Cash in hand, Art Vassmer floated in his boat across White Lake to the Sullivan County National Bank. He was the only bank customer that day. Vassmer feared robbers would take all the money the store was raking in from the sale of beer, soda, and peanut butter and jelly. But Vassmer's worries were groundless. "The Hog Farmers kept the peace," he said. "They were dirty, but they were nice. A few were happy on drugs, but hell, that was nothing." Vassmer raised only one price in his whole store. Beer was $2 a six-pack instead of $1.95. "Got tired of making change," said Vassmer, who even cashed a couple dozen checks for some kids who ran out of money. Not one bounced.

While the helicopters whirled to Yasgur's farm, Melanie sat in the motel lobby talking to her mom. When it was her turn to fly, her mother wasn't allowed with her - even though Melanie argued, "But she's my mom." Mrs. Safka drove back to New Jersey. Melanie flew to Bethel.

Bert Feldman, the town historian, was suddenly Woodstock's censor. His job was to keep frontal nudity from appearing on national television. He stood between the swimming hole and the television cameras, reminding folks to cover up. Afternoon temperatures were in the mid-80s. "They had to have one or two garments on, depending on sex," Feldman said. "Lemme tell you, after five minutes, it was work. You never saw a fight in there. You could argue, of course, that it was because everyone was stoned."

Other acts still weren't ready. Stage organizers knew they had to kill time. The Woodstock Nation might get restless if the music stopped. Emcee Chip Monck grabbed Country Joe McDonald, strapped an acoustic guitar on him and thrust him on stage. McDonald's short set included the unprintable and improvised "Fish Cheer" and "I-Feel-Like-I'm-Fixin'-To-Die Rag". After Country Joe, Monck spotted John Sebastian, the former lead singer and guitarist for the Lovin' Spoonful. Sebastian, clad in wild tie-dye, was tripping on some unidentified substance. He hadn't even been invited to perform at the festival. He recalls he was "too whacked to say no." Sebastian's stage rap was nearly a parody of hippie conversation, mostly because of his psychedelic state. But the crowd roared with approval. "Just love everybody around ya' and clean up a little garbage on your way out," Sebastian told the crowd.

Melanie Safka was such a nobody that she didn't even have a performer's pass. So when it was time for her to go on, she had to prove who she was by showing her driver's license and singing "Beautiful People." She was led backstage to her "dressing room," which was actually a tepee-sized tent. When she realized that she would be playing for a crowd about the size of Boston, she got so scared that she developed a nervous cough that "sounded like a chain saw." It was so loud that someone in the next tent sent her a cup of soothing tea. That neighbor was Joan Baez.

The film crew didn't have even close to enough film to shoot all the rock performances at Woodstock. So Wadleigh tried to make up for it by getting performers' song lists and the order in which they were going to sing them. Wadleigh wanted to film the anti-war songs, the songs that talked about the rifts in society and overlook the love songs. But musicians were getting stoned backstage. By the time they got on stage, they broke with song orders and played whatever came to them. Here's why the cameras never recorded the first two letters of the "Fish Cheer." Wadleigh was manning the onstage front and center camera. When Country Joe McDonald came out yelling " Gimme an F," revving the crowd with anti-Vietnam cheers, Wadleight was loading his camera and fixing a minor jam. "I was just scrambling like crazy to get my camera in some kind of working order," Wadleigh said. "That's why you don't see him for the first two minutes or so in the film. You just hear him. I got him on camera eventually. Someone should give him an award for that song. That is one of the greatest war songs there is."

Havens flew back to Liberty on the chopper. Then he hopped into his car and drove back to Newark International Airport, where he caught a plane for another show in Michigan the next night. Havens says the car ride to New Jersey was almost as incredible as the helicopter trip to the festival. "I was the only person on the New York Thruway going south," Havens said.

Of all the acts on Friday night, Woodstock's producers were worried only about Sly and the Family Stone. The rocking soul band had a tendency to fire up small crowds, inviting people to rush the stage. With a couple hundred thousand people, Sly and his band could ignite a riot. So Kornfeld cleared the pit in front of the stage to give security a fighting chance. Then he and his wife, Linda, climbed down, all alone into the vast chasm between the musicians on stage and Woodstock's horde. "He was singing, 'I want to take you high-er!' and everyone lit up. All those lights in the crowd, thousands of them," Kornfeld said. "We were right between Sly and the crowd.

