On August 25th I found myself sleeping under a tent at Black Rock City (BRC), the temporary city where Burning Man takes place. It was my first time going. A month before that I had no plans to get there though earlier in the year I had thought of going but made no definite plans. I thought well, perhaps next year, which is what I had also thought the year prior. But then, two weeks before the event, a conversation with a friend that was looking for someone else to go with changed that.

Ultimately, to go to burning man you “just” need

  1. A ticket
  2. A way to get in and out of Black Rock City
  3. Means to survive

And surely one can get that in three weeks, I thought.

Finding tickets was easy enough: one can always find people selling tickets as the date of the event comes close. Getting there and means to survive are an entangled choice: If you are taking the burner bus, which we did, you can’t carry that much with you which means you have to rely on a camp to bring you water and food, but in exchange you get to skip the car queue. If you have an RV you could do a fully DIY burning man experience and camp by yourself but it could be pricier. I thought that renting (and cleaning) a vehicle, dealing with potential maintenance was not worth the hassle this time. If we had a bigger crew it’d have been different I suspect.

We got to Burning Man Sunday 25th of August and got back on the 1st of September. Though it was only a week it felt like it lasted longer than that. It was certainly an unusual experience: Because phones don’t really work there very well (and I lost mine anyway), your real world life is put on pause until you get back and is replaced by the day to day of being a BRC resident. I didn’t feel the need to check Twitter or text anyone when I was there, so I did get to be fully immersed in the experience.

Once we got there, we set up camp, got some water and explored around. We had our first encounter with the BRC porta-potties, the place to go for your toilet needs if you don’t have an RV. Though we later found a camp that had private porta-potties and used them once, we found ourselves wishing to have access to nice regular toilets, especially for times around bedtime and waking up. In any case when one’s out and about living at BRC, there’s no escape from the porta-potties, as getting back to camp is a long journey that will leave you with a sore butt (if you bike) or take forever (if you walk) depending on your location in the playa.

Then we had to get used to living in a state of near-dehydration all the time. Sweat evaporates instantly on the playa, so you are losing water but not noticing it at first. You have to drink water all the time if you feel even a bit thirsty. At BRC a greeting we heard was “piss clear”; because if you are not, it’s a sign you’re not drinking enough water. “Fuck your burn!” is another one that I was amused by.

Black Rock City is a bit of a miracle. Every year, a completely empty piece of land is turned into a city replete with art installations, electrical installations and water infrastructure. Every year, it is all disassembled and the desert looks as barren as it did at the beginning.

Some of this infrastructure is shared across camps: The camp we were at was getting electricity from the one 40kW diesel generator over at Naked Heart for example. One or two of the mornings when most other people were sleeping, I wandered around following the cables coming from our fridges and the hose we were getting water from, seeing what was at the other end, how the whole system was connected together. I had the thought that someone had built those things “for free”, someone that also had to pay for a ticket to be there. This is a key aspect of the burn; it’s not just having fun in the basic sense of dancing to techno, being driven around in an art car, and accessing interesting mind states, but also about surviving together with your homies in the desert. Not too far from something I say is a key source of meaning for me in life: going on good quests with the homies, or more prosaically working on meaningful projects and forming meaningful relationships.

It did surprise me how much time we spent on basic maintenance tasks: getting water refilled, going to the toilet, finding other people, moving between camps, cooking, finding food. Doing anything takes effort when breathing is hard and your heart rate is almost doubled even under the shade. Especially during the middle of the day, wandering around felt horrible, so sometimes I would just hang out at the camp resting and perhaps washing some dishes or helping make food.

Sleeping was definitely problematic. At Burning Man you have a menu of options:

  • You could sleep at night and be awake during the day; however you will need really good soundproofing as you’ll go to bed and wake up with the thumping untz-untz of EDM in the background
  • Or you could try to stay awake at night and sleep during the day, but then it’ll be really hot in your tent, unless you find an AC dome (what we did) or bring a swamp cooler (which I also did, but didn’t use in the end)
  • Someone recommended going to bed at 9pm and waking up at 3am to get the best of both worlds. Perhaps this is indeed the best move but one has to be very disciplined and commit to it as a group.

If you’re part of a group, different people will have different sleep requirements. Being out of sleep sync means different people will have different energy levels at different times and the vibes may be slightly off as a result; someone may want to go to bed while someone else wants to go dancing. Planning what to do at Burning Man to the hour is hard, but agreeing on what to do about sleep seems like a good idea if you want to keep a group together.

