Snowmass Town Park. September 4–6. Come find the navy tent.
I've spent eighteen years working on a mountain about fifteen minutes from Snowmass Town Park. I've watched the JAS stage go up from a chairlift. I've driven past that field on the way to a shift and thought about how strange it is that a place I know that well turns into a small city for three days every Labor Day weekend.
This year I'm going to be standing in the middle of it with a folding table.
We have a booth at the JAS Labor Day Experience — Friday through Sunday, September 4 through 6, at Snowmass Town Park. Benson Boone Friday. Tim McGraw and The Red Clay Strays Saturday. Bonnie Raitt and Kingfish Sunday. It's an all-ages festival with a kids' zone, which is the part I keep thinking about.
Why this one is different for me
Boulder Creek Festival back in May was our first booth ever. That one was emotional — hometown, first time, no idea what I was doing. I ran out of a size on day two and spent Saturday night cutting more stickers in a hotel room.
JAS is different. This is my valley. These are the people I ski patrol with, the parents I see at the rink, the crews I've worked alongside on calls. There's nowhere to hide when you set up a booth twenty minutes from your house and your neighbors walk by. That's a good kind of pressure. It makes you get the details right.
The valley already taught me this all summer
Before JAS, we spent the summer at the ordinary version of the same thing.
Wednesday nights at Basalt River Park — free concerts, a thousand-plus people, blankets edge to edge, food trucks, dogs, kids everywhere. The Snowmass Rodeo, where every kid in the bleachers is wearing a hat and boots and looks identical to every other kid from thirty feet away.
Neither one is a scary place. That's the point. Nobody goes to a free concert by the river braced for trouble — you go to sit on a blanket and stop thinking for two hours. And that's exactly when a six-year-old wanders toward the water to look at somebody's dog and then can't tell which blanket is his.
I wrote up the whole summer here — Boulder, San Diego, Michigan, Telluride, and everything the valley taught me once we got home.
What actually happens at a festival with kids
The crowd doesn't stay where you left it.
You show up at four in the afternoon. Blankets are spread out with room between them. You can see your kid from anywhere. Then the headliner's set gets close, everybody stands up at once, and the geography of that field changes completely. The landmarks you were using — that tent, that flag, the gap by the fence — are gone. Everyone is facing the same direction. Everyone is roughly the same height from a four-year-old's perspective.
A kid who wanders eight feet to look at something is now behind a wall of legs.
I'm not trying to talk anybody out of bringing kids to JAS. Bring your kids to JAS. It's one of the best things about living here and the kids' area is genuinely great. But I've worked enough crowded events on the medical side to know that the moment of separation is almost never dramatic. A kid follows a dog, or gets turned around coming back from the bathroom, and forty-five seconds later two people are looking at the same field from opposite ends and neither one can find the other.
What makes that moment better or worse is entirely about how fast the adult who found your kid can reach you.
What we do about it
A myScanBandz wristband is a band with a QR code on it. Somebody scans it with any phone camera. No app, no chip to charge, no subscription. Your contact info comes up and they can reach you in about ten seconds.
That's the whole product. It doesn't do anything clever. It answers one question — who does this kid belong to — for the person standing there holding your kid's hand and looking around. From lost to found. Setup takes about two minutes, and you do it by scanning the band itself.
Gear Tags do the same job for everything that isn't a person. At a festival that's a lot: the camp chair, the cooler, the water bottle that costs more than the chair, the hoodie shed at 3pm and abandoned by 8. If it ends up in the lost and found at Town Park, a tag is the difference between it coming home and it living in a bin forever.
You go in confident, and you spend the weekend listening to music instead of doing head counts.
What's at the booth
- Wristbands in every design we make — the full lineup is here if you want to look before you come by.
- Gear Tags, including the variety packs — Starter, Adventure Essentials, and Family Essentials.
- A real tag you can scan right there. This is the part I actually care about. You don't have to take my word for how it works. Pull out your phone, scan the tag on the table, and see exactly what a finder sees. It takes four seconds and it explains the product better than I can.
- Koozies. Free. There's a QR on them too, because of course there is.
- Me. Navy shirt. Happy to talk about any of it, including the parts that haven't gone well.
If you run a camp, a school, a team, or a program that needs these in volume, come find me — that conversation is easier standing up than over email. If you'd rather start now, the For Groups page is here.
One more thing
I built this because I took my three-year-old and my five-year-old to an Avalanche game and did the math on what would happen if one of them walked twenty feet in the wrong direction. No phone. No ID. No plan. They were fine — that's not the point. The point is that I'd brought two small people into a crowd of eighteen thousand without an answer to a very obvious question.
That was the spark. Not a disaster. Just a dad standing in a concourse realizing he hadn't thought it through. That's the whole origin story.
JAS is the same math, outdoors, for three days, with better music.
Come say hi. I'll be the guy behind the navy tent, probably sunburned, definitely glad you stopped.
— Todd
Founder, myScanBandz
@myscanbandz on Instagram