The sprinkles began around midnight as sitarist Ravi Shankar was playing. Bert Sommer's angelic voice won him a standing ovation. By the time Joan Baez finished "We Shall Overcome," a warm thunderstorm was pounding Yasgur's farm. In the space of about three hours, five inches of rain fell.

The ration ticket read "Food for Love." But 25 year old Georgeie Sievers of Toronto, who had been visiting family in Port Jervis, paid a price anyway. "We waited for an hour, and we got a cold hot dog on a hamburger bun," she recalled. Food for Love was the original food concession for those inside the festival. Campgrounds coordinator Goldstein had set up two food operations: Food for Love, for those who had tickets, and the Free Kitchen for those outside the festival fence. Food for Love was plagued by a lack of organization from the outset. The voucher system was cumbersome, and the young food workers started giving away hot dogs and hamburgers in the spirit of the event. In addition, the massive traffic jam had blocked deliveries.

A Food for Love truck was stuck in the traffic in front of Abe Wagner's house, about five miles northeast of the festival site. Then the truck was raided. "One of the kids got in, and then they started throwing the food out all over the road, the bread, the hot dogs," Wagner said. Later, when hungry customers overran the booths, Food for Love disintegrated. "It started to rain, and it got ugly," said Helen Graham, who at 41 was one of the senior employees of Food for Love. "It was 2am, and I yelled, 'Joan Baez is on. Joan Baez is on.' I wanted to get the teen-agers away from the stand. They just wanted to stare at me. Mrs. Graham found herself trapped on Yasgur's farm because her car was blocked in. She wanted out of the Woodstock Nation. "It wasn't my type of culture. It wasn't my type of upbringing. It wasn't my type of experience." she said. "I kind of blotted it out from my head. It was a frightening experience. I didn't see the love and the peace. I saw an overwhelming crowd, and I didn't understand what was going on."

The stream behind Gery Krewson's tent was rising. The music stopped, and the group bailed out at 3am to dig a trench. "The water was just running down in torrents," he said. With the turf torn away, the Woodstock site is red clay and rocks brought down by glaciers millions of years ago. Within seconds of the rain, the festival became a slippery quagmire punctuated by puddles. The rain slammed into Yasgur's farm, drenching the fans, including 19 people who jammed into Krewson's tent seeking shelter from the storm. "When I got there, things at least had some semblance of order," Krewson said. From the instant the storm blew in, he recalled, there was no order, no security, no sense of what was happening or who was in charge.

Melanie Safka faced complete terror: half a million people in a driving rainstorm. "It was the only out-of-body experience of my life," she said. "I just watched myself on stage singing the songs, but I wasn't there." And then, as the rain tumbled down, tens of thousands of fans lit candles in the darkness. Sixteen-year-old Gery Krewson, his brother and three friends camped 50 yards from the stage. They'd arrived Wednesday night from Tunkhannock, Pa., in a psychedelic van. But their campsite seemed to be receding in the distance. A sea of people was rolling into the gap. "The word kind of got out that something was going on in the Catskills, " Krewson said.

Woodstock 1969 ... Saturday

Mary Sanderson stepped aboard the helicopter at dawn Saturday. The chopper blades slapped the air, and the pavement of the Orange County Airport fell away. The copter soared toward Bethel in a battering hailstorm. Just before it arrived, sunshine shot through a hole in the clouds. To the 40 year old nurse from Middletown, it looked like a scene from a biblical epic. "When you are in a helicopter, the sun's rays come down on 500,000 people. It looks like the multitudes," Mrs. Sanderson said. "You just can't picture that. You don't realize how all the people looked in that sun." Mrs. Sanderson had been scheduled to drive to the festival to work Saturday's night shift. But the Woodstock organizers had called her late Friday. They said the festival had been swamped with emergency cases. Ventures would send a helicopter for her and any other nurse she could recruit.

When she arrived, Dr. William Abruzzi of Wappingers Falls, the festival's medical director, immediately put her in charge of the newly erected medical tent. Outside, one man was selling his own brand of medicine. "He was yelling, ‘Mescaline! One dollar! Mescaline! One dollar!' All day long, " Nurse Sanderson said.

