Alexandra Sternlicht
Wed, September 6, 2023
As rain pelted the Burning Man "playa" on Friday night, turning the desert plateau into a giant mud pit, the festival's official radio station told attendees to cancel their party plans and hunker down.
"Don’t party" was the message, with the implication of avoiding drugs and alcohol, recalls one attendee describing the surreal experience as one of the world’s most celebrated bacchanals, frequented by DJs, artists, and tech billionaires, suddenly turned into a potential natural disaster zone.
By Tuesday, many of the 70,000 Burning Man attendees were back home, or on their way, after washed-out roads were reopened and a multiday travel ban in and out of the area was lifted. Many of the attendees Fortune spoke with rejected news reports that described them as having been stranded victims or in danger. (One person died at the event, though the cause is under investigation.)
But if nothing else, the deluge provided a high-profile display of the collision between nature and some of the world's most well-heeled revelers, including Google cofounder Sergey Brin, actor Chris Rock, and Kimball Musk, the brother of Tesla CEO Elon Musk—who was apparently not present this year, but who tweeted his praise for Burning Man on Sunday: "hard to describe how incredible it is for those who have never been."
Twitch cofounder Justin Kan posted on Instagram about having survived, and thrived, during the “hardest Burning Man I’ve been to in 10 years.” Crypto entrepreneur and former child actor Brock Pierce, health tech platform founder Adrian Aoun, and ex-Twitter manager Esther Crawford were reportedly among the many other Silicon Valley notables at this year's event.
Snorting drugs in soggy yurts
For many, the festival organizers’ calls for sobriety and restraint were interpreted loosely.
Inside a soggy yurt somewhere on the playa on Friday night, Richard, his wife, and friends sat on a tarp snorting lines of ketamine and cocaine, and popping MDMA pills, until their Bluetooth speaker died.
A longtime Burning Man attendee who asked to use a pseudonym, Richard normally plots his drug experiences at the festival very carefully. This year he had planned to do MDMA only on Friday night following a Shabbat dinner and concert by his favorite artist Paavo Siljamäki, concluding in a sunrise wedding.
But with the wild weather, all of that was canceled. The muddy conditions made it impossible for Richard and other attendees to navigate the Playa by foot or by bike. Instead, they went on a bender.
“Friday was definitely like, fuck it, let’s do whatever we want to do. If anything, let’s do more to overcompensate for the fact that we’re not out on the playa seeing things,” says Richard.
Other attendees shared similar tales of making do, without the usual extravaganza of music, art, and invitations into other camps.
“There wasn’t much else to do,” said another attendee in response to Fortune’s inquiry about drug and alcohol consumption at the muddy festival. “People were at their camps doing what people do when they get bored."
A sign reading "Shit Could Be Worse" as campers sit in a muddy desert plain on September 3, 2023, after heavy rains turned the annual Burning Man festival site in Nevada's Black Rock desert into a mud pit. Tens of thousands of festivalgoers were stranded September 3, in deep mud in the Nevada desert after rain turned the annual Burning Man gathering into a quagmire, with police investigating one death. Video footage showed costume-wearing "burners" struggling across the wet gray-brown site, some using trash bags as makeshift boots, while many vehicles were stuck in the sludge.
(Photo by Julie JAMMOT / AFP)
Attendees typically use bikes to navigate the four-square-mile expanse of desert that constitutes the Playa, an ancient lake bed in Black Rock Desert, Nevada, located about a three-hour drive from Reno. With flooded grounds and ankle-deep mud, it was impossible to cycle, and even walking was an ordeal that required putting plastic bags over shoes.
Relegated to mud-drenched tents, yurts and RVs, many people wanted to leave but were unable to do so without getting stuck. One attendee who managed to make it credited his Range Rover for his salvation.
“Just managed to escape Burning Man mudpocalypse,” wrote one attendee on Instagram, posting a picture of his SUV. “Thankful for my Range Rover.”
Even celebrity attendees like Diplo and Chris Rock were forced to slog for miles in the mud before being able to hitch rides out of the desert. “No one was making it out of burning man they didn’t believe we would walk 6 miles in the mud,” wrote Diplo in an Instagram Story, appearing to post from a private plane with mud on his face.
All of this has swept the internet into a Fyre Festival–esque episode of schadenfreude. “What fascinates me about Burning man is how many rich people have never let go of their dream of being cool, but rather than being willing to change in any way they pay for certain products and events and try to project coolness despite being unhappy and unsatisfied,” tweeted one user
A wet camp at Burning Man
Still, a number of attendees with whom Fortune spoke characterized this year’s festival as the best one yet (though many of these revelers departed ahead of schedule).
“Everyone was in it together,” says venture capitalist Sheel Monhat, who left the festival on Sunday. “It is pretty egalitarian; like, no one really has special treatment.”
Of course, the communal spirit was sometimes tinged with the hard-nosed practicality of the tech industry. Longtime venture capitalist Bill Tai told the Wall Street Journal that he decided to break camp and leave on Friday, just as the skies began to threaten the festival.
"As an investor," Tai told the paper, "I ALWAYS plan out a decision tree for how things may unfold."
This story was originally featured on Fortune.com
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