor.
There was someone inside dressed in a burlesque-adjacent character style, but the point was not performance in the big-stage sense. It was conversation. You sat down, caught your breath and talked about whatever rose to the surface. It could be silly. It could be strange. It could be nothing heavy at all. But in the middle of a festival built on movement, sound and sensory overload, the simple invitation to sit still and be spoken to like a person felt quietly generous.
That kind of space is easy to overlook if you are only measuring Electric Forest by set times. But for some people, that little hidden room could be the reset button. A mental break. A place to step out of the crowd without stepping out of the magic. The Forest has plenty of spectacle, but moments like this are where it shows a different kind of care. Not everything has to shake the ground to stay with you.
The kingdoms before the board
Before we reached the giant chess game, the maze started laying out its own mythology. Two hand-painted banners hung along the path like pages torn from an old fantasy book, telling the story of a civilization split between light, dark, power, greed and collapse. One spoke of a great technological alchemy, of gold, sacred rivers, volcanic mountains and a kingdom that once traveled the stars. The other turned darker, describing betrayal, the destruction of that technology and a fall back into primitive medieval war.
That made the chessboard room feel bigger than a clever installation. The game had a world behind it. The banners gave the battle stakes before anyone ever stepped onto a square. By the time we reached the life-sized board, it did not feel like we had stumbled into a random performance. It felt like we had walked into the next chapter of something the Forest had already been whispering through the walls.
The room itself looked like a moonlit battlefield. Blue light spilled across the oversized squares, shadows stretched over the board and people gathered around the edges waiting to see who would be pulled into the game. Then the performance began folding the crowd into the story. We became part of it as pawns, and thanks to where we were sitting, we somehow got swapped from the dark side to the light. I was personally happy with the accidental team change. If the Forest is going to assign you a role in a medieval cosmic chess war, you might as well land on the side with better lighting.
The art was worth slowing down for. The banners looked handmade, thick with texture, calligraphy and real brushwork, not just printed decoration slapped onto a wall. Electric Forest does that well when it is firing on all cylinders. It gives you the spectacle, but it also rewards the people who stop long enough to read the signs, study the details and realize the side quest has lore.
By then, Friday had become its own strange collection: a Bowsette companion, Pokémon in the wild, healthy food that somehow got Devin’s approval, a hidden parlor, a mythological chess war and a whole ranch’s worth of history under our feet. The night had stacked itself into chapters.
Then came GRiZ.
GRiZ brings it all together
By the time we made it to GRiZ, the night already felt loaded with story. The Pokémon side quest, the media lounge, the hammocks, Space Fruit, the hidden rooms and the chessboard kingdom had all piled into one of those long Forest days where every hour feels like its own little pocket universe. Then GRiZ walked out with the saxophone, and the whole field seemed to lift at once.
GRiZ at Electric Forest is not just a booking. It is a hometown-adjacent homecoming with a crowd that knows exactly what kind of emotional weather he can bring. He can make people dance, cry, laugh, shake their whole spirit loose and remember they are lucky to be alive, sometimes inside the same stretch of music. The saxophone gives it breath. The bass gives it body. The transitions give it motion.
What made the Friday set feel special was not just that he played the songs people wanted. It was the way he pulled pieces from across his different projects and made them flow together, almost like he was stitching his own map in real time. For years, every GRiZ lane has felt like him saying, “Yeah, I can do that too.” Funk, bass, soul, sax, party music, emotional release, weird little electronic turns, full-crowd catharsis. Friday felt like the answer to all of that. Not just proof that he could do each piece, but proof that he could bring all of it into one living set without the seams showing.
That is why the set landed so hard. It did not feel like a greatest-hits shuffle or a producer proving versatility by jumping lanes every few minutes. It felt integrated. Each project, each era, each mood had been part of the same bigger sentence all along. The GRiZ crowd has always loved him for the joy, but Friday made the craft glow too. He was not just saying he could do it all. He was doing it all, in one continuous current, with Ranch Arena answering every turn.
A few hours earlier, we had been walking through a maze reading about alchemy, betrayal and civilizations that traveled the stars. Then GRiZ took pieces from his own musical kingdoms and made them move as one. That might sound too neat, but the Forest has a habit of arranging metaphors before you notice you are standing inside one.
The crowd gave itself over. Hands went up. Totems bobbed like neon sea creatures. The sax cut through the night with that familiar human brightness, and the bass came underneath like the ground remembering its job. For a festival that spends so much time balancing spectacle and intimacy, GRiZ found the cleanest line between the two. Ranch Arena was enormous, but the set still felt personal.
Day 2 needed that. After a day full of side quests and small discoveries, GRiZ gave Friday its wide-screen ending.
Late-night ghosts and glowing routes
After GRiZ, the Forest still had hours left in it. Friday’s official map stretched deep into the morning, with Sammy Virji carrying Sherwood Court from 2:15 to 3:30 a.m. and Claude VonStroke taking Tripolee into the 4 a.m. hour. We did not build our whole night around seeing everything, because Electric Forest does not really reward that kind of stubbornness. It rewards surrender.
Still, the late-night images told their own story. Sherwood Court kept throwing lasers through the trees. Ranch Arena still felt like it was cooling down from GRiZ. The walkways glowed. Costumes blurred. The day’s side quests became camp stories before we had even made it back to camp.
That is the difference between a festival with stages and a festival with a world. At Electric Forest, the music is the gravity, but the wandering is the weather. You do not just leave a set and go somewhere else. You pass through scenes, characters, tiny rituals and overheard sentences that make the night feel populated by more than the schedule.
Friday had started with leftover echoes from Thursday. It ended with a new set of them.
The people who kept the quest moving
Coverage like this takes more than a wristband and a notebook. It takes fuel, gear, time, trust and the kind of support that lets a small media team chase stories across a very large Forest.
A huge thank you goes out to our Electric Forest coverage sponsors: Herb N’ Legend, The Dakota Scout, Iron Trakks Media, RaveRunner, Total Drag and Common Sense. Each one helped make it possible for Intellectual Dissatisfaction to return to Rothbury with cameras, notes, curiosity and enough stubborn momentum to follow the weekend wherever it led.
That support showed up in practical ways all weekend. RaveRunner kept us hydrated through the endless walking, long stage stretches and side quests that never stayed as close as they seemed on the map. At Electric Forest, good gear does not just make coverage easier. It lets you stay present long enough to notice the weird little moments that become the story.
Afterglow
Friday was not one clean storyline. It was a pocket full of strange items: 3D-printed Pokémon, Bowsette in the Forest, media-lounge friend codes, Space Fruit, hammocks, handmade chess kingdoms and GRiZ turning Ranch Arena into something close to collective gratitude.
Day 1 got us back through the gates. Day 2 reminded us why people keep wandering after they arrive. Sometimes the best thing in the Forest is not the thing printed on the schedule. Sometimes it is a side quest, a smoothie, a stranger with a shared obsession, a quiet room behind the room, a chessboard in the woods or a saxophone line from GRiZ that makes the whole crowd remember they are alive at the same time.
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