A music festival comes and drops loads of bands and money for schools.

There are three big music festivals happening this weekend in Monterey County. You may have heard of two of them – Cali Roots and Lightning in a Bottle (see stories). But unless you are intimately connected to King City High School or the rural Bitterwater Elementary School, you likely haven’t heard of the third one, called the Avaline Music Festival.

It began almost a decade ago, happens every two years outside King City, is a fundraiser and over two days packs in more than 20 indie bands.

Avaline began as a family and friends get-together on the cattle ranch of Mark and Carolyn Guidry, a husband-wife engineering duo who formed the Mark and Carolyn Guidry Foundation in 1993 to support education institutions close to their homes and hearts.

When Carolyn passed away in 2009, three of the grown children assumed a bigger role in the foundation, including Mike Guidry, who started Avaline to support its causes.

“The Guidry Foundation donates every year to [our] math department,” says Janet Matos, principal of King City High School. “When they do the music festival, they donate to our music program.”

As Mike is loading his truck in Redondo Beach on May 21 to make the drive north, he says, “We believe there’s a lot of links between the arts and technology. We like to support programs that nurture that.”

He does his part by bringing underground and indie bands to the 100-acre ranch to play on a smallish stage backdropped by a river oxbow and a cliff. It’s a full-on camping event – attendees bring food, water, tents, sleeping bags, firewood, etc. – with mountain hiking, a swimming hole, porta-potties, a medical tent and a shower trailer all onsite.

But it’s also a family-friendly, private fundraiser; it’s open to members of the foundation, but the donation to become a member and attend (and support the causes) is a bargain.

“We’re not looking for this event to be more than 400 or 500 people,” Mike says. When they near capacity they’ll pull the plug on the website.

Mike, who used to be into punk rock and likes cutting-edge young musicians, has programmed this year’s festival with help from Torrance band The 131ers (so named after an early mp3 glitch), who are friends with his kids.

“I’ve been playing Avaline since I was 12,” says lead singer Kaleb Davies. They’ve got a big, idealistic anthem sound, like an Arcade Fire or Imagine Dragons, propelled by synthesizer, guitar and youthful exuberance.

Davies says Avaline is not looking to grow into a Bonnaroo or Coachella (though the email address is avapalooza@yahoo.com), but this year it’s bigger: they expect even more crowds from nearby towns and ranches, colleges at Cal Poly, the Channel Islands and Monterey; there are more acts, churning out indie rock, punk, surf, folk, roots and hip-hop.

“We’ve got some secrets in store,” Davies says.

Super Cassette is one of the more deft bands, twin brothers who play guitar and sing harmony, backed by a bassist and drummer, seasoned with digital effects, altogether sounding proud of, but not limited by, their influences like Radiohead, Cake or The Strokes. They’ve got dynamics for days.

Surf-rock-punk band The Sanderlings, from Santa Barbara, has a jangly guitar-driven sound that conjures an old VW van, with surfboards mounted on top, careening toward the beach. Hot Tina are four women who rock pretty hard and have been in some other underground-sounding bands like Dirty Pink Lips, Rattlecake, Princess Dead, and Tron at the Cinesphere.

Kahj is a rapper from Berkeley who spits tricky rhymes with ease while riding the beat with the precision of a drum major.

One of the most recognizable names belongs to singer-guitarist Roger Rocha, former guitarist of 4 Non Blondes, who had a platinum album in 1992 on the strength of its single “What’s Up?”

The young lads from Wetwood Smokes, out of Costa Mesa, have a sound that OC Weeklycompared to Jonny Lang. They don’t have a deep discography (four EPs and counting) but they do have a throwback ¾-sleeve vintage T-shirt with their band name in 1970s typeface.

Davies says that the camping grounds are somewhat segregated, with college-age young people congregating together closer to the stage, and a family-and-kids area situated a respectful distance away.

There is a Vimeo video that Kahjal Merchant posted in 2014 from the festival. It follows a group of young people as they road trip to the ranch, mugging at the camera, play with white cow skulls near the swimming hole, bundle up in sleeping bags in tents. It shows them hooting and cheering in front of the stage, crowd surfing, doing the Macarena, acting up, packing trash, eating cereal in the morning. One girl plays with a puppy. And the young people are diverse, looking like more of America than crowds at bigger, costlier music festivals.

It looks like a fun place to be young.

AVALINE MUSIC FESTIVAL is Saturday and Sunday evening, May 26-27; camping is Friday afternoon to Monday morning, May 25-28; Guidry Ranch, King City. Donation admission: $35; $60; $100; $150-$250/families of three or more. avapalooza@yahoo.com, avalinefest.com.