Coachella attendees wait for water on the festival grounds.
Timothy Karoff / SFGATE
“I’m just barely surviving,” Denise Barozzi said with a smile. “But I’m having fun.” Barozzi was referring to the weather at the Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival, which, at the time that we spoke, was hovering between 95 and 100 degrees Fahrenheit. She’d just emerged from a cold plunge, a service offered for $30 in the Coachella camping area. A few other attendees had lined up to take plunges in an effort to temporarily beat back the heat.
After a mild year in 2024, Coachella’s desert heat is back with a vengeance. When the sun rose over the music festival on Friday, the temperature began a steady crawl upward. In the camping lot, cars baked under a cloudless sky. Attendees donned bandanas and sun hats, and crouched in rare patches of shade while charging their phones.
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This reporter’s iPhone 13 overheated while charging under the shade of a canopy and stopped charging at 23%. For hours after, it felt like a dying star in my pocket. (This has never happened to my phone in the three years I’ve owned it.)
A screenshot of an iPhone overheating at Coachella.
Timothy Karoff / SFGATE
Friday is set to be the hottest day of the festival’s first weekend. On Thursday, National Weather Service meteorologist Sebastian Westerink told SFGATE that the high of 100 degrees is a few degrees away from the record for the same date, 106 degrees in 1904.
By 10 a.m., the lines for the free water refill stations at the festival’s Camping Hub were 20 minutes long — long enough for one SFGATE reporter to chat up the stranger behind him and learn the broad strokes of his life story (Ukrainian parents, Israel, Williamsburg, San Diego, university, tech job). After waiting in the glaring sun, attendees reached the front of the line to discover that the water came out in a thin trickle — bad news for anyone trying to refill their Camelbaks, gallon jugs or — God forbid — camping showers.
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“At 5 a.m., this thing was blasting,” one shirtless man told me shortly after noon, as he filled up his Stanley tumbler at the water station. “I think that it slowed down after everyone used it.” (By midday, the machine refilled a Nalgene much faster — one or two minutes instead of three.)
But despite the elements’ best efforts (and the agonizingly weak water pressure at the refill station), spirits on the campgrounds are high. At eleven, lines for cold showers were mercifully short. At noon, campers played table tennis in the shade of the Camping Hub.
To take a temperature check on this high temperature day, SFGATE interviewed several attendees to ask them how they were handling the heat.
Alma Ramirez came prepared. 2025 is her fourth or fifth Coachella, and she knows the drill. She was waiting for the festival’s gates to open at 12:55 with a parasol in one hand and a mister in the other. To hydrate, she drank Pedialyte out of a Poland Spring bottle.
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“I feel like it’s gotten worse. Climate change is real,” she said, laughing.
Others weren’t so lucky. Ramirez mentioned that her neighbor in the car camping lot was passing out and had to leave the camping grounds to sleep somewhere with air conditioning.
The campgrounds at Coachella 2025.
Timothy Karoff / SFGATE
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Oscar Lermo didn’t anticipate the heat at all. He only realized it was going to be a hot weekend on the drive down from San Jose, when his car thermometer kept climbing.
“I’m miserable,” he told SFGATE, just before the gates opened. “I hate it. I made the mistake of wearing pants and high-top shoes when I should have been wearing shorts and a tank top.” Lermo said that his phone was also overheating in the 100-degree weather.
At 1:30 p.m., shortly after the gates opened, one of the water refill stations near the Sonora stage was dispensing hot water. I shared looks of puzzlement with other attendees, who ended up emptying the contents of their plastic bottles into the dry grass. (I returned at 2, at which point the water had cooled to room temperature.)
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Joaquín Chaffardet, who was on his way to DJ (he performs as Joaqu.n), stood near the Do Lab dressed in black pants and a black mesh jersey over a black T-shirt. He’s from Texas, he said, and doesn’t really get hot, though he expressed some regrets about dressing in all black.
“This is the hottest Coachella I’ve been to, for sure,” he said. “I probably won’t wear all black tomorrow.”
