Old Mill Park's Redwoods Carry an Extra Weight This September
September 10, 2026
September 10, 2026
Old Mill Park does the same thing every third weekend of September. Light drops through the redwood canopy in long gold shafts, folding chairs go down on packed dirt, and somebody's kid takes a lap around the community mural table while a fiddle tunes up near the main stage. The 69th Mill Valley Fall Arts Festival returns to that same ground on September 19 and 20, 2026, and on paper it looks like every year before it: 135 juried artists, wine tasting from six California wineries, a Children's Grove run by a costumed guide locals know as the Blue Fairy.
What's different this year sits inside a single hour on Sunday afternoon. At 3 p.m., pedal steel player Barry Sless takes the stage with Mother Hips frontman Tim Bluhm and slack-key guitarist Stephen Inglis. At 4 p.m., Mark Karan's Buds close out the day. Both Sless and Karan spent years playing alongside Bob Weir, the Grateful Dead's co-founding rhythm guitarist, who lived in the hills of Mill Valley. Weir died in January 2026 at 78, and the festival has said Sless and Karan will use their sets to honor him. There was already a large public memorial for Weir at San Francisco's Civic Center Plaza in January, with John Mayer, Joan Baez, and Mickey Hart among those who took the stage. What happens at Old Mill Park in September is a quieter version of the same thing, folded into a 69-year-old community art fair rather than staged as an event of its own, in the town where he actually lived and got married.
That distinction matters if you're deciding how to spend the weekend. This is not a memorial concert with a ticket sold as one. It's a fall arts fair your family has probably attended a dozen times, where two of the afternoon slots now carry a different kind of weight.
Old Mill Park sits in a residential pocket with no adjacent lots, which means the festival has never let attendees drive in and park. Instead, free shuttle buses and free taxis run continuously from two remote lots: Edna Maguire Elementary at 80 Lomita Drive and the Park Elementary lot. Buses head to the festival from 9:30 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. and run back from 10:15 a.m. to 5:15 p.m., with the last bus leaving Old Mill Park at 5:15 p.m. If you've been to this festival before, you already know the drill. If you're newer to town, the thing worth internalizing is that circling downtown for street parking on festival weekend is a wasted twenty minutes. Park at one of the two school lots, or walk if you're close enough, and let the shuttle do the rest.
Ticket pricing already shifted once this year. Early bird pricing, which ran through September 1, is gone. General admission now runs $25 at the gate and $20 for seniors 62 and older, up from $20 and $15 before the deadline passed. Children, students, and teachers with valid ID still get in free. New this year is a "Festival Friends" pass for anyone who wants a faster line and a few added perks, which the festival organization is offering for the first time in the event's 69-year run.
Saturday's stage starts at noon with the Spencer Krenz Bluegrass Band, led by a Mill Valley resident, and moves through a lineup built for an afternoon under trees:
Sunday opens with the Commanders Jazz Ensemble, the 14-piece U.S. Air Force Band of the Golden West, then moves through The Keller Sisters' Americana harmonies and Bay Area troubadour Michael McNevin and The Spokes before landing on the two sets that carry the Weir tribute at 3 and 4 p.m.
MVFAF president Liz Lauter described the music stage as a gathering point for the region's favorite performers set against one of its most beautiful outdoor venues. That's true most years. This year it's also where two musicians who spent decades on stage with a Mill Valley neighbor will play a few blocks from the house where he lived.
Seven days after the last shuttle pulls out of Old Mill Park, Mill Valley does a version of the same instinct with none of the same rules. Concerts in the Plaza returns to the Downtown Plaza at 87 Throckmorton Avenue on September 26, running from 11 a.m. to 7:30 p.m., presented by the Mill Valley Arts Commission. There's no ticket, no shuttle, no juried anything. You bring a chair, you buy dinner from whichever downtown restaurant is closest, and you sit in the plaza instead of a redwood grove.
The lineup runs from Give Me a Dollar, the musical project of Tommy Freiburger and Karsen Scott, opening at 11 a.m., through Lorin Rowan and The Deep Blue Jam at 12:30, a mandolin-driven Americana outfit built around roots, reggae, and bluegrass. Mid-afternoon brings Caroline De Lone, a Bay Area singer-songwriter who has shared stages with Elvis Costello, Bonnie Raitt, and Steve Earle among others. The day closes at 6:30 with The Rubinoos, the Berkeley power pop band that put out its debut album in 1977 and has since had songs turn up in Revenge of the Nerds and, more recently, Netflix's Sex Education.
Where the Fall Arts Festival asks you to plan around a schedule and a shuttle stop, the Plaza show asks you to do almost nothing. That's not a coincidence. One event has run for 69 years on a piece of land with no parking. The other exists because downtown Mill Valley already has sidewalks, restaurants, and a plaza built for exactly this.
If you only have room on the calendar for one of these, the honest answer depends on what you're after. The Fall Arts Festival rewards planning: buy tickets before you're standing at the gate, know your shuttle lot, and if the Weir tribute matters to you, block out 3 to 4 p.m. Sunday specifically, because that hour won't repeat. The Plaza show rewards the opposite instinct. Walk down after a late breakfast, catch whichever set is playing, and leave whenever you're ready. No pass, no lot, no plan required.
Both weekends are proof that a town this size can hold two very different versions of a community gathering one week apart, one built around a 69-year-old juried art tradition in a redwood grove, the other around a free downtown stage that asks nothing of you but a folding chair. That contrast says more about how Mill Valley actually works day to day than either event does on its own.
If you're the kind of resident who tracks this level of detail about your own town, whether it's a festival lineup or the market on your street, Emily Schaffer covers Mill Valley with the same attention to what's actually happening here, not just what's listed. When the conversation eventually turns to buying, selling, or simply understanding your neighborhood's value, her Request a Private Consultation page is the place to start.
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