The Shadow
After being canceled in 2020 and 2021 due to COVID-19, the Burning Man Festival that is held in the Black Rock Desert in Pershing County, Nev. has been scheduled for Aug. 28-Sept. 3.
The counter-culture festival that creates a city with a zip code, a post office, a landline telephone booth, 40-foot- wide-named streets and hundreds of bars and restaurants where free alcoholic beverages and food are served is established for seven days.
The Burning Man Festival’s roots date back to 1986 when Larry Harvey and Jerry James, two San Francisco artists, constructed a nine-foot-tall-wooden sculpture of a man, dragged it to San Francisco’s Baker’s Beach, and burned it in effigy on Summer Solstice day. Only 20 bystanders were present to watch.
Before COVID-19 interrupted the festival in 2020, the festival had grown to attract 70,000 counter-culture artists and revelers.
The organizers of the festival moved the event from San Francisco in 1991, and a dry lake bed about 100 miles northeast of Reno, Nev. became the setting for the festival that forms the once-a-week Black Rock City.
Although the 2020 and 2021 festivals were officially canceled due to the pandemic and permitting issues encountered in Nev., the event went virtual. Some 20,000 showed up at the site despite the pandemic.
Tickets to the 2022 Burning Man Festival are on sale for $2,500 each. If those attending bring their pet dogs with them, they will not be admitted due to the ban on dogs.
Once inside the gate, Black Rock City exists for one week with generators supplying electricity, Porta-potties located at strategic locations serving festival goers between visits of the fleet of trucks that service them.
Throughout the week, artworks are displayed in the city where vehicles that would fit right into “Mad Max,” a 1979 Hollywood movie, cruise through the crescent-shaped city where a five-mile-per-hour speed limit is enforced.
Black Rock City becomes the largest temporary city on Earth for one week, and attendees come from around the world to experience dwelling there in tents, RVs and other vehicles.
The festival concludes each year with the traditional burning of a wooden sculpture of a man.
