Open air, rave, music or art festival? Cosplay? The organizers deny any definitions and prefer to call Burning Man an "event" in the Black Rock Desert, but for each of the participants it is something special.
Photographer James Percy, a veteran burner, has dedicated the whatisburningman.org photo project to answering this question.
In the perception of Burning Man, people are divided into two camps. Those who sincerely do not understand why climb into the desert with the nearest locality 300 kilometers away, fall asleep and wake up with dust in your eyes and ears, hide from sandstorms and a sharp change in temperature day and night. And others - let's call them dreamers. They are ready to travel and fly hundreds and thousands of kilometers in order to temporarily become residents of a city that exists only eight days a year and where everyone can realize their most daring creative ideas, and in return they will meet only curiosity and interest - no condemnation.
In 2015, 70,000 people attended Burning Man.
How it all began
It all started in 1986. A group of friends gathered on the beach in San Francisco on the summer solstice to burn a stuffed wooden man. The party was a success and began to take place every year. In 1990, when the event had about 800 participants, the police banned the burning of the effigy on the beach for security reasons. The Berners teamed up with the Cacophony Society, moved the celebration to the last weekend of summer (Labor Day) and moved from the beach to the Black Rock Desert of Nevada.
This desert is part of the dried up prehistoric Lake Laontan, its bottom is perfectly flat, there is no sand dunes but there is dust. A lot of dust!
It was in the desert that Burning Man turned from a beach party into a grand festival, where people come for emotion and inspiration. It is a place of attraction for independent artists and musicians, hippies and freaks of all stripes, inventors, dreamers and romantics.
For more than twenty years, BurningMan has been visited by Google founder Sergey Brin, Facebook creator Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos, Amazon, Elon Musk, Tesla. In addition to the luminaries of Silicon Valley, in the vastness of Black Rock City you can meet the most diverse audience - from starlets from Los Angeles to hedge fund managers from London or whalers from Alaska.
Writer Chuck Palahniuk said in an interview that Burning Man's older brother - the Cacophiny Society novel "Fight Club" (Fight Club).
What you need to know
Anyone who decides to go to the Black Rock Desert should be aware of the ten core principles of the Berning Man, which are designed to preserve a unique atmosphere and warn participants about what they will have to face.
1. Radical inclusion
Everyone can become a part of Burning Man. Here strangers are treated with joy and respect. Does not exist special conditions to participate in this society. (There is still one condition - a ticket is required!)
2. Donation
Gifts are presented unselfishly, not in exchange for something.
Lack of deals, consumerism, sponsorship and advertising. Any logos are prohibited.
4. Radical self-sufficiency
You can only count on yourself. You may be advised something, but guided tours are not practiced.
5. Radical expression
It is customary here to demonstrate your talents and express yourself: there is no censorship, everyone sets a framework for themselves.
6. Community efforts
Here, creative collaboration and interaction are valued. Emphasis is placed on striving to create, promote and defend works of art and communication that support creative interaction.
7. Responsibility
Each of the participants bears responsibility for themselves and public welfare. Local, state and federal laws, however, have not been canceled in the desert.
8. Don't leave a mark
The organizers demand respect for the environment. Everything should remain as clean as it was before you arrived: it is enough for everyone to clean up after themselves.
9. Participation
It will not be possible to observe from the outside, everyone has the right to work in the name of the common good, so that later they should have a good rest.
10. Here and now
Personal experience is invaluable, theory will never replace practice.
The administration strongly advises everyone to abide by these principles.
How Black Rock City works
It is easier to understand what Burning Man is by looking at the city map.
Black Rock City is a city in the desert with residential "streets" and infrastructure, around which art objects, stages, entertainment zones are built. The tent-car camp was built in a semicircle. In the very center - the symbol of the festival, the giant figure of the "Burning Man".
Since the mid-90s, when the number of participants exceeded several thousand, Black Rock City took the form of a multilayer horseshoe turned upside down. In the middle of this horseshoe is a playa (something like central square city), the place where art objects are located, art cars run - the cars of the most bizarre shapes and sizes, something like discos on wheels.
