At Burning Man, pretty much anything goes

Burning Man participants visit the site's temple, which will eventually be set on fire. Visitors leave notes inside and in the walls of the structure, hoping the cleansing fire will set them free.
(Photo: Trevor Hughes, USA TODAY)

Trevor Hughes
USA TODAY

BLACK ROCK CITY, Nev. – A young woman stepped into the dusty glare of my headlights, and I realized she was topless. And pantsless.

The only thing she was wearing was a playing card strapped on by a clear rubber band around her waist.

And a giant smile.

"Welcome home!" she said. "Is this your first time?"

Yes. Yes, it is.

I'm spending the week embedded in the annual Burning Man festival, reporting on the newest tech trends, the dust storms and the luxury camps that drew criticism last year. The temporary city we've created is called Black Rock City, and for this week it will be the third-largest place in Nevada.

First-timers like me are pulled from their vehicles to celebrate. In my case, the young woman ordered me to remove my shirt and make dust angels as lights flashed and music drifted on the wind. I banged a bell as my greeters yelled "not a virgin" to mark my transition in the encampment.

Burning Man draws 70,000 people annually to the Nevada desert (God forbid you pronounce it Nevaaaaaada, by the way) for an almost-anything-goes event. A sign at the entrance warns arrivals that all laws apply, but there's a lot of people and not a lot of cops.

That's kind of the point: Organizers create and encourage a freewheeling experience in which many people take illegal drugs, and casual sex is not only common but widely condoned. Many of the themed camps seem intended to confront and then contort societal norms. But norms are reserved for the outside world, the Default World.

Here, creativity is everywhere. Elaborate sculptures reach toward the sky. Others blast flames. Endless electronic dance music pumps across the encampment as neon-lit vehicles circle. Strangers hug you without warning.

And the outfits. The outfits! This is a place for extreme personal expression in a way that might make many Americans feel uncomfortable. Here, lots of people go shirtless, and there's a fair few wearing even less than my greeter.

Media access is tightly controlled, and the organizers use copyright law to enforce the rules –-- photographers must sign a contract agreeing not to exploit people's images for personal gain. The last thing Burning Man organizers want is to see participants' images used to sell stuff.

And while it took me a whole day to notice, now I can't stop marveling at the complete lack of stuff being sold or marketed. Corporate logos on rental trucks are usually covered up or altered, and there's no one hawking, well, anything.

It's a welcome relief from the constant pressure of consumerism we face every day. Gone are the messages to buy buy buy. Instead, we're asked to simply be. (There's no official Internet provider, and mobile phone coverage is iffy.)

Don't get me wrong. Virtually everyone has spent a lot of money to be here, and spending a week requires lots of logistics. I watched as participants stocked up on cheap plastic junk in Reno, pouring millions of dollars into that city's economy while allowing Burning Man to maintain its reputation as the world's largest Leave No Trace event.

Here, the entire economy is based on the concept of gifting. People give you things out of the kindness of their heartsAND, with "gifts" ranging from the sculptures to free booze and Tantric massages.

Sunday, a young woman handed me a beaded bracelet she'd made, with each colored bead a piece of Morse code.

Unfurled, if you know how to read it, the bracelet quotes Shakespeare: "All the world's a stage, and all the men and women merely players."

And for the next week, this remote Nevada desert is the biggest stage of all.

New Sheriff Overseeing Burning Man to Crack Down on Naked Rule-Breakers

The weeklong event in Nevada draws thousands of people — and their drugs

Participants walk through dust at the annual Burning Man event in the Black Rock Desert of Gerlach, Nev., on Aug. 29, 2014.

Jack Linshi
Time

A new Nevada sheriff tasked with overseeing the upcoming Burning Man festival plans to crack down on the annual desert debauchery.

Jerry Allen, 39, who was elected Pershing County Sheriff in January, said he plans to tighten law enforcement for the tens of thousands of festival-goers journeying to the remote Black Rock Desert next week for the annual event, the Reno Gazette-Journal reported on Tuesday.

In recent years, many attendees at the week long event — where nudity is the norm, drugs flow as if on tap and orgies litter the desert — have not been charged for crimes like marijuana possession, according to federal reports on the event, but the new sheriff in town said he has a tougher police protocol in mind.

“We don’t have the personnel to issue citations to 70,000 naked people on the playa, but we will be upholding the law to the best of our ability,” Allen said. He added that Burning Man “brings nothing … except for heartache” to the conservative, rural county.

Burning Man organizers said they remain optimistic because the low number of arrests in years past suggest more festival-goers are abiding by the law.

“We’ve been working with [Allen] since his election, and he’s been involved with all of the large coordination efforts,” said Burning Man spokesman Jim Graham. “It’s an ongoing process on education, but he hasn’t been out there for a few years, so he hasn’t seen the progress we’ve made in recent years.”

Burning Man will take place from Aug. 30 to Sept. 7.

BLM’s Burning Man requests outrageous

EDITORIAL
LAS VEGAS REVIEW-JOURNAL

Strip VIP hosts are breathing sighs of relief from Wynn Las Vegas to Mandalay Bay. They might have their hands full satisfying all kinds of requests from their guests this holiday weekend, but they know they could be stuck with far more outrageous demands. They could be dealing with the BLM.

If Nevadans needed any more proof that U.S. Bureau of Land Management leaders are arrogant, entitled and disconnected, they need only read a tremendous series of stories recently published by the Reno Gazette-Journal.