In theory, you could show up to BRC almost empty-handed and survive. “The playa will provide” they say. But if everyone did that the whole thing would fall apart, as a good citizen of BRC, you should be self-reliant. Once you try your best, if you happen to have failed to prepare sufficiently, you’ll most likely be ok: you can show up at a camp and you may get water, food, coffee, drinks, or a place to rest. You can wake up one day and there are more coffee and pancake offerings than you will be able to visit during your stay. There are bike repair camps, outfit swaps, community bikes (hard to find but we used them once!), AC domes, tea lounges, all offered as gifts to other burners.

Ok, enough with the survival stuff, where’s the fun? Burners are like clowns in a children’s chemotherapy ward; trying to both provide and have fun despite the grim background facts of the inhospitable playa. The obvious thing is music (mostly EDM, but one can also find classical music, perhaps even an orchestral rendition of Queen’s Bohemian Rhapsody) and dancing. Surprisingly I didn’t do a lot of that this time! I spent a lot of time having conversations with people about their own experience. In a good way, conversations felt self-referential as in circling.

Running into people I know from SF was really fun, little surprises happening throughout the event. I knew some of the camps where friends would be at, but no guarantee that they would be there when I visited. I had a decent success rate at showing up and saying hi to someone I knew. We slowly collected a crew, someone we met at an authentic relating workshop, and someone I faintly knew from the Berkeley group house scene. We stayed mostly together until the end of the burn.

Then there were the little absurd experiences: getting spanked before you get coffee at Scarbutts (Why? I asked. “It’s fun” they said), being driven in a mattress-on-wheels at night by a stranger than then led us to the Altitude Lounge, getting into a wood fired sauna (Though a dry sauna, as we added water it got more humid than the desert, getting out felt refreshing), or having a 3 course meal in a nicely set table (pictured below, we ended up going twice).

Sure I’ve had 3 course meals before, but having such niceties in the desert it felt like a hilarious “fuck you” that the BRC community is giving nature, a collective celebration of human ingenuity, and while Burning Man is not the most efficient (generators scale with size for example), its smaller scale lets you appreciate this sense of collective achievement more. Next time you go into a restaurant you can appreciate all the unseen but real effort (I Pencil, anyone?) that went into extracting what to you is an effortless meal for a convenient price. Hell yeah!

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Most of the time I was with our small group of 4 people wandering around. Not being with a group often meant having trouble reuniting later, so the incentive to stay together was strong. But there were many occasions where I was alone. One night I took my bike and biked past the Man, the Temple, and almost all the way to the trash fence, just to see what was there (I didn’t quite make it all the way this time though!). The deep playa is a great place to explore alone. It reminded me of pictures like this, where everywhere you look around you in the far edge there’s a lot of stuff (art cars, music, lights) but in the space immediately around you there’s absolutely nothing, just darkness, with the occasional art car or bike passing along, like comets grazing a planet, getting close but not quite touching (Well, in one occasion someone got close and said “I’m looking for Titanic’s End!!!” to which I replied “Me too! Let’s go find it!”).

Burning Man is life, lived differently. In the real world most people are not dancing all the time, they are also resting, having conversations, or reading a book. The same is true at Burning Man. You can experience the Burn in any way you want. The experience, I’d say, is not so much about the specific content but about the state of mind, being exposed to serendipitous happenings, feeling higher highs and lower lows. I got to feel the worst I've felt in a while at Burning Man after not sleeping much for two days in a row. In the moment, I was tired, angry at minor annoyances, and quite grumpy. But after the event, I'm grateful I'm not like that most of the time! And that though I wasn't the most pleasant person to interact with one or two of those days and had some tense moments with our group, by the end we were all four of us sitting together to watch the Man burn.

Would I go again? At least once more, yes!

