Trapped. The participants of the famous American alternative festival Burning Man could no longer go to or leave the site, located in the Nevada desert, on Saturday. The cause: heavy rains having transformed the place into a huge field of mud and forcing the organizers to close the doors.
“The gates and the airport of Black Rock City (the name of the site, editor’s note) remain closed, any entry or exit is delayed until further notice”, repeated at regular intervals since midnight the account X (ex-Twitter) of Burning Man. The organizers also invited participants already there to “conserve water, food and fuel and find warm and safe shelter”.
The rains return this Sunday
Due to heavy showers, “la playa”, a huge esplanade characteristic of the event, was made impassable. If the rains stopped during the day, they should be back on Sunday, the last day of the festival, while temperatures overnight from Saturday to Sunday should drop to around 10 degrees, again according to the organizers’ account.
The majority of the planned activities have been suspended, including the firing of the wooden giant installed in the center of “la playa”, which marks the end of the festival and gives it its name. The festival had been confronted last year with an intense heat wave with strong winds which had already made the experience difficult for the “burners”, name of the festival-goers.
More than 75,000 attendees
Launched in 1986 in San Francisco, Burning Man aims to be an indefinable event, somewhere between a celebration of the counter-culture and a spiritual retreat. Initially organized on a beach in San Francisco, Burning Man has become a structured festival, with a budget of nearly $45 million (2018 figures) and more than 75,000 participants in the last edition, down from the previous one in 2019. .
It has been held since the 1990s in the Black Rock Desert, a protected area in northwest Nevada, which the organizers are committed to preserving.