It was the Saturday morning before Labor Day and we were laying in bed trying to find something for us to do over the holiday weekend. Due to all of the fires in California, the Forest Service had closed all of the national forests, the state had closed all of the parks, and the fire departments were asking people to not visit Lake Tahoe over the weekend. That didn’t leave a lot of options for outdoor activities in California, so we began looking for cool places to visit in Nevada.
One spot that looked interesting was the Black Rock Desert, a park managed by the BLM, and clicking on it the quick description said “huge, dry lake bed where the Burning Man Festival is held”: how awesome, I wonder when the festival is held? The answer was… all this week! Not only was the festival this week but the climax of the festival, the ritual burning of the man, was happening today. But, according to the official website, the festival had been canceled for a second year in a row due to COVID and would be held virtually. What a bummer! Well, maybe we can drive out and see what the ancient lake bed is like and at least say we had been to the location of Burning Man.
Wanting to read a couple reviews on Google of the desert to get an idea of what to expect before heading out and the first one from two days previous said “Awwwwwww sooo happy to be at the burning man 2021 . Not legal . Not official. But true and wild. Like the first ones.” No way! Was there a small gathering of Burners out in the desert holding their own version of Burning man? There was only one way to find out, so I got up, told Hannah to prepare for a possible long day in the desert and we started on the 3 1/2 hour drive to the Black Rock Desert not having a clue what to expect.
Our hopes were high as we made our way across the desert. The Burning Man festival has been a top bucket list item for a long time. The excitement really began to grow after we stopped in the tiny town of Gerlach, NV where there was a small gathering of festival-goers congregated at the only convenience store in town. It was a good sign. It wasn’t until then, as we waited for our pizza and began to peruse the various bulletins postings at the store, that Hannah discovered that we were in search of Burning Man.
There was some evidence of fellow desert travelers as we started across the Playa but not enough to confidently assume that there was some sort of gathering happening and there was so much dust, you couldn’t see very far into the desert. We asked a couple of people near the entrance of the Playa where the gathering was and their advice was to “Follow the music”. As we made our way deeper into the void, outcroppings of life scattered across the emptiness slowly began to appear through the haze.
Those outcroppings of life quickly became more dense the closer we got to the epicenter. At first, we were passing by individual camps spaced far apart but as we kept driving the singular camps became group camps that then became large congregations of campers. Soon, we were navigating in between tight communities that stretched in every direction around us as far as we could see and we started to hear the music. We weren’t really sure how the parking situation worked, so we kept driving, in awe of what we were seeing. We finally decided to park in what seemed to be the center with only our hiking boots and hydration packs. We chose to park next to a large crane that had its boom in the air, we thought would make a nice point of reference as we made our way around. We didn’t know it at the time, but hanging from the boom of that crane was a giant LED penis which we would use once the sun went down like a light house to guide us back home.
The majority of camps set up were open to anyone that wanted to stop by and chat or take part in whatever they had to offer. We spent the first several hours just walking around the different camps and enjoying the different art that people had packed in. There were no formal booths to buy amenities, trash cans, or bathrooms. Seeing this, we worried that people may be trashing the place like many places around the US with similar set ups, but it was quite the opposite. There was no trash laying around, no mess, and no unpleasant odors.
One of the main principles at Burning Man is gift giving and that the value of a gift is unconditional. This means that there is no need pay for or exchange a gift of equal value in return for something received. Some were offering alcoholic drinks, some were offering snacks, some had set up large DJ platforms playing music for everyone to enjoy, and some were offering intangible gifts of thought/experiences. It wasn’t long before we realized that all the “bars” were just giving away beer/mixed drinks at no cost at all and we knew we were in for a great time.
We even met a guy that asked us if we wanted to go wake-boarding on the Playa and that he had a boat ready to take us. We both thought he must be pulling some sort of hustle but sure enough, he had a boat that was hooked to a motor home and from the boat he pulled out a wake-board with big rubber wheels. There was another guy that was a bit braver and wanted to try it first so we hopped in the boat, tossed out the rope for him to hold on to and we set back as the owner of the boat took off. The guy on the wake-board fell off almost immediately unbeknownst to the driver so he continued to drive us in the boat through a large portion of the festival. It was dusty and loud sitting in that boat but how many people get to take a boat across a dry lake during Renegade Burn? It was totally worth it.
As day turned to dusk, more and more people began to appear out of their camps and the party was beginning to heat up. When we had arrived, all of the camps were set up in a large circle with a huge empty space in the middle. Navigation of the circle was based on the hours of a clock which made getting around and locating specific areas manageable. When talking to other people, they would say things like “There is a great camp over at 5 O’clock you should check out!”.
As the sun went down, a large portion of the festivities began moving inward, filling the empty space making navigation nearly impossible. It was great, because there was a different party happening no matter which direction we went. If it hadn’t been for the giant Johnson in the sky, we would have never found our way around.
We had heard that there was going to be a drone show somewhere in the gathering at 9pm but as this was an unorganized event, there wasn’t any way for us to know where it was going to go down. We continued to make our way from one dance party to the next, hoping that we would be in a good location to see the big show when it started. Somehow we ended up in the exact right spot at the perfect time and found ourselves on the front line right as the drone show was beginning. The show was incredible! The amount of time and effort that it had to have taken to choreograph the movements and lights of each individual drone into a synchronized performance like that is super impressive. The drone show lasted a little over 12 minutes but since my phone had already died and Hannah’s battery was in the teens we couldn’t record the entire performance, but we were able to capture the beginning and final burning of the man.
After the drone performance was over, we decided to start making our way back to the truck, but since we had been wandering aimlessly for the last couple of hours and the night time tide of party goers had drastically changed the landscape we had lost sight of our boner beacon. We had thought ahead and dropped a pin on the maps where the truck was when we had arrived, unfortunately both phones were dead at this point and were of no assistance guiding us back. A lot of the art and parties were mobile and had moved locations from where we had seen them earlier so they weren’t a good point of reference either. I was sure that we were supposed to be going to the left and Hannah was certain that I was wrong and that to the right was the direction we should be heading because of a florescent unicorn she had seen earlier. I literally had no idea where we were or what direction we were facing so we chose to go to the right and after a few hundred yards there, just over the horizon, appeared that giant pecker in the sky shining like our north star to lead us home.
Over all, the entire experience at Renegade Burn was amazing. Having been on the road for nearly three years now, we have all but lost our sense of family and belonging to anything other than each other. And all though we’ve made friends at each new location we end up at, there has been a real lack of feeling like we belonged. That wasn’t the feeling that we got at Burning Man. This festival or the Renegade version at least, felt like a place where we could be ourselves, lost in a sea of other weirdos that were there to express themselves in whatever fashion that they felt most comfortable. It didn’t matter if you were dressed in shorts and a t-shirt, wearing giant eagle wings, walking around on stilts looking like Slender Man, or riding a bicycle around butt naked, everyone was there to be themselves. It was not only accepted but celebrated by everyone else. In our experience, there is a need to act and present oneself in a certain way in order to be accepted by those around you but not here, not at Renegade Burn. We didn’t know it when we arrived but that feeling of freedom was something that we needed and are looking forward to feeling again when we return the desert in the future.
