Sol Fest Talks Move To Florida’s Vortex Spring

Sol Fest Music and Arts festival has already announced this year’s lineup, which features headlining sets from REZZ, CloZee, LSDream and Big Gigantic. This year, the event takes place at Vortex Spring in Ponce De Leon, Florida, on May 2 and 5, the event moving from its original home in Alabama.

Festival founders Alexus Williams and Justin Kulkusky are both registered nurses who started the festival in honor of their late friend, Quentin “Sol” Rupp. Every year, they wrap up the festival with Sol Sunday, a memorial segment paying homage to Rupp. The day features lantern burns and a slideshow, with attendees having the opportunity to honor their own loved ones who have passed. 

This year, Williams and Kulkusky are moving the festival from its original venue at the Bama Slam Campground and Waterpark in Coffee County, Alabama. The two festival organizers, who are from Florida, had initially planned to throw the event at a natural spring in their home state, but the venue manager they were working with unfortunately passed away just days before the event. Within nine days, they pivoted up to Bama Slam, where the festival took place in 2022 and 2023. However, they always wanted to have their festival take place at Vortex, the venue being the first one they’d ever looked at. 

“The reason we chose that venue is it was built for a country music festival,” Alexus Williams says. “We knew it was equipped to handle Sol Fest and they had the power. Everything was set up for stages. It’s very nice, it’s like looking at your dream house. It’s a natural spring and so beautiful. Before, [we would look at the venue] and be like, we’re not there yet. Now, we’re there.” 

The venues sit just an hour apart from one another, making the move easy for the team. Their last location only had a 15,000 capacity, and the team knew it was time to expand so they could get more fans on site. 

Williams and Kulsky have been sorting out ways to make the festival shine in its new location. They’ll bring in art installations and plan to fully illuminate the forest area, something they didn’t have last year. They’ve also been working along with the venue owners to help clean the springs, and they’re planning on bringing in beach sand so they can perfect the festival’s atmosphere and really hone in on their water-filled theme.

“What’s great about this venue is you can close the waterpark down,” Williams says. “They tend to do that between 7 and 8 p.m., and we will have the main venue. You’ll go inside the main venue where you have the main stage, the forest stage, the late-night stage and all of the VIP access. We have plans to always have lifeguards, and Vortex has that as well. We’re partnering with them and we’re working on a new system that they have, where cameras can detect people if they go underwater for any period of time. The spring is knee-deep in most of the area, except for scuba diving, and that’s completely separate. It’s all waterslides which are very shallow.”

While waterparks create an added challenge in terms of insurance and permits, Sol Fest’s organizers say they’ve figured out how to make it run smoothly. Since they partner with the venue itself for the event, they’re easily able to get what coverage and protection is needed.

“One firm value and foundation we have is we don’t skip on the quality,” Kulkusky says. “We don’t skip on the safety. Everything is top-notch. Whether it be the security team, or it be the production, everything is what we would want to see in a festival. When we stared this, we said, ‘Let’s think from the beginning to the end. We arrive at a festival. How do we want things to be all the way from when we arrive at the camp?’”