Rugged outdoorsmen need not apply to the Interior Department. As reported by the newspaper’s Jenny Kane, the BLM asked the organizers of the upcoming Burning Man counterculture festival to build a million-dollar luxury compound — supplied with a ridiculous list of snacks, food and amenities at the festival’s expense — to accommodate the federal employees charged with staffing Black Rock City later this summer. The request, which would raise the festival’s land use costs to roughly $5 million, has become a stumbling block for organizers, who need a permit from the BLM to stage their event in northwestern Nevada.

Burning Man is famous for extreme conditions and the self-reliance of its attendees — two things BLM employees want no part of. The implication of the request was clear: The permit for the already sold-out festival, which will attract up to 80,000 people to the desert the week leading up to Labor Day, could be denied if the BLM’s VIPs aren’t provided with flushing toilets, showers, hot water, refrigerators, couches, washers, dryers, Choco Tacos, M&Ms, licorice, Chobani Greek Yogurt, steaks and 24-hour access to ice cream.

What, no bottle service or spa treatments?

In an interview with the Gazette-Journal, Rep. Mark Amodei, R-Nev., whose district includes the Black Rock Desert, questioned the origin of the request.

“I don’t think it was driven out of Nevada. I think it was driven out of Utah, or D.C., or both,” he said. “We have a big problem: 15 VIP accommodations and soft-serve ice cream 24 hours a day. With all due respect, those dots do not connect.”

That’s almost $67,000 per employee for a week in the sticks. Those are some awfully expensive manicures. (“Ethel, I said the clear nail polish!”)

Sen. Harry Reid, D-Nev., also had a big problem with the extravagance. In a pointed letter to Interior Secretary Sally Jewell, Sen. Reid reminded her of the cultural benefits and economic boost Burning Man has brought to the state for the past 23 years, and reiterated the philosophy and logistics of the festival.

“While I agree that the BLM should take its permitting duties seriously and work with Burning Man to both guarantee the safety of its participants and the protection of the environment, providing outlandishly unnecessary facilities for the BLM and its guests should be beyond the scope of the permitting requirements,” he wrote. “Flush toilets and laundry facilities can be found about ten miles away in Gerlach, Nevada, if BLM’s employees need such amenities.”

The BLM’s request bordered on extortion: “You want your permit? Then give us our ice cream!” The fallout from the demands has compelled the BLM to reconsider its needs at Burning Man. Good.

The demands, while ridiculous, make perfect sense. The BLM can’t manage the land. It can’t manage wild horse herds. It can’t prevent wildfires. Its sheltered staffers know nothing about the land, so they couldn’t possibly be expected to rough it while monitoring a counterculture celebration that’s all about leaving civilization behind. They think the public’s land is their land, and they resent leaving the comforts of their offices and homes to protect it from the unwashed masses.

Here’s an idea for the BLM: provide some basic camping courses to your staff — in the outdoors, not at a five-star hotel — and hire fewer wimps.

Burning Man Draws 66,000 People To The Nevada Desert

Embrace at Burning Man 2014.

By MARTIN GRIFFITH
Associated Press

RENO, Nev. — The Burning Man counterculture festival drew a peak crowd of nearly 66,000 celebrants as it neared an end Monday on the northern Nevada desert.

Friday's official peak attendance of 65,922 was within the population cap of 68,000 the federal Bureau of Land Management imposed on the quirky art and music festival 110 miles north of Reno, said Gene Seidlitz, manager of the agency's Winnemucca District.

The number was down from last year's record peak crowd of 69,613, which resulted in organizers being placed on probation for a second time in three years for violating the limit.

Organizers had been warned that if they were placed on probation a second straight year, the agency might suspend or cancel their permit.

"That (crowd size) is not a problem this year," Seidlitz said, adding the attendance cap was one of 55 conditions organizers had to comply with under terms of their permit.

"We don't see any reason why we shouldn't meet all other stipulations," Burning Man spokesman Jim Graham said.

Overall, the weeklong festival leading up to Labor Day was successful and safe except for Thursday's death of a 29-year-old Wyoming woman who was struck by a bus carrying passengers on the playa of the Black Rock Desert, Seidlitz said.

Crime statistics will not be released until later this month, he added.

Rain early on closed the gate for a day — the longest closure in the event's history — and dust storms caused occasional whiteout conditions Friday.

But the festival's eclectic artwork, offbeat theme camps, concerts and other entertainment drew praise from participants from around the world.

"Actually, I feel renewed faith in humanity," John Bacon, of Seattle, told KRNV-TV.

Ron Adair, of Ojai, California, said he felt "a little tired."

"It's a little hard to have that many nights in a row and get by on four, five, six hours of sleep every night," Adair said.

After it moved from San Francisco, the inaugural Burning Man in Nevada drew only about 80 people in 1990.

The gates are open! Tens of thousands of stranded 'burners' flood into Burning Man site after festival is reopened following rare storm

Deserted: Tens of thousands of people should have arrived to create a make-shift city in Nevada's Black Rock Desert. But after Monday morning's rains, the site was empty until today.

By Alex Greg and Ted Thornhill
UK Mail Online

Tens of thousands of so-called 'burners' were flooding through the gates of Burning Man this morning after the event was reopened following a rain storm that left Nevada's Black Rock Desert looking more like a swamp on the festival's opening day.

Vehicles were allowed into the event's entrance on Highway 34 northeast of Gerlach from 6 a.m. Tuesday, organizers tweeted just after 1 a.m.

Festival goers, or 'burners,' responded to the good news with excited tweets such as 'time to get back on the road,' and 'all roads lead to #burningman.'