In the very center of the playa there is a stuffed wooden man. For the convenience of the participants, it is customary to count the streets of Black Rock City from him, which is drawn like a giant hour dial. Thus, a typical address for a meeting place at Burning Man might look like this: 4.15 D.
How to plan your trip
You should start organizing your trip by buying tickets for the festival: about 60,000 tickets are sold out in a matter of minutes. The face value of one ticket is $ 450. You can follow the sales calendar at tickets.burningman.org.
It is better to go to Burning Man for the first time with friends who have already “swam and know”. They will tell you how much food and water to take with you, and share a pack of wet wipes. Newcomers who first found themselves in the desert are called virgin burners.
Where to live
The choice of accommodation in the Black Rock Desert is small: it is either a camping car that took you to your destination, or a tent. If the choice fell on a tent, then you can give up on comfort. However, this option is much cheaper than camping, where rental prices can go up to $ 10,000 per week.
After choosing a home, you should think about the parking space. As a rule, friends-burners gather in the so-called camp (from the English camp - "camp"). The camp management negotiates with the administration about the number of parking spaces and the location of the camp.
When choosing a parking space, it is worth keeping in mind: the closer the camp is to the playa, the less sleep you will have - the parties here smoothly flow into one another. Parking in the city center does not guarantee tranquility, but it does guarantee the greatest protection from the wind. And parking on the outskirts, on the outside of the "horseshoe", will give you the opportunity to relax and recuperate in silence (the road to the nearest party can take about half an hour on foot or 10 minutes by bike).
Where to buy everything you need
Must have: For protection from wind and sand dust you will need pilot goggles and a face scarf. A reliable and powerful flashlight for night movement. For photo and video cameras it is necessary to provide protection from sand.
You can find a list of things you need to take with you and buy everything you need for a trip in special stores ().
Black Rock Desert (Nevada, USA) - detailed description, location, reviews, photos and videos.
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The Black Rock Desert is small in size: 110 km long and 23 km wide. But on such a compact territory all the typical landscapes of Nevada are located. In prehistoric times, this part of the state was occupied by the giant Lake Lahontan, the remains of which can today be found near Lake Pyramids. Black Rock - mystical place... Its dried up and wind-chipped black rocks, geysers sparkling in different colors and endless expanses of takyrs fascinated the colonizers who made their way through these lands to sunny California. They fascinate even today.
The unearthly atmosphere of Black Rock has made it home to the mind-blowing Burning Man contemporary art festival.
What to see
It's worth starting with the impressive flat terrain and uniformity of Black Rock Playa. It stretches more than 50 km south of the town of Gerlack to the Black Rock Range. A giant plain covered with cracks most years, and in winter it is flooded with water and ice. Due to the perfectly flat surface, extreme races are periodically held in Playa.
The Trego hot springs ( GPS coordinates: 40.770102, −119.112632). They are especially popular in late autumn and early spring, as it is too hot to swim in the streams in summer and too cold in winter. Thanks to the presence of a camping, Trego - perfect place for the camp or launch pad for trips to Black Rock.
If it is still hot in Trego, you should go to Soldiers' Meadows, Solje Meadows (GPS coordinates: 41.352390, −119.203839). The territory is eaten by warm and cold springs, in which you can swim if you wish.
There are campsites and hotels in Soldier's Meadows, but seeing more than half a dozen cars here is a great success.
The fact that economic activity was periodically carried out in the desert is reminiscent of the abandoned village of Hardin (GPS coordinates: 41.114722, −119.0025). In 1866, James Hardin discovered a silver deposit here, and soon dozens of prospectors were drawn to Black Rock. They even built mills to smelt the metal, but after a few years the silver ran out. Today, on the site of the abandoned mine, only the ruins of houses and auxiliary buildings remain.
Practical information
GPS coordinates: 40.753856, −119.277111.
The most convenient way to approach Black Rock is from Gerlak - the desert begins just outside the city. There are no gas stations or restaurants. Lovers of silence and wild rest... Before the trip, you need to carefully prepare: take with you a tire repair kit, fuel, food and water. It is better to go here in an all-wheel drive SUV.
Black Rock City, or Black Rock City, is a temporary city in the middle of the desert in the American state of Nevada. It exists only one week a year and hosts the world famous Burning Man festival. Festival visitors come from different states and countries to build a city with seventy thousand inhabitants here!
