On Sunday, August 28th, my friend Jaime and I finished loading up my car and drove north from Santa Monica up US 395. It was a pleasant drive along the east side of the Sierra Nevada to Reno where we ate at an all-you-can-eat sushi restaurant. During our drive, we watched the rain and sun intermittently drench the mountains. We had great weather and it wasn't too hot. This was comforting to us since we were worried that it was going to be really hot at Burning Man (since we were going to be in a desert). Luckily, it never got much over 90 during the event. Sunday night, we camped in some National Forest just outside of Reno.
This year, Burning Man was sold out. I found out after that instead of 50,000 burners, over 54,000 attended. It took about 6 hours to get in because of the large number of people. However, we never felt too bored. We were certainly eager to get in and get to it but there were lots of people dancing, walking around and "gifting" all kinds of things, and talking to their neighbors in line.
Jaime and I started to get a sense of what people had warned us about the dust. It was like a desert made of some sort of alkaline powdered sugar. The ground was made of a very fine grain, off-white dust that seemed very hard packed. Jaime and I quickly understood that both of us and everyone else at the event were probably going to be covered in dust all of the time. Dust could get kicked up very easily and dust covered the inside of my car in no time. We found out from a neighbor next to our camp that these were actually some of the best conditions in a long time. This plain is a seasonally dry lake bed over 30 miles long. Every spring, the lake is submerged in a few inches to a couple feet of water. Apparently, the ground froze sometime close to when the last of the water was evaporating. This made for a fairly hard surface that was easy to drive and ride bikes on. Our neighbor had a geology background (as well as a master's degree and two bachelor's degrees and a part-time resident of Colorado). We loved our neighbors by the way and I'll talk more about them later!
Still, with all of the people driving in and the wind over the first few days, dust clouds would blow across the camp giving the subjects of my photos a artful shroud of dust. Eventually you get used to the dust, you wear goggles, some sort of mouth covering, and you almost don't notice it after awhile.
We finally arrived at the entry post around 6pm. The sun was starting to go down and we were really excited. At the entry post there are greeters who have you get out of the car and give you a big hug. They gave us all of the event materials and explained what was in different parts of the camp. Lastly, they had us roll around in the dust and make "dust angels." Then we got up and each struck a large bell. It was fun and gave us a sense of how fun and wacky this experience might be. We set up camp and I cooked up some Udon noodles in beef broth with Shitake mushrooms. Jaime was tired after that so she went to bed. I did a quick walk down to the central art plaza. It was incredible. I looked out across a massive expanse of desert swarming with bicycles covered in lights, art that was shooting flame, art cars driving around with live DJs, and people dancing at dance clubs. I walked back to my camp thinking that this was going to be a lot of fun and a great experience. I will write some more in another post tonight.
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