Burners had to adapt in real time as rain turned their desert oasis into a messy mud trap.
This photo, provided by Maxar Technologies, shows an overview of the center camp at the Burning Man festival on Monday, Sept. 4, 2023, in the Black Rock Desert north of Reno, Nev. Near the end of every summer, attendees of the multiday mega-festival venture to the Nevada wilderness. Their motto: “Leave no trace.”instead after about a half an inch of rain hit what is normally the driest state in the nation.
On Aug. 27, as the festival was getting started, climate activists blockaded a road into Burning Man in protest of its environmental footprint.This year’s event is only expected to fuel critics who have long charged the festival for leaving trash in surrounding communities and not living up to its eco-conscious goals as crowds rush away from the encampment.
“By the time we went to bed that night, it was really clear that this is going to be something that would shut down the city,” said Kamenetz, who writes a Substack newsletter about climate change. To dig mud out of a portable toilet, Kamenetz unbolted a gold-colored decorative shovel attached to a zebra-striped, safari-themed vehicle brought to Burning Man as an “art car.”Revelers tried to make the best out of a bad situation. During the day, the group sculpted a statue of an elephant out of mud. At night, they played music. As a sign, perhaps, that things would be okay, a rainbow arched across the playa Saturday.
“It totally worked - there’s nowhere else I’d rather be in the middle of a zombie apocalypse,” Lee said. “I’d see people walking around with trash bags, offering water, handing out food. You see somewhere clearly struggling because they look hungry and doesn’t have a poncho and you help them.” The Southwest United States has seen more rain than normal this year, both because of an active monsoon as well as the passage of Tropical Storm Hilary. Around the same time downpours drenched Burning Man, torrential rain also brought flooding to Las Vegas, which has received 2.55 inches of rain during the monsoon season, the 11th-most on record.
Yet by Sunday, an exodus was underway even as roads remained closed. Over Labor Day, people pushed RVs and kicked mud out from under wheels to get them to move. Others hoofed it by foot. Kamenetz walked more than three miles through mud to catch a bus. By Tuesday morning, the departure was “going smoothly” despite the heavy volume of travelers, Pershing County Sheriff Sgt. Nathan Carmichael said. The only major incident from Burning Man that the sheriff’s office was actively investigating Monday was the death of Leon Reece, a 32-year-old attendee who was found unresponsive at the festival Friday.
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