With its inaugural year in the books, Madison House Presents’ Vertex music festival may have just pulled off the unthinkable: throw a major music festival in small town Colorado without rankling its neighbors.

In recent years, Colorado has proven a tough customer for large new music festivals. Riot Fest lasted just one year in Byers before a community petition ousted them to Denver’s National Western Complex. Drug arrests and traffic marred winter time festival Snowball, which bounced from Avon to Winter Park to the parking lot of Sports Authority Field, where it was last held in 2014.

From Buena Vista residents to festival organizers, there is little indication that the event was anything but a success — even if its numbers don’t necessarily suggest it.

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In turn, Vertex lost money in its debut. But like many budding businesses, that’s a foregone conclusion for large-scale music festivals in their first year. (A representative for the festival declined to disclose the extent of the loss.)

Spending time at Vertex’s vision of Jed Selby’s farm, it’s plain to see where that money went. While the festival hooked fans with splashy headliners like blues rockers Alabama Shakes, Seattle DJ duo ODESZA and jam favorites Trey Anastasio Band, Madison House Presents has a reputation for prizing its environment as much as its music. A festival’s billed artists are always the major draw. But consider that Madison House’s 45,000-person Electric Forest in Rothbury, Mich. sold out this year even before its lineup was announced, a rare if unheard of accomplishment for a major music festival.

Vertex was evidence of how they managed that. Unlike last month’s first annual Divide Music Festival in Winter Park, which put little more thought into its experience beyond where its advertisers were arranged around its fenced pen, Vertex decked out its entrance hub on Buena Vista’s Selby Farm like a rustic wonderland. Dubbed “the Bazaar,” Christmas lights zigged on treetops above the requisite food and beer vendors on the path to the main stage area, leading its brightly dressed masses through a hamlet of oddball attractions. Two “O Brother Where Art Thou?”-era women cawed at passersby from a hay-scattered laundry shed, offering to scrub and hang dirty clothes free of charge. An adjacent bright pink parlor offered tickle breaks to tense patrons; another cabin brimmed with yellow balloons, with little instruction other than to not drag the balloons out after fans were done belly-flopping into them.

“Gosh, it was very impressive, what they did with that space,” Buena Vista mayor Joel Benson said in an interview after the festival. Benson took a tour of the grounds on Saturday and bought a ticket on Sunday to see bands like Fruition and Ryan Hemsworth. “Some of the people there were very entertaining to watch.”

Benson noted that he had heard concerns from residents ahead of the festival, which led to some of them leaving town preemptively. “There was a lot of hype about the crazy impact it’d have on the town, but we didn’t see that,” he added.

The main concern Buena Vista residents had was the havoc that an influx of more than double the town’s population of 2,700 people could wreak on local infrastructure.

For better and worse, that wasn’t an issue.

Regularly scheduled shuttles ferried festival-goers the mile from the town’s center to the festival, which had ample parking thanks to its 274-acre plot, most of which was empty.

On the drizzly Thursday night before Vertex started, Buena Vista’s Deerhammer Distillery stayed open an extra hour to accommodate the handful of festival-goers milling around its tiny barroom.

“We don’t really know what to expect in terms of business,” said bartender Evan Winger. “The most drinks we’ve ever served in a night is about 400, so if we do more than that, we’ll know we’ve had a good night.”

That record would still stand at the end of the weekend, although business did pick up in the hours before the festival’s music started. “We had one of the best mornings we’ve ever had on Friday,” Winger said.

Despite booking 12 bands throughout the weekend, the nearby Lariat Bar and Grill didn’t fare much better at converting festival-goers into customers. “Day time business on Friday and Saturday was positively affected,” said Court Johnson, 64, who co-owns the Lariat with his wife Robbie. “At night, it was less than normal.”

“Still,” Johnson said, “I would like to see Vertex become a permanent fixture.”

As it stands, Vertex has gone far to establish itself as a reputable festival. The Chaffee County Sherriff’s office reported four arrests stemming from the festival, a number undersheriff Joe McGuire said was “very low.”

“It’s early, but I have not heard any unexpected negative feedback from the event,” Mayor Benson said. “I expect that they will ask for another permit.”

While there’s been no major issues reported so far, Vertex’s return is still up in the air. That decision will wait until 2017, and depends how its county commissioners vote, which is also far from certain: Two out the three county commissioner seats are up for election this November.

Benson added that he preferred seeing the land on the farm used for Vertex instead of being developed. “I certainly think there’s some good potential for it in BV in the long run.”