Report

2026 Fire In The Mountains – Saturday

2026 Fire in the Mountains – Saturday

Thursday and Friday can be found here.

Fierce winds on Friday night and early Saturday morning blew most of the smoke away. Yeah! Unfortunately, extreme winds later Saturday gusted the smoke right back in. Booo!

This was the clearest view we ever had at Lower Two Medicine Lake.

My nostrils, and lungs, took a beating at this festival. Between the smoke, dust from the wind, and dirt being kicked up in the mosh pits, it wasn’t easy to breathe. If you attend Fire in the Mountains in the future, be sure to bring a mask, or at the very least a bandana to filter the air a bit. The few bands that brought headwraps to sell as merch sold out of them immediately.

Ravon Chacon & Iggor Cavalera’s postponed set from Friday was first up on Saturday. The last time I saw Iggor live was 1989!

Too hot to watch their whole set, I headed back to the lake, where my son taught me a trick he learned on Friday. If you went all the way into Lower Two Medicine Lake, you would stay cool for about a half hour. But if you simply put your shirt completely under water and then put it back on, you could stay cool for almost two hours! That was my go-to solution for the heat for the rest of the festival.

The water was cold. Yes. But as one guy who went under near me screamed one morning, “Better than coffee!!!”

There is a lack of shade at the stages (and GA camping has no shade). With the high winds, I doubt a solution will emerge to this problem in future years. The wet t-shirt solution worked very well though.

While we are on the topic of what to bring and too much sun, you’ll be told to wear sunscreen and drink lots of water. No surprise there. I wore my sunscreen, so my skin did not burn. However, I received my first-ever sunburn on my lips at Fire in the Mountains. Not pretty and kind of painful. On Sunday and Monday, my lips were actually bleeding. My advice is to not stop at sunscreen for your skin. Also apply lip balm with SPF. Lesson learned.

Let’s blast through some photos of subsequent bands in order of appearance.

Savage Oath

Nocturne

Although The Ruins of Beverast is a one-man project in the studio, for live performances, several hired guns are needed. I’ve seen Job Bos, the keyboardist, play live before for In the Woods…, Satyricon, and Dordeduh.

Alexander von Meilenwald is not only an amazing musician, but I was surprised by the variety of vocals he was able to achieve. Huge talent.

View the photo above on a big screen to get a sense of the persistent dust issue.

Tarantella

My ninth time seeing YOB.

The circular headbanging in the pit during “Adrift in the Ocean” went perfectly with that song. I challenge moshers everywhere to recreate that experience at future YOB shows.

Gallowbraid

Smoke sucks for breathing, but it can make for some unusual sunsets.

Enslaved’s set was one of my favorites of the festival. In addition to playing songs off of eight different albums, they did a couple of special things.

The first was having Steve Von Till of Neurosis provide spoken word over Enslaved’s “Heimdal”. Very moving.

A couple of songs later, Kevin Kicking Woman from Blackfeet Nation joined Enslaved for the song written for Fire in the Mountains, “Spirit Helper”. Chills galore.

Full of Hell headlined the small stage on Saturday. Another suggestion for future Fire in the Mountains is to have a larger second stage and improve the lighting. Bands seemed cramped up there—especially Sigh on Sunday night, and the constant red lighting was meh.

Charlie Speicher and Robert Hall of the Firekeeper Alliance presented Steve Von Till and Neurosis with a decorated bison skull before the Neurosis set.

The Neurosis set, oh the Neurosis set! Talking about and seeing videos of it, don’t come remotely close to doing the live experience justice. My photos are crap compared to what it looked like in person.

Neurosis live has gone through multiple eras. The constants are that they don’t talk to the audience during their set and they never do encores. Those things didn’t change. The lighting, though, was really different than prior tours.

The visual effects and performance of “We Are Torn Wide Open”, for instance, was like nothing I have ever experienced before. The rest of the set was also incredibly impactful.

They played most of the new album (An Undying Love for a Burning World), one of my favorites, “The Tide”, and a couple off of Times of Grace. Beautiful perfection.

As if that wasn’t a marvelous enough day, Amigo the Devil treated us to a campfire singalong to finish up the night/early morning. “Hell and You” has been stuck in my head ever since.

Stay tuned for Sunday.