Promoters decided early on that it was crucial to crowd control for the music to be endless, especially after dark. The music was supposed to start at 7pm on Saturday and continue until midnight. But after the crowd swarmed the site on Friday, the promoters' strategy changed. They needed more music and deemed that acts should start later and play until dawn. Saturday's bill included loud, tough rock'n'roll: The Who, the Jefferson Airplane, Janis Joplin, Creedence Clearwater Revival, the Grateful Dead, Canned Heat, Mountain and Santana. The promoters worried that as the music got louder, the crowd could get wilder. But if they weren't entertained well, several hundred thousand bored fans could do some damage. Lang and the other organizers pleaded with Saturday's acts to play twice as long. Most were willing. It was the biggest audience in history; the attendance was estimated at 250,000 that morning.

The mud smelled like hashish, two inches deep. Sodden sleeping bags were churned up with cellophane, cigarette butts and discarded clothes. Standing rainwater was steaming skyward, blanketing thousands of sleeping kids with an eerie fog. Gery Krewson saw the tractor rumbling over the hill, plowing through a pile of soaked garbage and sleeping bags. The tractor was towing a tank trailer to haul away sewage from the portable toilets. But under that mass slept a 17-year-old from South Jersey named Raymond Mizak. His sleeping bag was over his head to ward off the rain. The tractor slowly ran over him. Krewson and five others raced up the hill and helped carry Mizak to an ambulance. By the time the helicopter arrived, Mizak was dead. "I don't think he ever felt anything. He was asleep," Krewson said. Richard Barley was walking up the hill seconds after the accident. "He had a blanket over him," Barley said. "A couple of girls were standing there crying."

Eileen Fuentes, a 17-year-old Forest Hills High School student, had been recruited to run an independent concession stand at the festival. She sold the accouterments of the counterculture - posters, roach clips and buttons. But Fuentes discovered Saturday that the real market was in raincoats. She ventured into the crowds, found a spot by the stage and sold the raincoats her boss had packed, just in case. Within an hour, hundreds of coats had been snatched up at $5 a pop. "I went back to get more, but we didn't have any more," she said.

"SPI-DERS!" the guy was screaming. The Freak-Out Tent had its first patient. Nurse Sanderson wasn't sure what to do about psychic spider infestations. The Hog Farmers treated bad acid trips with physical stroking and soft words. She decided to do the same. "You learned in a gosh-darn fast way," she said. "You have to give them some touch with reality. You had to speak softly." Mrs. Sanderson wanted to work the festival to learn how to treat the new sicknesses associated with the drug culture. Woodstock Ventures had offered to help train medical personnel, and Ventures was offering big bucks - $50 a day - for nurses. But there weren't many takers. Local people in medicine were skittish about being associated with the controversial event, Mrs. Sanderson said.

The medics had brought a bottle of Thorazine, an anti-psychotic drug, to chemically counteract bad trips. But the tripsters reported that Thorazine would send a drug user crashing immediately, leading to long-term psychological problems. The consensus at the Hog Farm was that Thorazine was a very bad trip indeed. "We stuck the Thorazine under the table, and I think somebody stole it," Mrs. Sanderson said. She divided the circus tent into three wards to cover the incoming casualties. The most famous was the ward for those experiencing the imaginary symptoms of bad trips. A second, the largest, was for people with cut feet. Broken glass and pop-tops slashed hundreds. "Their feet were cut to ribbons," she said. "We sat them down, put their feet in a bowl of clean water and disinfectant." The third area was for people with a malady peculiar to Woodstock. "They had burned their eyes staring at the sun," Mrs. Sanderson said. "If they were tripping, they'd lie down on their backs and just stare. There were five or six or seven at a time. That was something."

The shiny piece of foil glistened next to the black rubber tire of the state police car. Leo O'Mara, 18, of Clintondale, figured there was hashish in the foil, snatched it up and continued walking past the cop as he followed the abandoned cars along Route 17, for what was probably 20 miles. O'Mara opened the foil and found 29 tabs of acid. "They were pinkish, kind of," O'Mara said. "So I took one and folded the rest up and kept walking." But O'Mara's evening was about to turn strange. "I get there and everyone's saying, ‘Look out for the purple acid! Look out for the purple acid!'" he said. "I go,'Hey, that stuff was kind of purple. Uh-oh."

