Words: Tom Ward
It was supposed to be an escape from it all. Worry, bills, work. A week-long festival of music, costumes and dancing. A bacchanalian desert celebration celebration with an overemphasis on fire performers and scrap metal sculptures that might generously be described as art. A Mad Max-adjacent festival deep in the Nevada desert, one last refuge where revellers could be their true, authentic selves. Except, this year’s Burning Man didn’t quite go to plan.
Taking place in the Black Rock Desert in Pershing County, Nevada from August 27 to September 4, the 35th Burning Man event saw an estimated 73,000 people decamp to the desert. The problem was, following freak rainfall of over 1.3cm on Friday September 1st, attendees found themselves stranded in a quagmire not just of avant-garde performances, questionable fashion and music taste, but actual mud. Thick, gloopy mud that stranded vehicles, making passage out impossible.
Burning Man was founded in San Francisco in 1986 and has been a staple of the arts scene ever since, attracting celebrities like (this year) Cara Delevingne, Chris Rock and Diplo (more on them shortly). Like all good festivals, there’s an emphasis on camping and self-sufficiency, heightened here by the fact that the festival site is more than 100 miles away from the nearest city of Reno, with no airport or main roads nearby – hence the preference among festival goers for R.Vs and off-road vehicles. This year isn’t the first time it’s been disrupted by weather, either: in 2018 dust storms forced a temporary close to the festival, while it was twice cancelled during the Covid 19 pandemic.
For three days, festival-goers found themselves stranded, forced to shelter in place while rationing and sharing supplies while they waited for the roads to dry enough to allow egress. Water reportedly stood-ankle deep, with further downpours expected throughout the weekend. Ironically, many festival-goers were given a true taste of the isolation they longed for, and spirits mostly remained high. The Daily Mail characteristically describes the festival ‘descending into chaos’, but, writing for Esquire, Daniel Dumas writes about using the time by attending an extra party, on the Saturday night (and really, what else are you going to do?).
““The spirit in there,” festival-goer Cindy Bishop told the Guardian, “was really like, ‘We’re going to take care of each other and make the best of it’”.
Also stranded was the actor Tessa Thompson who, along with Delevingne and friends, walked five miles through the mud back to their car. Diplo, and Chris Rock likewise had an arduous trek, walking six miles before hitching a ride on the back of a truck.
“I grab my cousin Bella, scale a nearby tower, and spot a few jeeps and RVs in the distance slowly making their way out of the city,” Dumas writes. “The road in front of my camp seems dry enough to drive over. I do a gut check and then talk with the rest of my campmates. We feel like we have a small window to make an escape from Black Rock City.” Spoiler alert: the plan doesn’t go as smoothly as Dumas would have liked.
A person walks in the mud at the Burning Man Festival in the Black Rock Desert, Nevada, USA, 03 September 2023. EFE/EPA/DIANA JENSEN
Eventually, festival-goers began making their way home when roads reopened at midday on Monday, with hours-long queues to leave the festival site (despite organisers suggesting some attendees wait until Tuesday to ease traffic). For some attendees, the difficulties added to the magic:
“Yes we all know burning man ended in ebola, cannibalism and people drowning in puddles but I wanna talk about the double rainbows, the mud sculptures the sunsets, the great people and the excellent music I got to play with great friends … the community and the self reliance that got everyone back safe and all the good memories… yes the 6 mile hike out might have been a highlight” Diplo wrote on Twitter.
The longterm implications of a desert festival drenched in mud might be more serious than jokes about ebola, with experts pointing to climate change as the driving factor behind the unseasonable rains. In a month when Death Valley (the hottest place on Earth) played host to a temporary desert lake due to massive rainfall, headlines around Burning Man claim “Burning Man is getting washed out by climate change” and “Burning Man’s climate reckoning has begun”.
04 September 2023, USA, Black Rock: Undated image shows rainbow seen over the muddy grounds of the “Burning Man” festival. Tens of thousands of visitors to the desert festival “Burning Man” are stranded on the site in the US state of Nevada after heavy rainfall over the weekend. Photo: David Crane/dpa (Photo by David Crane/picture alliance via Getty Images)
The fallout from this year’s festival is having an effect on the environment, too. “Some participants were unwilling to wait or use the beaten path to attempt to leave the desert and have had to abandon their vehicles and personal property wherever their vehicle came to rest,” Sheriff Jerry Allen of Pershing County, Nevada wrote in the San Francisco Chronicle, while also complaining of higher than usual levels of trash left behind. This behaviour, Allen wrote, did not mesh with the official ‘10 Principles of Burning Man’ which includes directives to: “civic responsibility,” “communal effort,” and “leaving no trace.”
Ultimately, this is a story about festival goers getting stuck in the desert. You might even find the thought of DJs and actors wading through mud beneath the baking sun amusing. But, it’s yet another indication that climate change is coming for us all, and even the places we once thought of as an escape are no longer immune.
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