After being trapped in the desert turned into a field of mud, the thousands of participants in the American festival were able to start Monday afternoon to leave the site.
They were planning to spend a few days decompressing in the middle of the desert, but they ended up stuck. The thousands of Burning Man festival-goers, this annual alternative gathering organized in the middle of the Nevada desert, turned into a field of mud after torrential rains on Saturday and Sunday. More than 70,000 people remained trapped at the site and only began to be able to return home from Monday September 4 as roads reopened once the sun returned.
Burning Man is a festival between celebration of the counter-culture and spiritual retreat, created in 1986 in San Francisco. Since the 1990s, the event, whose entrance tickets cost several hundred dollars, has been taking place in the Black Rock desert, in Nevada. The Burning Man culminates each year with the cremation ceremony for a 12-meter wooden effigy (hence the name of the festival), which has been rescheduled for 21:00 Monday evening (04:00 GMT Tuesday).
Departure operations have begun
Access to Black Rock City, a few tens of kilometers from the first dwellings, had been closed on Friday, September 1 due to bad weather which transformed the “Playa”, a huge open-air field, into a visibly impassable muddy expanse. “Exodus operations have officially begun in Black Rock City“, said the festival on Monday, September 4 in a press release published on its website. “The driving ban has been liftedThe organizers, however, called on visitors to delay their departure from the site until Tuesday to avoid massive traffic jams.
The so-called “burners”, dressed in the eccentric outfits that characterize them, made their way through the thick and sticky mud, socks wrapped in plastic bags as boots. Some left on foot, walking for hours in the middle of the night to reach the only passable road, some 8 km away, and hitchhike back to civilization.
Chris Rock and Diplo, ordinary castaways
Among them are celebrities like comedian Chris Rock and music producer Diplo who got picked up by a fan after a harrowing mile-long walk through the mud and shared their journey on social media. Telephone masts were deployed and the site’s wireless internet signal was opened to the public, but connections remained spotty.
According to state police, bad weather at the festival caused one death, but authorities did not provide further details on the circumstances of the death. The Burning Man had been confronted last year with an intense heat wave with strong winds which had already made the experience difficult for the “burners”, nickname of the festival-goers.