Yesterday, incredible pictures taken from the air showed the astonishing number of people stranded in the desert after rare heavy rains prevented them entering the site of the annual festival.

By Monday, it should have resembled something from a post-apocalyptic Mad Max movie, a teeming mini city growing out of the sand.

But standing water turned the playa 90 miles north of Reno into a quagmire and police barred ticket holders entry to the free-spirited week-long arts event.

Hundreds of vehicles massed outside the gates waiting for the weather to clear up, with some posting messages on Twitter about their predicament using the hashtag #strandedman.

Festival-goer Jordan Kalev arrived at the event by plane and took pictures of the site as he flew over showing the sheer volume of traffic massed at the entrance and the soggy state of the ground.

Around 70,000 people were left anxiously waiting for the event to start, with many driving back to Reno rather than queue in the desert.

Several hundred people who arrived on Sunday were told to remain in place in their camps but those who came to the gates for the 10 a.m. opening on Monday were turned away and told to keep an eye on social media.

'Black Rock City has shut down following rainstorms that left standing water on the playa, leaving it undrivable,' said Jim Graham, a festival spokesman, in a statement issued on Monday.

Highway patrol officers turned back festival goers who have paid upwards of $1,000 on the black market for tickets to the event, which last year saw a record 68,000 people spend a week in the desert for the annual art, music and everything else festival.

Rudy Evenson, who works at the US Bureau of Land Management, who operates the Black Rock Desert site Burning Man uses said that the festival would not get underway on Monday 'because there was too much rain. When it dries out they'll let people in again.'

The downpour began at 6 a.m. on Monday and continued for several hours, only dumping a tenth of an inch of rain, enough to make the muddy flats unfit for vehicles to drive on.

'We're going to make the best of the situation,' Charlie Lucas, of Portland, Oregon, told the Reno Gazette-Journal.

By midday Monday, hundreds of people had gathered outside a tribal smoke shop just off US Interstate 80 in Wadsworth east of Reno where they were buying camping permits at the lake that sits on the Pyramid Lake-Paiute Reservation.

Clerks at the smoke shop said they had no idea how many permits had been sold, only that they were 'overwhelmed' and did not have time to talk.

'We're going to make good of a bad situation,' Shaft Uddin of London told the Gazette-Journal. 'I hear Pyramid Lake is beautiful, and apparently there is going to be a big party.'

By Monday afternoon, yellow Volkswagen buses, countless recreation vehicles and at least one school bus painted to look like a cheetah with whiskers on the hood began packing campsites along the lake.

Close to a dozen of those first arrivals took off their clothes and entered the lake, the newspaper reported.

Nudity is allowed at Burning Man as part of the celebration of art and self-expression.

But within an hour, a park ranger at Pyramid Lake had asked the campers to put their clothes back on. 'How can you not know that it is not OK to be naked in public?' the ranger asked.

Hundreds of travelers searching for oneness with nature and celebration of self-expression inf act spent their first night in the parking lot of a Wal-Mart or Reno resort casino.

But most were taking it in stride and were largely optimistic - as so-called 'Burners' are apt to be - that the gates to the counterculture event would reopen Tuesday.

'You take it as it comes,' said Mark Vanlerberghe, who left San Jose, California, in an RV that he ended up parking Monday at the Wal-Mart for the night when he heard the access road to the remote festival site was closed.

'You're going to the desert and you know there's weather to deal with,' he said. 'I guess that's part of being a Burning Man. Don't get stressed about it.'

Dozens of RVs and vans bound for Burning Man were parked at the Wal-Mart at the Three Nations Plaza, and nearly a hundred more across the street by sundown at the Grand Sierra Resort along U.S. Interstate 80 just east of downtown Reno.

The blinking casino lights and video billboards gave off a pink twinkle not unlike the various light shows at the weeklong desert gathering that culminates with the burning of a large wooden effigy the night before Labor Day.

But the yellow stripes on the blacktop pavement with 'Wrong Way' signs weren't exactly what the seekers of paradise on the playa had in mind on their way to soak up the various theme camps, art exhibits, all-night music and guerrilla theater, along with a decent dose of nudity and a bunch of other stuff that's just plain weird.

'We're just trying to stay positive,' said a woman from Oakland, California, who identified herself only as 'Driftwood' while hanging out in the Wal-Mart parking lot with a group of first-timers from Texas.
'Positivity can raise everything up.'

Barbara Quintanilla of Houston said the rain delay was the least of their worries in an RV with friends who didn't initially know whether the camper used diesel or regular gas, made a wrong turn out of Texas and ran over a sign post. Their destination is 'Planet Earth,' she said, 'The Eighties' Camp.'

'My friends believe that making it a longer trip will make you better,' Quintanilla said. 'We have a list of 27 things we need to get at Wal-Mart.'

Traveling companion Bill Sanchez of Houston said the voyage so far 'has been brutal.'

'We made a 2,000-mile trip and none of us had ever driven an RV before. It would only go 35 mph up hills,' he said with a smile at the plaza on land owned by a Nevada tribe.

'But through hard work and dedication, we will achieve our dreams.'

Jahliele Paquin and Jeff Difabrizio were in their third mode of transportation on the way to their first 'Burn' from their home in Canada's Northwest Territories.

They flew from Yellowknife to Regina, Saskatchewan and bought a van they drove to Reno, where it broke down Monday and they rented a car for the rest of the trip.

'We're kind of thinking like we'll get there when we get there,' Paquin said.

Jeff Cross of Orange County, California was in a different group with Texans Adam Baker and Chelsea Coburn making their second trip to the Black Rock and were determined the weather wouldn't deter them.