Bethel Town Justice Stanley Liese ran a quiet court from his house. But in August 1969, Liese suddenly acquired 18 months' worth of work - 177 cases. The most common charge: possession of implements to administer narcotics. If the cases were not simply dismissed, the average find was $25. Liese remembered one 16-year-old who was charged with selling marijuana (for $6 an ounce) and possessing six pounds of the stuff with intent to sell. Irate customers followed the troopers into Liese's house when they brought the suspected marijuana dealer in. The customers demanded that the judge throw the book at the teen because the grass was awful. Liese ordered him locked up in the Sullivan County Jail and sent a sample of the grass to the police lab in Albany for analysis.

The Free Kitchen was created to feed the hundreds of people who would be outside the concert, just making the scene. Organizers felt responsible for a horde of unprepared people, so they planned to feed them. But by Saturday afternoon, the Hog Farm's Free Kitchen was cooking for thousands after the Food for Love operation turned into chaos. I bought truckloads of grain, barrels of soy sauce," Goldstein said. "I bought a lot of vegetables from all over. But after the roads shut down, Goldstein's problem became how to move the food to the people. The helicopters couldn't find a place to land. "The sandwiches were coming in a National Guard helicopter to the Hog Farm compound, " Goldstein said. "We had 200 people join hands to form a circle for the helicopter.

A Woodstock acid trip wasn't always voluntary. "Outside (the tent), they were giving out electric Kool-Aid laced with whatever," Nurse Sanderson said. "They said, ‘Don't take the brown acid.' They put it in watermelon. Now, when kids take a tab of acid, they know what they're getting into. When you drink something that's cold because you're thirsty, that's different. A lot of the kids hurt with this stuff were just thirsty. They didn't have any choice. " But while the kids were drinking and taking whatever was around, Lang was being careful. Stationed in the headquarters trailer backstage, Lang couldn't afford to hallucinate. He says he didn't even smoke pot that weekend. "I didn't drink anything that didn't come from a bottle I didn't wash or open myself," he said.

So far, so good for Leo O'Mara. The acid had kicked in, the sun was shining, and he had no bummer symptoms yet. But he was thirsty, yes thirsty. Four cans of cold beer were sweating next to the stump on which he was sitting. In keeping with the code of the counterculture, O'Mara didn't touch it for an hour, by his reckoning. He even looked at his watch. By the time he says he finally did flip one of the pop-tops, the sun would have baked those beers, but O'Mara swore they were still ice-cold. The facts of physics are clear. O'Mara was hallucinating either time or temperature. "I couldn't believe it," he marveled. "I'm serious, man. Really."

On Saturday evening, Lou Newman's ears pricked up when he heard the murmuring on the sidewalk outside his gift shop in Liberty. "The kids were going, ‘Walla-walla-walla.' I couldn't really hear what they were saying," Newman said. "Then I found out why. This guy comes in and says, "We're with the Jefferson Airplane, and this is Grace Slick.' I didn't know anything about a Jefferson Airplane." Marty Balin, Jorma Kaukonen and Slick were staying at the Holiday Inn down the road. All three signed Newman's guest book.

The show wasn't going on. Janis Joplin, The Who and the Grateful Dead refused to play Saturday night. Their managers wanted cash in advance. Woodstock Ventures feared the fans would riot if the stage was empty. The promoters pleaded with Charlie Prince, the manager of the White Lake branch of Sullivan County National Bank, to put up the money. Prince knew that Ventures President John Roberts had a trust fund of more than $1 million. Late Saturday night, Prince negotiated his way through the clogged back roads from Liberty to White Lake, where he opened up the bank. He discovered the night drop slot was overflowing with bags of cash. Prince called Joe Fersch, the bank's president, who told him to use his judgement. After Roberts gave Prince a personal check that night for "50 or 100 thousand dollars," Price wrote the cashier's checks. The performers were paid. The show went on. "I felt that if I didn't give him the money for the show to go on, well, what would a half-million kids do?" Prince said.

One festival-goer, who asked to be identified only as Andrew, had decided that Janis Joplin was in love with him. Andrew knew that he had a shot at instant on stage romance. "I knew that if I could just make passionate love to her, everything would just be all right and she would fall in love with me forever," Andrew recalled. "I got about three feet on stage, and about 40 policemen disagreed. They dragged me off. I wasn't the only one. That happened all the time." Daniel Sanabria, the fence installer, who stayed for the show, also remembered Joplin's set. He was 10 feet from the stage. "I think we were under the influence of certain mind-altering substances," Sanabria said. "We would tell the performers, ‘Down on stage.' She (Joplin) would sit down and let us see."

