FLORENCE — Joseph Ard printed across the Country Thunder West festival grounds, zig-zagging the open alfalfa field with his camping chairs banging against his legs as he ran.
His girlfriend Sara Yount and a few other people lagged behind him as he darted for the empty space against the fence that separates the general admission area from the pricier VIP assigned seats.
Ard, 20, is an old Country Thunder pro; the Phoenix resident remembers attending the country music festival years ago when it was in Queen Creek.
“This is as close as you can get to the stage outside of the VIP area,” he said, as a handful of fans set up their chairs and blankets next to him.
Ard wasn’t as lucky on Thursday, when the four-day festival opened. It runs through Sunday.
Ard and Yount lingered in their campsite and pretty much missed all of the shows, he said. By the time the pair got motivated to check out the music when Old Dominion was on stage opening for headliner Kip Moore, the wind had picked up and with it came an annoying rain that only grew stronger as the night progressed.
The rain might prove to be a problem through the weekend with wind and sprinkles in the forecast through Sunday. But that didn’t diminish attendance; Country Thunder officials estimated that 27,000 people turned out Thursday and the number is expected to be about the same each night.
On Friday, ominous gray clouds blanketed the festival grounds before the Tucker Beathard band took the stage at 2:30 p.m. A few sprinkles popped up before the sun came out.
The sun was blasting hot when Ard made his sprint. Not far from where he set up his chairs, Logan Fraser from Canada, who works for Country Thunder, was showing his 2-year-old daughter London the wild horses in the pens near the small rodeo grounds. Randy Helm leads the cowboy church services on Sunday morning. The preacher and former police officer also supervises the Arizona Wildhorse Inmate Program, which he founded four years ago. He has 530 horses, all rescued from open prairie lands along the Arizona-Mexico and Texas borders as well as from California and Wyoming.
Thirty inmates from the state prison at Florence work with the horses, doing everything from feeding and shoeing the animals to breaking in the wild ones.
“The inmates who’ve done the program have never come back to prison,” Helm said as London’s mom, Karleen, held the girl so she could get a close look at one of the horses eating hay. “This has only been going on four years so you can cross your fingers and hope.”
Helm said about 400 people attended cowboy church at last year’s festival. He expects a similar number this year, but the service has been moved from Sunday to Saturday.
“Rain and wind are in the forecast Sunday morning and when the wind blows, no one can hear anything,” he said.
