Thousands heading home from flooded Burning Man
The traffic jam leaving the Burning Man festival eased up Tuesday as the exodus from the mud-caked Nevada desert entered a second day following massive rain that left tens of thousands of partygoers stranded for days.
A pair of brothers from Arizona who took their 67-yearold mother with them to Burning Man for the first time spent 11 hours into early Tuesday morning just getting out of the festival site about 110 miles north of Reno.
“It was a perfect, typical Burning Man weather until Friday — then the rain started coming down hard,” said Phillip Martin, 47. “Then it turned into Mud Fest.”
Event organizers began letting traffic flow out on the main road around 2 p.m. local time Monday — even as they urged attendees to delay their exit to help ease traffic.
By Tuesday morning, wait times had dropped from roughly five hours to two to three hours, according to Twitter.
The annual celebration in one of the most remote places in America launched on a San Francisco beach in 1986 and has since grown. Nearly 80,000 artists, musicians and activists visit the Black Rock Desert every year to build a makeshift camp city virtually overnight in preparation for the ceremonial burnings of a towering, faceless effigy and a temple dedicated to the dead.
Most attendees travel to the stark desert for a week to express themselves with music and art, commune with nature, or “find themselves.” Others visit the ancient lake bottom for a psychedelic party full of hallucinogens and nudity before the burning of the wooden effigy.
The event this year began Aug. 27 and was scheduled to end Monday morning, with attendees breaking down camps and cleaning up — until the rains came.
After more than a half-inch of rain fell Friday, flooding turned the playa to foot-deep mud — closing roads and forcing burners to lean on each other for help.
Burning Man emphasizes self-sufficiency, and many burners arrive in Black Rock Desert with limited supplies, expecting to face challenges in the form of brutal heat, dust storms — or torrential rains.
The rain also posed challenges for authorities responding to emergency situations — including the death of a man identified as 32-year-old Leon Reece. A cause of death is pending.