Thever was just back from ‘Nam. Now, possessed with paranoia, he cowered on a cot in the Freak-Out Tent. " He kept saying the same thing over and over again," Mrs. Sanderson said. "He was afraid of something. ‘Don't come near me,' he said. ‘Don't come near me.' They tried to talk him down, but that time we did use drugs. They gave him a shot of something, and an hour or so later, he was down. We asked him, we always asked, what he had taken. I'm not awfully sure that we got the right answers."

Phil Ciganer's buddy was Grateful Dead guitar guru Jerry Garcia, who used to pop into Ciganer's hippie boutique in Brooklyn. But, friendship aside, Ciganer had to be honest about the Grateful Dead's performance at Woodstock. The band members were standing in water, their electric guitars were shocking their fingers. "It was the worst show of theirs I'd ever seen," he said.

The Who had released their first rock opera, "Tommy," in June. Now, just after midnight, the English hard-rockers were performing the three-record set's theme song, "See Me, Feel Me." "Listening to you, I get the music," sang the fringe-shirted Roger Daltrey, "gazing at you, I get the heat..." Head Yippie Abbie Hoffman sat on the stage with Lang during The Who's set. Hoffman had been working the medical tent since the festival's opening act, gobbling down tabs of acid to stay awake. Lang and Hoffman had been looking for an imaginary guy with a knife under the stage. Lang decided it was time to calm Hoffman down. He had become increasingly obsessed with publicizing the case of John Sinclair, a Michigan teen-ager busted for possession of two marijuana cigarettes.

So he jumped up and grabbed the mike, spitting out a few words about Sinclair, who had gotten a 10-year jail sentence. Who lead guitarist Pete Townsend didn't recognize Hoffman and figured he was just another whacked-out festival-goer rushing the stage. Townsend bonked Hoffman on the head with his guitar. Hoffman wandered away. " Abbie was being Abbie," Kornfeld said. "He was very out of his head at Woodstock. He didn't have contact with reality."

Woodstock 1969 ... Sunday

At sunup Sunday, Grace Slick's voice wafted out of the festival bowl to a pasture above: "One pill makes you larger, and one pill makes you small..." "Some (jerk) was out there making eggs over a campfire, going, ‘Hey man, it's the Airplane! Hey, man, it's the Airplane!'" recalled Jerome O'Connell, the hippie from Rome, NY.

Judge Liese heard a commotion out on the lawn. Hippies were camped all over the grounds of the Waldheim Hotel bungalow colony in Smallwood, which the judge owned. But Liese couldn't explain this banging. At 5:30am, the judge got up to investigate in the grayish morning light. "I saw a longhaired man wandering around all the bungalows, trying to open the doors," he said. "I asked the fellow what he was looking for. "He said, ‘A doctor.' "I told him Dr. (Stuart) Dombeck was three-quarters of a mile away, but it would be impossible to get there because of the roads. He kept raising his voice louder and louder. I finally told him to leave. "But I guess I made a mistake, standing too close behind him. The next thing I knew, I woke up. He'd punched me in the mouth and knocked me out. I was down maybe 20 or 30 minutes." The blow also knocked out most of Liese's teeth. "The newspaper headline read, ‘Hippie slugs judge,'" Liese said.

Abe Wagner wasn't fond of freaks. Years later, he recalled the hungry kids, the lost kids, the kids with nowhere to sleep, nowhere to relieve themselves. The kids using and selling drugs. There were "rabble-rousers, " as Wagner called them, but he emphasized that they were a small minority. "I felt sorry for the kids lying by the roadside," Wagner said. "Hungry. Dirty. I remember a Belgian couple; she was crying. They had lost their kids. What could I do?" Wagner said he and his neighbors fed them. "Most of us here had two or three weeks of food on hand. We put a plank across our driveway and put the food on it and fed the kids. And we took cans of soup and set up a soup kitchen for the kids in an old building on Lake Shore Road." But there was also a handful of nasties among Wagner's neighbors. Wagner remembered one Bethel resident who charged $10 to tow a car out of a muddy ditch and onto the road. When one kid didn't have the money, the neighbor towed the car right back into the mud.

