BLACK ROCK CITY: An unusual late-summer storm has turned a weeklong, counterculture festival Burning Man in Nevada into a sloppy mess as 70,000 partygoers got stuck in deep mud in the desert amid dwindling water and food supplies.
Burning Man organizers finally reopened the road leading out of the remote Nevada desert festival on Monday, allowing tens of thousands of attendees to escape after they had been trapped for days by mud.
“Exodus operations have officially begun in Black Rock City,” the festival’s website announced on Monday afternoon. “The driving ban has been lifted.”
Many of the 64,000 people who remained on site may choose to stay one more night and watch the festival’s giant namesake effigy go up in flames, one day past schedule.
The unexpected summer rain turned the weeklong annual counterculture arts festival into a muddy nightmare. One person died at the event and an investigation is under way.
What is Burning Man?
Every year Burning Man brings tens of thousands of people to the Nevada desert to dance, make art and enjoy being part of a self-sufficient, temporary community of like-minded spirits.
Originating in 1986 as a small gathering on a San Francisco beach, the week-long festival is now attended by celebrities and social media influencers. A regular ticket costs $575.
The festival is held in Black Rock City, a temporary community created in the middle of the Black Rock Desert in northwestern Nevada. Its location is far from big cities and about 227km (141 miles) north of Reno.
The site in Nevada’s Black Rock Desert sits atop the former Lake Lahontan. It is about 15 miles (25 km) from the nearest town and 110 miles (177 km) north of Reno.
What went wrong this year?
More than 13mm of rain fell at the festival site on Friday, disrupting the celebration. For the Reno area, the average rainfall for the whole month of September is 5.4mm.
For days, up to 70,000 people were ordered to stay put and conserve food and water as officials closed the roads, requiring vehicles to stay put. Road closures were imposed just before the festival’s giant wooden effigy was supposed to have been burned on Saturday night.
When the road finally reopened, a long line of vehicles snaked through the desert, inching along in an epic traffic jam as event organizers urged drivers to consider delaying their departure to reduce traffic.
Eventually, the traffic formed into an organized exodus 10 lanes wide, an armada of recreational vehicles and cars seeking the promised land of a hot shower and a clean bed.
The way out is a 5-mile (8-km) dirt road to the nearest highway. The Burning Man Traffic account on social media platform X estimated “exodus” travel time at 5-1/2 hours.
Even before the gate was officially open, campers started leaving while it was still dark. Stuck vehicles littered the roads in the makeshift Black Rock City that springs up for the festival, some of them horizontally blocking lanes roads because they had lost control.
The desert path to the main gate was a graveyard of marooned cars, which will challenge the event’s ethos of “leave no trace” of human activity in the desert.
The festival typically has a penultimate night send-off with the burning of a giant wooden effigy of a man, along with a fireworks show. Originally set for Sunday night, it was rescheduled for Monday night at 9 p.m. PDT, organizers said.