'It's the best festival in the world,' he said while unloading provisions at their RV outside the Wal-Mart Monday night. 'And there's no cellphones, no internet, no money or corporate sponsors.'

'You have to have a lot of supplies,' Coburn said. 'It's a lot of work, but it makes it more gratifying.

Indeed in recent years, devotees of Burning Man have become irritated with the expansion in popularity of the free-spirited event.

The festival dates back to 1986 and is based on ideals of community and inclusion - but visiting the ad-hoc city that rises from the desert each year has become a status symbol for the tech elite.

The one-upmanship of San Francisco tech nouveau riche, with their luxury accommodations and chef-prepared meals, is at odds with the spirit of the festival, say some longtime 'burners.'

The festival began as a counter-cultural gathering of free spirits on a beach in San Francisco and has evolved into a 10-day phenomenon spread across seven square miles of Nevada's Black Rock Desert.

Participants 'dedicate themselves to the spirit of community, art, self-expression, and self-reliance. They depart one week later, leaving no trace,' the Burning Man website explains.

Nothing but ice and coffee is for sale so attendees must bring enough food and water to sustain themselves.

Tens of thousands of likeminded burners frolic around the temporary city instilled with the principles of Burning Man, which include gifting, decommodification (no advertising or transactions), radical self-reliance and radical inclusion.

Art installations, music, free classes, costumes, sharing of love, opinions, food and discussion is the order of the day at Burning Man.

So it's unsurprising that the new wave of annual attendees from San Francisco with very different ideas about the experience has some devotees up in arms.

A man who attends the festival annually with a group of Silicon Valley entrepreneurs told The New York Times that the camp they establish costs $25,000 per person - but not for the models who are flown in on private jets from New York.

'We have the craziest chefs in the world and people who build yurts for us that have beds and air-conditioning. Yes, air-conditioning in the middle of the desert,' he said.

Regular attendees haul camping gear or drive rented RVs to the desert and pay $300 to camp for 10 days, using portable toilets and freshening up with wet wipes.

And flying in the face of the festival's tenets of 'radical self-reliance,' and 'communal effort,' some camps come complete with 'sherpas,' or hired help.

According to The New York Times, there are up to 30 sherpas waiting on 12 attendees who fly in on private planes and are then driven to their camp in luxury RVs and fed meals prepared by teams of top chefs.

Sherpas handle the rest - costumes, which are a big part of Burning Man life, drugs, and any other whim.

'The tech start-ups now go to Burning Man and eat drugs in search of the next greatest app,' Tyler Hansen, who worked as a sherpa, told The New York Times.

'Burning Man is no longer a counterculture revolution. It's now become a mirror of society.'

Elon Musk, a founder of PayPal, recently said that Burning Man 'is Silicon Valley' and that creator of the HBO show 'Silicon Valley' Mike Judge couldn't possibly understand the tech world because he hadn't been.

It's not only tech types - DuJour reports that socialites, heirs and heiresses and Hollywood starlets have also been attending in style, including Lady Victoria Hervey, shipping heir Stavros Niarchos, Alexandra von Furstenberg and Francesca Versace and a New York Wall Street tycoon who spent $1 million on a custom RV.

Money-making endeavors at the festival are also on the rise, with concierge companies offering packages including flights, transfers, food, camps with electricity, food, water and wifi, private toilets and even a 'customized art car' for wealthy burners.

This year's festival sold out within an hour.

After it moved from San Francisco's Baker Beach, the inaugural Burning Man in Nevada drew some 80 people in 1990.

The first 1,000-plus crowd was in 1993, and attendance doubled each of the next three years before reaching 23,000 in 1999. The crowd was capped at 50,000 under a five-year permit that expired in 2010.

A Line Is Drawn in the Desert

At Burning Man, the Tech Elite One-Up One Another

“If you haven’t been, you just don’t get it,” said the entrepreneur Elon Musk of Burning Man. A wooden yacht art car rolled through in 2012. (Credit Andy Barron/Reno Gazette-Journal via Associated Press)

By Nick Bilton
New York Times

There are two disciplines in which Silicon Valley entrepreneurs excel above almost everyone else. The first is making exorbitant amounts of money. The second is pretending they don’t care about that money.

To understand this, let’s enter into evidence Exhibit A: the annual Burning Man festival in Black Rock City, Nev.

If you have never been to Burning Man, your perception is likely this: a white-hot desert filled with 50,000 stoned, half-naked hippies doing sun salutations while techno music thumps through the air.

A few years ago, this assumption would have been mostly correct. But now things are a little different. Over the last two years, Burning Man, which this year runs from Aug. 25 to Sept. 1, has been the annual getaway for a new crop of millionaire and billionaire technology moguls, many of whom are one-upping one another in a secret game of I-can-spend-more-money-than-you-can and, some say, ruining it for everyone else.

Some of the biggest names in technology have been making the pilgrimage to the desert for years, happily blending in unnoticed. These include Larry Page and Sergey Brin, the Google founders, and Jeff Bezos, chief executive of Amazon. But now a new set of younger rich techies are heading east, including Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook, employees from Twitter, Zynga and Uber, and a slew of khaki-wearing venture capitalists.

Before I explain just how ridiculous the spending habits of these baby billionaires have become, let’s go over the rules of Burning Man: You bring your own place to sleep (often a tent), food to eat (often ramen noodles) and the strangest clothing possible for the week (often not much). There is no Internet or cell reception. While drugs are technically illegal, they are easier to find than candy on Halloween. And as for money, with the exception of coffee and ice, you cannot buy anything at the festival. Selling things to people is also a strict no-no. Instead, Burners (as they are called) simply give things away. What’s yours is mine. And that often means everything from a meal to saliva.