// levik.livejournal.com
Today I am offering you a very succinct tour of the main attractions of this temporary city.
All that week, I was posting about the Burning Man festival, which takes place every year in the Nevada desert in the United States. In order not to be distracted by writing these posts, I prepared their text and photos in advance. So there will be a team of hodgepodge from different previous years (I was on every BM in 2006-2014).
By the way, I almost forgot! Tuesday is on the play "Tutu Tuesday", or "Tuesday in Tutu". I don’t know where this tradition came from, but the participants picked it up together, and now it is customary to dress up in ballet tutus on Tuesdays.
// levik.livejournal.com
Moreover, this tradition extends not only to girls. For example, Tonya and I:
// levik.livejournal.com
Okay, let's not get too distracted. I promised you a tour!
Black Rock City is commonly abbreviated as "BRC". This is a real city with a capacity of 70,000 people. It is being created for the week of the festival, although much more time has been put in its creation - the first "builders" come here in a month. At the peak of population (sometime on Friday), it is among the ten most major cities state of Nevada.
Let's take a look at the map of Black Rock City:
// levik.livejournal.com
It can be seen that it is located in the form of an incomplete circle. Its streets are concentric circles of avenues, and radial beams of streets. The streets are named after the clock face, from 2:00 to 10:00. Each year the avenues are named according to the theme of the festival, but these names are always in alphabetical order. If you are too lazy to remember, you can just call them A, B, C, etc. The most important avenue that runs along the inner edge of the city is called the Esplanade. So the addresses in the city go something like this: "3:15 and C", "7:45 and B", "8:30 and Esplanade". (By the way, at all these places, our camp was in the past.)
From above, it all looks extremely impressive (here in 2009, since then BRC has become 40% larger):
// levik.livejournal.com
This place is extremely flat, without any hills (or dunes) there, but surrounded on all sides by mountains in the distance. Remember - the multi-meter wooden statue of a man, Maine, stands in the very center of a large circle. Until Saturday evening, he is our main landmark.
Well, let's go look at all this from below!
In fact, the best avenue to show off and see others is the Esplanade. You can meet anyone there!
// levik.livejournal.com
But we will not go to the Esplanade, but start with the simple streets of the city. They look like this:
// levik.livejournal.com
Quite wide, if desired, two cars can part, but not at speed, of course. In general, you can only drive here at a speed of 5 miles per hour, and only in specially licensed cars. On the sides there are camps. Some have luxurious beautiful tents, others have simple tents. Cars are parked right here too.
When you walk along the BRC, you constantly come across some delays on your way. Most often these are bars or trampolines. We'll talk about bars later somehow, but with trampolines, everything is clear anyway. How can you not stop to jump?
// levik.livejournal.com
Yes, a lot of things can delay a person going on important matters. For example table football.
// levik.livejournal.com
Or trampolines. Have I already mentioned trampolines?
// levik.livejournal.com
Due to the fact that there is so much to distract from, there is a concept of "playa time" in Black Rock City - festival time. That is, we agree on 12:00, but in fact it can mean at 12:30, and at 14:00, and in general the day after tomorrow.
Here we are. This is the Central Camp, Center Camp. It is located on the Esplanade and at six o'clock (the map shows a small circle inside big city). The camp is a huge round tent. Rumor has it that this is the largest stretched building in the world, I don't know how true this is.
// levik.livejournal.com
There are tons of bicycles parked around Center Camp - it's important to remember where you leave yours so you can find them later. And the bright flags installed on the roof are visible far from the deck. This is the second most reliable landmark after Maine, its advantage is that it does not burn out at the end of the week.
// levik.livejournal.com
Inside, under the shade of the ceiling, it is spacious and not hot (since the structure is blown by the wind from all sides). Here you can sit and relax from the sultry day. Moreover, there is the only cafe in the entire festival where you can buy coffee, tea, lemonade and other drinks. There is no alcohol here, and asking them just for water is also not very decent.
// levik.livejournal.com
In the very center of the building there is a stage on which some performances are constantly taking place. Acrobats, jugglers, capoeiristas - you can meet them here around the clock!
