Burning Man festival founder Larry Harvey, aged 70

Larry Harvey, founder of the Burning Man festival, has died at the age of 70.

Harvey died at a hospital in San Francisco, surrounded by family, Burning Man Project chief executive Marian Goodell said.

The cause was not immediately known but he suffered a stroke earlier this month.

Longtime friend Stuart Mangrum posted on the organisation’s website that Harvey did not believe in “any sort of existence” after death.

“Now that he’s gone, let’s take the liberty of contradicting him, and keep his memory alive in our hearts, our thoughts, and our actions,” Mr Mangrum wrote.

“As he would have wished it, let us always Burn the Man.”

Burning Man takes place annually the week before Labour Day in northern Nevada’s Black Rock Desert.

The week-long festival attracts around 70,000 people who travel to a dry lake bed 100 miles east of Reno, where temperatures can routinely reach 100F (37.8C) during the summer.

There they must carry in their own food, build their own makeshift community and engage in whatever interests them.

On the gathering’s penultimate day, the giant effigy – or Man as it is known – is set ablaze during a raucous, joyful celebration.

Friends and family toasted Harvey as a visionary, a lover of words and books, a mentor and instigator who challenged others to look at the world in new ways.

“Burners,” as they are called, left comments on the organisation’s website thanking Harvey for inspiring them as artists and for creating a community.

An “esoteric mix of pagan fire ritual and sci-fi Dada circus where some paint their bodies, bang drums, dance naked and wear costumes that would draw stares in a Mardi Gras parade,” is how the Associated Press once described the gathering.

While tickets now sell out immediately, Harvey described in a 2007 interview how he had much more modest intentions when he launched Burning Man on San Francisco’s Baker Beach one summer day in 1986.

“I called a friend and said, “Let’s go to the beach and burn a man,” he told the website Green Living.

“And he said, ‘Can you say that again?’ And I did and we did it.”

Within a few years the event had outgrown Baker Beach and moved to the desert.

His brother, Stewart Harvey, said in a post on Saturday that the two were adopted by farmers “Shorty” and Katherine Harvey and grew up outside of Portland, Oregon.

The brothers, who were not related by blood, were extremely close.

Harvey said he hitchhiked to San Francisco at age 17, arriving just as the 1965 Summer of Love was ending. He settled in the Haight-ashbury district for many years.

After that first fire in 1986, Burning Man flourished as Harvey meticulously oversaw its every detail from the various communities that would spring up overnight to its annual arts theme to the beautiful temple that is also burned.

He is survived by his son Tristan, brother Stewart and nephew Bryan Harvey.

Larry Harvey was hailed a visionary.