Burning Man festival: Black Rock Desert, Nevada, USA

Abstract

northeast out of Reno, Nevada, and after a hundred miles or so of mostly single-lane highway you’ll reach Gerlach, a dusty old railroad town situated at the southerly outskirts of the Black Rock Desert. For fifty 50 weeks of the year, the 300,000 acres of beautiful but inhospitable alkali flats, or playa, that make up Black Rock Desert are eerily quiet, empty save a few intrepid visitors and the Bureau of Land Management officers tasked with the area’s protection and preservation. However, for nine days every August, this all changes, as the desert playa is dramatically transformed into a temporary city-like encampment – —‘Black Rock City’ – —that, since 1991, has played host to the notorious Burning Man festival. Superficially viewed by the uninitiated as an off-grid hedonists’ free-for-all, Burning Man is in fact a multifaceted event that brings together sculptural artists, fire and pyrotechnic imagineers, musicians and performers, futurists, counterculture community-builders, and, yes, hedonistic and bohemian attendees (or ‘“Burners’”) from across the world. Although Burning Man is synonymous with dusty sandstorms and dry desert heat, the event’s roots lie in Northern California, and a series of small summer solstice gatherings that took place at Baker Beach, San Francisco, in the 1980s (it’s estimated that fewer than fifty people attended the inaugural Baker Beach event). A key feature of these parties were bonfire rituals, including the burning of small wooden effigies, and it is from this practice that the Burning Man festival got its name. Each year, a large human-shaped wooden sculpture (called the man—see Photo 1) is razed to the ground on the penultimate night of the event.