Appendix: Packing list

So what do you really need to go to Burning Man? There are a bunch of packing lists on the internet one can find and if anything I found I was overprepared in some regards and underprepared in others. The items that I ended up using all the time and that I’d say are the bare minimum would be (setting aside shade, water, food, bikes; that was provided for us by the camp this time)

  1. A waterpack; I got the 2.5L Katari 3 from Osprey as a portable lightweight source of water. A mistake I made is not buying this accessory to keep the nozzle clean.
  2. Electrolytes. I got these ones and added a pack to my water once or twice a day.
  3. Sunscreen. My skin doesn’t burn easily but just in case I used some; mostly in my face
  4. A mask. The weather this year was nice but there were some days when I was glad to be able to breathe filtered air. I got this one
  5. Sunglasses. One could always squint but it’s nice to have them. I had a pair of Ray-Ban aviators at home so I took those
  6. Boots. I went with Blundstones, and they did Ok, comfortable enough but I found them a bit harder to get into and out of them than I thought, especially when my hands were dry. Palladiums are another recommendation people have.
  7. Good socks. I have a large collection of Darn Tough Light Hike Micro Crew socks and they did great. My feet didn’t feel too hot, I got no blisters and no sand inside. I changed socks every few days, they held really well.
  8. A hat. I ended up exploring Black Rock City a lot during the day so it was nice to have one. I got this one.
  9. Lights. This is quite important, particularly at night! I got a Spot 400 as a headlamp (plus a pack of spare AAA batteries that I didn’t use at all), a bucket hat that lights up, these LED armbands (super handy! They can be attached to a bike or to oneself)
  10. Earmuffs. Really useful for sleeping! They block most but not all of the noise. Should have bought regular earplugs as well.
  11. Chapstick. Your lips will be happier that way
  12. Skin lotion. On day two my fingernails were bleeding from the dryiness. This probably saved me.
  13. Blister cushions. Used only once but it probably made walking a much better experience during the week
  14. A cup. I got a foldable one to be able to keep it inside my backpack. But perhaps I should have gotten one that is attached to the backpack instead to free up internal space.
  15. Goggles. I didn’t use them (they ray bans did ok enough deflecting dust from my eyes) but there were no major whiteouts when I was there. I got these ones but they have small holes in them and sand could have made it through. I’ll probably get different ones next times.
  16. Re sleeping bag, tent, and pad; I was in a rush and thought the camp would be providing them until last minute so what I got might not have been the best; I was also planning to donate them to the camp so I went for relatively cheap ones. Imho they were good enough: tent (an ok tent, quite small), pad, sleeping bag (comes with pillows but they were meh; the pad also had pillows, that was nice).
  17. This bag from peak design for extra storage. I had it clipped to my backpack with this mini carabiner but it got a bit impractical. Next time having it on a belt would have been better.
  18. A wristwatch. I had a Fitbit and the battery lasted most of the week, should have brought the charger with me!
  19. Battery pack. Nice to be able to charge stuff without relying on power from the camp.

Other things I brought that are less important

  1. Spray bottles. Useful to refresh oneself, wash your hands
  2. A plate. Depends on your own situation but the camp I was with had communal plates so I didn’t use my plate that much.
  3. A spoon/fork set. Same as above.
  4. Wipes. Generally useful to clean your hands or to blow your nose. You’ll be blowing your nose a lot! You can also carry a bunch of 1-ply toilet paper with you too.
  5. Toothbrush kit. It’s nice to brush your teeth but not strictly required, during that week. I did it every few days.
  6. Flashlight. I have this Nitecore NC10000 which doubles as a USB-C battery to keep lights charged if need be and also it’s quite a bright flashlight
  7. Warm leggings. It was cold one of the nights and this set helped
  8. Saline spray for the nose. You can also use the spray bottles with regular water though.
  9. Hand sanitizer. I brought a bunch; the toilets always had a supply of it, the rest of the time I ended up using it to wash my hands on the go.

Things I wish I had bought (that I would have used)

  1. Walkie talkies! Finding friends after parting ways is hard! Phones don’t work at burning man so we had to resort to leaving messages in pieces of cardboard to meet at predetermined times. With walkie talkies, we could have been more flexible about splitting and reuniting later in the day. We got some from a camp in the last few days and they were nice to have.
  2. Duct tape. If I had it at hand, I could have repurposed my backup non foldable cup into a cup I can carry around by taping the mini carabiner to it.
  3. More than “bought” but rather “done”, is organizing better, I spent too much time searching for stuff. I should have kept a dedicated space for each type of item in designated bags or storage space for ease of access.
  4. A water bottle; I had to use my backpack for water inside the tent and I wish I could keep it outside and have a water bottle inside the tent at all times for ease.
  5. More fun costumes (I bought everything in a rush, and I ended up wearing 2 pairs of shorts, a few shirts, and this robe most of the time)
  6. A collapsible miniplate; I got less food around than I thought so I didn’t miss this, but next time if I get more food this would be useful.

I have to mention here a few resources that I found helpful when preparing my own packing list:

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