Bass Canyon or Splash House? A very scientific guide to choosing your weekend

This weekend, electronic music fans in the western half of the country have a decision to make: would you rather be launched into another dimension at the Gorge, or slowly steamed beside a Palm Springs pool with a frozen drink in your hand?

Bass Canyon and Splash House both run 14–16 August. They are 934 miles apart, and they have almost nothing else in common. We hold the full set times for both, so this is a quiz with an answer key.

1. Choose your ideal setting

Bass Canyon's three stages are called Canyon, Hilltop and Starlight. They are named after landforms and the sky.

Splash House's three day stages are called Hilton, Renaissance and Saguaro. They are named after hotels, because they are hotels. You can check into the stage.

That's the whole difference in one line, and everything below is a consequence of it.

2. Choose your festival uniform

Bass Canyon's gates open early and the music runs long. Every one of its three days starts at 2:30pm and the final set begins somewhere between 11:00pm and 11:50pm. That's a nine-hour day outdoors in central Washington in mid-August, three times in a row.

Splash House runs on hotel time. Saturday's pool programming starts at 1:00pm and the last set begins at 7:30pm. Sunday runs 2:00pm to 8:30pm. Six and a half hours, then everyone goes to dinner.

One of these weekends wants a hydration pack. The other wants a hotel key and a towel.

3. Choose your preferred form of exhaustion

Bass Canyon: 88 sets. Three stages, three full days, 30 sets on Friday, 30 on Saturday, 28 on Sunday. Nothing is split into sessions. It simply runs.

Splash House: 42 sets, and the structure is the actual product. Three hotels host the day parties, which means the festival expects you to move between properties. Then it stops, and starts again at night somewhere else entirely.

Bass Canyon asks you to endure. Splash House asks you to commute.

4. Choose your 2 a.m. destination

Here the schedules stop being funny and start being blunt.

Bass Canyon has zero sets starting after midnight. Not a single one across all three days. The latest start of the weekend is ILLENIUM B2B Dabin at 11:50pm on Saturday. At 2am, the Gorge is a field.

Splash House has exactly two, and both start at midnight at a fourth venue, the Air Museum: Gorgon City on Friday night, and a Kaskade Redux set on Saturday night.

Now the detail we enjoyed most. Splash House publishes an end time for 34 of its 42 sets. The eight with no end time are exactly the closing sets — the last name on each hotel stage each day, plus both midnight after-hours headliners. The schedule makes precise promises right up until the moment it matters, and then declines to say.

Bass Canyon publishes no end times at all, for any of its 88 sets. Make of that what you will.

5. Which lineup matches your personality?

Bass Canyon books 97 artists; Splash House books 38.

The more telling number is who those artists are. Eight of the season's 25 most-booked artists are on the Bass Canyon bill — ALLEYCVT, Crankdat, Excision, ILLENIUM, Level Up, Ray Volpe among them. Splash House has one: Know Good.

Flip it around and Splash House wins the other way. 36.8% of its bill appears at no other festival in our index, against 22.7% for Bass Canyon. The smaller lineup is the rarer one.

Bass Canyon is also where the collaborations live: five of its sets are billed as B2B or joint sets, including Excision B2B SLANDER and Crankdat B2B Wooli. Splash House has one.

And Excision plays Bass Canyon three separate times — Friday's closing set, a Sunday evening Detox set, and the Sunday B2B. If your ideal weekend is the same artist three times, the data has found your festival.

6. The final verdict

We checked both lineups against each other, and exactly one artist is playing both festivals.

Avello is on at the Hilton at 4:15pm on Saturday in Palm Springs, and on Hilltop at the Gorge at 9:10pm on Sunday. Twenty-nine hours and 934 miles between the two.

So it can be done. By one person. Who has presumably already booked the flight, and who is not you.

Everyone else picks. Bass Canyon if you want three nine-hour days, the biggest names of the season and a field that empties at midnight. Splash House if you want six-hour afternoons, a lineup two thirds of which you cannot see anywhere else, and the only two sets this weekend that start when the other festival has already gone to bed.

7. Plan it properly

Both schedules are live on Electric State with full set times — Bass Canyon and Splash House — stage by stage, day by day. Follow the artists you care about and the app tells you when they're on rather than making you re-read a grid at 4pm with 6% battery.

Whichever one you pick, the other one is next August. Except for Avello, who does not have this problem.

Set times and lineups as we hold them on 10 August 2026, transcribed from the official schedules. Times are Pacific. If a promoter moves a set, the app moves with it and this post does not.