In recent years, the competition for who in the tech world could outdo who evolved from a need for more luxurious sleeping quarters. People went from spending the night in tents, to renting R.V.s, to building actual structures.

“We used to have R.V.s and precooked meals,” said a man who attends Burning Man with a group of Silicon Valley entrepreneurs. (He asked not to be named so as not to jeopardize those relationships.) “Now, we have the craziest chefs in the world and people who build yurts for us that have beds and air-conditioning.” He added with a sense of amazement, “Yes, air-conditioning in the middle of the desert!”

His camp includes about 100 people from the Valley and Hollywood start-ups, as well as several venture capital firms. And while dues for most non-tech camps run about $300 a person, he said his camp’s fees this year were $25,000 a person. A few people, mostly female models flown in from New York, get to go free, but when all is told, the weekend accommodations will collectively cost the partygoers over $2 million.

Continue reading the main story
This is drastically different from the way most people experience the event. When I attended Burning Man a few years ago, we slept in tents and a U-Haul moving van. We lived on cereal and beef jerky for a week. And while Burning Man was one of the best experiences of my life, using the public Porta-Potty toilets was certainly one of the most revolting experiences thus far. But that’s what makes Burning Man so great: at least you’re all experiencing those gross toilets together.

That is, until recently. Now the rich are spending thousands of dollars to get their own luxury restroom trailers, just like those used on movie sets.

“Anyone who has been going to Burning Man for the last five years is now seeing things on a level of expense or flash that didn’t exist before,” said Brian Doherty, author of the book “This Is Burning Man.” “It does have this feeling that, ‘Oh, look, the rich people have moved into my neighborhood.’ It’s gentrifying.”

For those with even more money to squander, there are camps that come with “Sherpas,” who are essentially paid help.

Tyler Hanson, who started going to Burning Man in 1995, decided a couple of years ago to try working as a paid Sherpa at one of these luxury camps. He described the experience this way: Lavish R.V.s are driven in and connected together to create a private forted area, ensuring that no outsiders can get in. The rich are flown in on private planes, then picked up at the Burning Man airport, driven to their camp and served like kings and queens for a week. (Their meals are prepared by teams of chefs, which can include sushi, lobster boils and steak tartare — yes, in the middle of 110-degree heat.)

“Your food, your drugs, your costumes are all handled for you, so all you have to do is show up,” Mr. Hanson said. “In the camp where I was working, there were about 30 Sherpas for 12 attendees.”

Mr. Hanson said he won’t be going back to Burning Man anytime soon. The Sherpas, the money, the blockaded camps and the tech elite were too much for him. “The tech start-ups now go to Burning Man and eat drugs in search of the next greatest app,” he said. “Burning Man is no longer a counterculture revolution. It’s now become a mirror of society.”

Strangely, the tech elite won’t disagree with Mr. Hanson about it being a reflection of society. This year at the premiere of the HBO show “Silicon Valley,” Elon Musk, an entrepreneur who was a founder of PayPal, complained that Mike Judge, the show’s creator, didn’t get the tech world because — wait for it — he had not attended the annual party in the desert.

“I really feel like Mike Judge has never been to Burning Man, which is Silicon Valley,” Mr. Musk said to a Re/Code reporter, while using a number of expletives to describe the festival. “If you haven’t been, you just don’t get it.”

Non-tech Burners who have been may “get it” but don’t like all this excess, and are starting to push back. This month, the Key Group, a Swiss luxury concierge service, announced that it would be offering a Burning Man Concierge Service that seemed more like a cruise liner vacation than a week in the dusty desert. (The company did not respond to a request for comment.)

Among the dozens of options offered by the Key, there is the “establishment of a camp with electricity, water and satellite Internet Wi-Fi connection,” “cooks and fresh buffets for every meal” and — not a small task by any means given the distance from the real world — the “possibility of ordering goods and products from outside Black Rock City every day.”

When the website Burners.me, which blogs about the festival, posted a link to the Key’s site, the Burning Man community seemed generally confused as to whether such extravagance was actually real or if someone was playing a joke. When it turned out to be quite real, people railed against the service, and the Key removed the Burning Man concierge option from its site.

Of course, you won’t likely see pictures on Instagram or Facebook of the $2 million camps, chef-cooked meals, the Sherpa helpers and concierge services, or private and pristine toilets. That would mean that the tech elite actually cared about money — which would just go against the entire Burning Man spirit.

BLM reports Burning Man crowd tops 61,000 in Black Rock Desert of northern Nevada

The "Man" burns on the Black Rock Desert at Burning Man near Gerlach, Nev. on Aug. 31, 2013. (AP Photo/Reno Gazette-Journal, Andy Barron)

Associated Press

RENO, Nev. — A federal official says more than 61,000 people have turned out so far for the weekend Burning Man outdoor art and music festival in the Black Rock Desert of northern Nevada.

U.S. Bureau of Land Management spokesman Mark Turney said Saturday that gate management was tightened Friday when organizers got close to a permitted capacity of 68,000.

Turney says the crowd ebbs and flows at the festival taking place about 100 miles north of Reno.

He says organizers reported one person was flown to a hospital by medical helicopter this week after being struck by a vehicle.

No other serious incidents have been reported.

Attendance peaked last year at 56,000.

The BLM raised the crowd limit this year after organizers agreed to security, public safety, resource management and cleanup rules.