Wavy Gravy called it "Breakfast in Bed for 400,000." The recipe: Rolled oats or bulgur wheat (often both). Cook until mush. Add peanuts for taste. Cook until the texture of goulash. For a side dish, stir-fry any vegetables that can be scraped together. Scoop the mixtures onto paper plates. "These people were feeding literally hundreds of thousands of people with nothing," Krewson said. "They were taking what they could get and feeding people with it." Gravy told the audience that it was no miracle. "We're all feeding each other, man," he said.

The Hog Farm had become the Greater Hog Farm. Gravy was now leading thousands of volunteers, sort of. Many newly recruited Hog Farmers had red polyester rags, each stenciled with a winged pig, tied around their arms. " It got hard to tell the Hog Farm really responsible people from the casual hang-around Hog Farm people," Goldstein said. "Suddenly, the only credential was the Hog Farm. There were so many people doing so many things that the Hog Farm brassard (arm band) became an all-areas pass. A vegetable chopper wanted to participate, and three hours later, he'd be running a crew. Gravy's idea was simply that eventually, everyone in the whole crowd would have a brassard.

By noon, the sun was beating down on Bethel. Heatstroke became the biggest worry, even some fans were showing signs of pneumonia from being drenched for two days. The promoters considered turning the fire hoses on to mist the crowd, but didn't. It started to rain again in the afternoon. Sunday's lineup again was packed with rockers: The Band, Joe Cocker, Crosby, Stills & Nash, Ten Years After, Johnny Winter and Jimi Hendrix. Iron Butterfly, which pioneered heavy metal rock'n'roll, was also scheduled to play. The group arrived in New York from a seven-week, nationwide tour and called for a helicopter to bring it to the festival. But Lang and the other organizers worried that Iron Butterfly's brand of hippie/heavy-metal music might be dangerous under the circumstances. Emcee John Morris dispatched a nasty telegram to the group at the airport. It was designed to provoke the members into deciding not to play. But Lee Dorman, Iron Butterfly's bassist, remembers it differently. Woodstock organizers, he said, were supposed to send a helicopter and didn't.

"Two or three times, we checked out of our hotel and went to the heliport on 33rd Street," Dorman said. "It never came. I guess it had more important things to do, like feed people." The band went home to California and, at first, members didn't mind missing the festival. "When we... heard how big it was, we thought, ‘Damn, we missed it,'" Dorman said. "It would have been great to play ‘In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida' or even to just say ‘Hi.' "

Ben Leon ran the boat rental business on Filippini's Pond, popularly known as "Leon's Lake." The 90-year old kept watch on the boats from the porch of a shanty perched on the hillside above the largest of Woodstock's skinny-dipping spots. On Woodstock weekend, Leon wasn't renting boats, but he was still watching. "He sat on the veranda, the old fool, and you could hear him 50 feel away: ‘Heee-heee-heee. Haw-haww-haww,'" Feldman said. " He had a gigantic pair of binoculars. Must have been Navy submarine spotters or something. The funny thing was that 10 days after the festival, he dropped dead. I talked to the undertaker, and he said he never could wipe the smile off the guy's face. That's the way to go, I guess.

"He was 17. She was 15. Sometime during the weekend, they came to banker Charlie Prince with a problem. Their parents didn't know where they were. They had another problem. The boy had taken his father's week-old 1969 Oldsmobile out for a drive. Somehow, they'd ended up at Woodstock. They had one more problem. They couldn't find the car.

Attendance estimates kept rising. By Sunday, the state police figure was 450,000, and others rounded it off to an even half-million. But Record editor Al Romm, who coordinated coverage from a trailer behind the stage, believed the estimates were all wrong. Citing aerial photos, Romm swore that Woodstock drew maybe 150,000 people. "There were 100,000, 150,000 there," Romm said. "It was to everyone's advantage - the police, the promoters and the reporters - to say there were more. It was to nobody's advantage to say there were less. The biggest concert before it had 20,000 people. (Woodstock) was still a big deal; there were just not as many people."

Bert Feldman, Bethel's historian, also maintained that the attendance figures were wrong. But he thought the figures were low. "There were 700,000 people there," he said. "The attendance estimate is based on aerial photos, and there were thousands of people under trees."