Burning Man fest leaves the desert

BURNING MAN 2011: The Temple at Sunset by Jeff Sullivan


Zelie Pollon
Reuters

Organizers of the iconic "Burning Man" celebration began this week to clear the desert of any evidence that 50,000 people had just spent the past week here in a transient, art-filled, makeshift city.

As the anti-establishment arts festival and survival project disappears piece by piece from the white sands of the Black Rock Desert in Nevada, participants and organizers say Burning Man -- which just had its largest week in its 25-year history -- is going through some growing pains as plans to expand its size and scope moving forward over the next year.

"When you have to be accountable and not anonymous, you change the way you act. As it's gotten bigger we've lost some of that," said Katrina Van Merter, 32, of Dallas, attending her sixth Burning Man.

The event is characterized by massive art projects and the namesake burning figure at its close, with participants heading into the desert for a week each year to build a working city from the ground up -- including an airport, a post office, and a security team -- that tries to be devoid of consumerism.

Burning Man started with an 8-foot structure burning on a beach in California at summer solstice and has morphed into a sophisticated community with year-round projects including solar energy development and a crisis response network.

Black Rock City LLC announced plans to turn its profit-making enterprise into a nonprofit this year.

Participation was capped at 50,000 people a day per a Bureau of Land Management use permit, said organizers.

Next year they're hoping to up that number, gradually adding 20,000 more people by 2016, said Burning Man communication manager Andie Grace.

TAKING THE STRAIN

But as the crowds grow, some of the long-time participants wonder if the desert gathering's principles -- including what self-styled "burners" call radical self-reliance, community, civic responsibility and an economy based on giving freely -- can take the strain of a growing population.

Others say that its growth has helped Burning Man change from a tiny party into an organization capable of innovation that can have benefits outside the "playa," the Spanish word for "beach" that burners use to refer to the site.

The Hexayurt, for example, is an easily deployable paneled shelter, created by Vinay Gupta in 2007 in honor of that year's Burning Man theme "The Green Man."

Gupta has since begun conversations with USAID about using the inexpensive structure in post-disaster areas, Grace said.

The town's crescent design, developed by Rod Garrett and founding member Harley Dubois, covers five square miles and includes 60 miles of streets, hundreds of intersections, and between two and four thousand signs created annually by a Burning Man sign shop, said Will Roger, a founder.

Roger has been asked to present to numerous audiences, including a retired Army group, about the building of what is known as Black Rock City.

Firefighters, city planners and reportedly members of Homeland Security have come to study the organizational and support structure of the complex erected to support tens of thousands of participants for a week, that then disappears as if it never existed.

ASTOUNDING GROWTH

But the astounding growth of Burning Man has its drawbacks, as some participants struggle to accept the changing demographics and influx of strangers into Black Rock City.

Participants point to bike thefts across the dusty playa, people coming to indulge but not to share, and a kind of close knit community feeling that is simply slipping away.

On Monday, thousands of talc-covered vehicles streamed out of the Black Rock Desert as the festival drew to a close.

Cars, trucks and RVs -- topped with dusty bikes, bright furry clothes and the makings for elaborate shelters -- snaked down the small single lane road toward civilization.

"We used to sit on the corner and wave goodbye to people as they left the playa, and tell them we'd see them again next year," said Dave Roetter, who came to the event with his 6-year-old son, Memphis. "People just don't do that anymore."

There are about 600 rangers who patrol the playa, along with several state agencies and the BLM. And despite the growing size, there is still a kind of citizen monitoring that encourages good behavior.

Accidents occur, as do arrests and numerous cases of dehydration, but nothing more than one would see in any city of this size, organizers say.

As for the missing bikes, Rogers says they're probably misplacing them. Thousands are left strewn around the basin by the event's end.

"It's still one of the safest cities in America," he said.

The demographic of Black Rock City is increasingly wealthy and older participants. A 2010 survey listed 40 percent of participants to be between the ages of 40 and 70 years old, and incomes ranging anywhere from less than $10,000 a year to over one million dollars a year. Several have groused about ticket prices that can top $360.

But there are also a greater number of families, and even very small children, many of which live together in one of Burning Man's largest camps called Kidsville.

The more, the merrier, said Sandy Lyle, 43, of San Diego.

"This year definitely feels bigger than usual, but what we do here is create community, so more people just gives us more opportunity," she said. "That's what Burning Man is all about."

Burning Man from Earth's orbit

A European Space satellite took photos of the 2011 Burning Man festival in the Nevada desert from 373 miles above.

By Mike Wall
Christian Science Monitor

The annual Burning Man festival is in full swing in the Nevada desert, and a tiny European satellite has snapped an overhead shot of the eccentric action.

The European Space Agency's Proba-1 microsatellite took a photo of Burning Man on Thursday (Sept. 1) from an altitude of about 373 miles (600 kilometers). The picture shows campers and tents massed for the annual gathering, which attracts 50,000 people to the Black Rock Desert 120 miles (193 km) north of Reno.

The image was stitched together from four black-and-white photos, each of which has a resolution of about 16 feet (5 meters), European Space Agency (ESA) officials said. [See the satellite photo of Burning Man]

IN PICTURES: Burning Man 2011

Burning Man is a weeklong art and self-expression festival that meets every year around Labor Day. This year, it runs from Aug. 29 to Sept. 5. Attendance was capped at 50,000, and the event sold out in July.

This year marks the 25th anniversary of the festival, which takes its name from the ceremonial torching of a giant wooden effigy. The event began modestly in 1986, when a handful of friends torched an 8-foot (2.4-m) wooden man on a San Francisco beach.

Burning Man first moved to the Black Rock Desert in 1990, and it has grown greatly over the past two decades. The height of the torched man has grown as well; in 2009, he measured 50 feet (15.2 m) tall, according to the festival's website.

"Proba" stands for "Project for Onboard Autonomy," and Proba-1's two cameras are indeed largely autonomous. The microsatellite, which is less than 3.3 feet on a side (less than 1 cubic meter), launched in October 2001 as an experimental mission.

Proba-2, which focuses on solar monitoring, was launched in November 2009. Two other Probas are in preparation, ESA officials said. Proba-3 will test formation flying, and Proba-V will monitor global vegetation.

Burning Man survives suit by burned man

from Burning Man 2005 - A Photoessay by Scott London

Bob Egelko
San Francisco Chronicle

If you approach the flames at the Burning Man festival, you're taking your chances of getting burned.

That was the verdict Tuesday from a state appeals court in San Francisco, which refused to reinstate a festivalgoer's damage suit against the promoter of the annual celebration in the Nevada desert.

Anthony Beninati, a Los Angeles-area resident, was badly burned at the September 2005 event in Black Rock City, Nev. A college-educated real estate manager, he was making his third visit to the weeklong festival, which culminates with the incineration of a 60-foot wood sculpture.

Once the Burning Man topples, participants are invited to throw objects into the bonfire. Beninati planned to contribute a photo of a friend who was supposed to come with him but had recently died in a motorcycle accident.

He walked 7 to 10 feet into the burning embers, with flames on either side of him, threw in the photo, then took a few more steps forward, tripped and fell into the fire.

Beninati's hands were burned and one arm was permanently injured, said William Kronenberg, a lawyer for Black Rock, the San Francisco company that promotes the festival. He said paramedics flew Beninati in a company-supplied helicopter to be treated.

Beninati's suit accused Black Rock of negligently allowing people to approach the fire without safe pathways. But the First District Court of Appeal, upholding a judge's dismissal of the case, said anyone who takes part in an event with obvious dangers - downhill skiing, mountain climbing or walking up to a bonfire - knowingly risks injury.

"By continuing to walk into the fire, Beninati assumed the risk that he might trip and fall," presiding Justice Ignazio Ruvolo said in the 3-0 ruling. "The risk of falling and being burned by the flames or hot ash was inherent, obvious and necessary to the event."

Ruvolo said such suits have been barred in California since 1992, when the state Supreme Court dismissed damage claims by a participant in an office touch-football game.

Beninati's lawyers were unavailable for comment.

Bad Day at Black Rock

Bryan’s Misguided Search for a Green-Approved Legacy

by Gerald Hillier
Nevada Journal

Sen. Richard Bryan's proposal to create a new National Conservation Area (NCA) in Nevada's Black Rock Desert is not in the public interest, and certainly not in the interest of Nevadans. Actually, the senator's proposal would negatively affect precisely the area he claims he is seeking to protect. The plan would highlight these remote locations, give them public attention and attract more people to them. Other public lands in Nevada would be negatively affected also.

This is my considered view as a professional land and natural resources manager who for 16 years ran the largest NCA in existence—the California Desert Conservation Area. For 35 years I worked for the Bureau of Land Management, assigned for 21 of those years as a district manager. Thus my knowledge of the management and administration of national conservation areas is first-hand.

From my frame of reference, there are several areas where one can see a major disconnect between the explanations being given by Bryan and other NCA supporters and the actual circumstaces of this proposal.

First, although it is being offered in the name of "protection," and a purported need for it, that is an outright misstatement. The public lands are already managed and protected. It does not take designation to give BLM land "protection." The authority to regulate and manage use already exists and is being exercised. After all, the Federal Land Policy Management Act (FLPMA) has been in effect for some 24 years now.

BLM Already Has Authority
Over Applegate-Lassen Trail

The BLM has rangers in all areas, it has applied the management authority granted it under the act, and it is doing comprehensive land and resource planning. There is nothing missing from that equation. And whatever historic value does exist in the Applegate-Lassen Emigrant Trail, clear authority to manage and protect it is already in place under the BLM's existing multiple-use planning process.

But even if there were a need for additional protection, the NCA designation does not provide any.

One big reason is that there are no standards for NCAs. What, really, is a "National Conservation Area?" What standard of behavior is called for by users?

I can tell you—as someone who was an original supporter of the concept in the '70s when the NCAs began—that there is none. NCA status will not give protection purposes any more teeth. Fundamentally the NCA designation itself does not work. Essentially it is today only an interim step, on the way to something else.

How the Restrictions Come

Consider what Californians saw happen with the California Desert Conservation Area. With 12.5 million acres of public land in the southern part of the state, the CDCA became a proving ground and pilot program for the NCA concept. For its time and place, that was good—but it showed that the model does not need repeating.

Here's an example. At the end of the planning process, we found we had a special area—the high-elevation East Mojave—which was remote enough to escape urbanization and had lots of uses. It had important mining and grazing as well as hunting and rock hounding. All were valid uses—some economic and others involving outdoor recreation.

It needed a name, and what we came up with was "National Scenic Area." Our intent was to highlight both its true multiple use character and its heritage values.

What it became, however, was a stalking horse for preservationists who wanted to end multiple use on the land. The outcome was a National Preserve in the CDCA, in the name of "protection." Next, under the U.S. Park Service, came more restrictions on grazing and hunting, with the NPS announcing an ultimate goal of removing them. Mining and rock hounding were simply prohibited. And of some 500,000 acres of private lands that are or were within the East Mojave area, most soon will be conveyed to the federal government.

The bottom line is that the very values the public valued and which the BLM itself had intended to protect were virtually lost.

Now, Sen. Bryan and the environmentalists pushing for NCA status for the Black Rock have, of course, offered assurances that the designation will have no effect upon existing uses like grazing and hunting. Unfortunately, however, those assurances are empty. It is not up to the senator nor to the advocacy groups what will happen under the plan they are pushing. Indeed, their plan itself gives complete control to the Secretary of the Interior. This raises the question of whether the intention behind these platitudes is to lull local folks to sleep. Actually, if the assurances that the grazing, hunting and private property will not be affected were truly valid, there would exist no reason to propose the NCA.

Of course, everyone in the West today has had too much experience with the federal agencies to trust them to keep their promises, or even be bound by them. Sadly, that's with good reason. The nation is now littered with broken federal promises, whether one looks at Voyagers National Park in Minnesota, where lake access was "assured" until the National Park Service applied wilderness management rules, or to California, where miners were promised protection of "valid existing rights" but had to prove them and then were faced with no way to move ore out of the wilderness.

Ongoing Mischief

We are all familiar, of course, with environmentalists eagerly emphasizing the stress that visitors place on an area. Yet the preservationists advocate NCA status for the Black Rock desert—a course they know will attract more visitors there. Is their goal to create a need for even greater restrictions? This is the danger with NCAs—they set up a framework for on-going preservation mischief in the name of "protection." What that turns out to mean, practically, is "get rid of everything we do not approve of."

That has been the effect of the NCA designation—helped along by application of the Endangered Species Act—in California's San Bernardino County.

There the residents and citizens are losing much control of and access to what had been the county's resources and resource-based industry and employment. Almost 500,000 acres of private land tax base are on the way to being lost to the county, as "conservation interests"—wielding federal Land and Water Conservation Fund appropriations—move to purchase the acreage and "donate" it to the federal government.

In Southern California the California Desert Protection Act has already placed almost 9 million acres—much of it highly mineralized—off-limits for any future development and even recreation activity such as rockhounding. This represents a real loss to the county's tax base. Not only are taxable lands lost, but public lands, too, are blocked from ever being able to generate business, economic return or employment.

Because San Bernardino County is already beyond the ceilings set by law for payment in lieu of taxes (PILT), county officials there find themselves facing a substantial net loss in revenue with no decrease in the demand for services and infrastructure in the area. Indeed, much of the infrastructure use—e.g., county roads, solid waste disposal, flood control—is a direct result of federal acquisitions!

The Latest Version of the Bill

After reading the latest draft of Bryan's legislation, posted on his Senate website, I see that the bill still seeks to enact into law numerous non-NCA bells and whistles of the preservationist wish list. These include mineral withdrawal, cancellation of geo-thermal steam leasees and designation of wilderness—and it seeks to do this without the normal public planning processes.

For example, while the bill now at least in part addresses on-going uses, it also clearly sets the stage for very restrictive management. After withdrawing the entire area from mining location and leasing, and establishing the eleven Wilderness Areas, what's left to plan?

This departs from the procedures followed in other, earlier, NCAs, such as the case of the California Desert. There it was up to the agency to develop planning recommendations for wilderness. It is true that Congress later ignored the input and took the recommendations of environmentalists, but that does not negate the public record that was made and which still has validity.

Another difficulty is the bill's language on roads:

Existing Public Roads.—The Secretary is authorized to maintain public roads within the boundaries of the conservation area in a manner consistent with the purposes for which the conservation area was established ....

Does the senator propose to extinguish any road claims under RS 2477? Although those are valid existing rights, his language seems to ignore it and say that the federal government is taking over everything. I suspect that out there within the WSAs there are roads and trails—available to jeeps and other forms of access and used by miners, ranchers, hunters and others—that do not qualify as a "road" under the very technical language the agencies have lately begun using. Now they are trying to exclude from the definition of "road" anything that does not receive "regular and continuing maintenance by mechanical equipment."

Under current law, Congress can do virtually whatever it wants—including designate land area as wilderness under the 1964 Wilderness Act. The legislators are not constrained nor are there any requirements they have to meet prior to such designation.

However, if a federal agency recommends an area for Wilderness status, the federal government is required, under law, to both inventory the "roadless" areas and—more critically—complete U.S. Geological Survey mineral inventories. This is to document what mineral values may be lost if the area is withdrawn. All this data is then available to the Congress, if its members care to consider it. It is also available to the public, for its input into the decisions.

Now, in the Black Rock case, it is my understanding that such inventories have not been done. The areas are Wilderness Study Areas, but have generally been classified by the BLM as Not Recommended as Suitable for inclusion in the National Wilderness System. Apparently, because the BLM considered the areas unsuitable for Wilderness status, no inventories were ever authorized. This would mean that passage of the senator's bill, as currently written, would violate existing national policy, as embodied in the Wilderness Act.

The Issue of Legacy

To many observers it appears that Sen. Bryan, now in his last year in the U.S. Senate, has naturally been thinking in terms of his personal legacy to the citizens of Nevada. When approached by preservationists making disingenuous claims about the need to "protect" the Black Rock Desert and the mountains around it, the senator then agreed to seek the legislation they desired.

But legacy should not, must not, be wrapped up with implementing agendas which are not in the public interest—or which adversely affect the livelihoods of those who can ill afford to battle powerful environmental interests to maintain their income, employment and stewardship of resources.

Gerald Hillier is owner and principal, Public Land Users Services. He lives in Riverside, Calif.