// levik.livejournal.com
On the side there is another stage for musicians and other performances. In 2009, the troupe of the world famous clown Slava Polunin showed here their famous show in the version of "Slava" s Dust Show.
The area of the desert is 2.6 thousand km² with a length of 110 km and a width of 32 km. Part of the drainless Great Basin.
The desert is part of the dried-up prehistoric Lake Lahontan, which existed 18-7 thousand years BC. NS. during the last ice age. With the maximum filling of the lake about 12.7 thousand years ago, the desert was at a depth of 150 m. At present, it is the flow region of the Quinn River, the waters of which sometimes cover the desert with a layer of several inches.
To the southwest of Black Rock Desert and north of Pyramid Lake lies the Smoke Creek Desert. The Black Rock Desert is the local gypsum mining center. The dry surface of the lake bottom in the southern part served as a testing ground for setting several speed records by car. Since the 1990s, the desert has hosted the annual Burning Man Festival, which attracts tens of thousands of people to desolate areas of the desert.
see also
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Notes (edit)
Coordinates: 40 ° 52'59 ″ s. NS. 119 ° 03′50 ″ W etc. / 40.883056 ° N NS. 119.063889 ° W etc./ 40.883056; -119.063889(G) (I)
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Excerpt from Black Rock (desert)
“No, it’s so, out of surprise,” thought Pierre. But as soon as he wanted to continue the conversation he had begun with Princess Marya, he again looked at Natasha, and an even stronger flush covered his face, and an even stronger emotion of joy and fear seized his soul. He got confused in words and stopped in the middle of his speech.Pierre did not notice Natasha because he had never expected to see her here, but he did not recognize her because the change that had taken place in her since he had not seen her had been enormous. She lost weight and turned pale. But this did not make her unrecognizable: it was impossible to recognize her in the first minute he entered, because on this face, in whose eyes a hidden smile of the joy of life always shone, now, when he entered and looked at her for the first time, there was no there was also a shadow of a smile; there were only eyes, attentive, kind and sadly questioning.
Pierre's embarrassment was not reflected on Natasha by embarrassment, but only by pleasure, which slightly lit up her whole face.
“She came to visit me,” said Princess Marya. “The Count and Countess will be here one of these days. The Countess is in a terrible position. But Natasha herself needed to see the doctor. She was forcibly sent away with me.
- Yes, is there a family without grief? - said Pierre, referring to Natasha. “You know that it was the very day we were released. I saw him. What a lovely boy he was.
Natasha looked at him, and in response to his words, her eyes only opened more and shone.
- What can you say or think in consolation? - said Pierre. - Nothing. Why would such a nice, full of life boy die?
- Yes, in our time it would be difficult to live without faith ... - said Princess Mary.
- Yes Yes. This is the real truth, ”Pierre interrupted hastily.
"Black Desert" in American state Nevada- an amazing corner of our planet, where hot geysers soar into the clouds, and the sand is painted black. This desert is part dried up prehistoric lake Laontan, which existed 18-7 thousand years BC during the last ice age.
This mystical place with dry black rocks and sparkling geysers attracts with its unearthly atmosphere.
The Black Rock Desert is a salt marsh, closed lake in the northwest of Nevada. The desert is 110 km long and 32 km wide. It is part of the drainless Great Basin.
Numerous volcanic and geothermal formations are found in this desert.
This famous geyser, called Fly, is actually no more than human height. But thanks to a good shooting angle and lighting, the photographers managed to create an image as if he was the most beautiful giant on the planet, constantly spewing out three water jets:
Minerals, algae and cyanobacteria give it this incredible color:
Once upon a time on the site of this geyser was the Fly ranch, but when in 1916 the rancher drilled a well, hoping to turn the desert into fertile wet meadows, but accidentally drilled a geothermal pocket of water. However, it wasn't until 1964 that boiling water began to fly to the surface, creating this geothermal beauty:
The owners of the lands on which the geyser is located were offered several times to sell them in order to open access to all comers, but so far they refuse. This monument is surrounded by fences and gates, so tourists need to ask the owners in advance for permission to visit these lands.
Since the 1990s, the desert has hosted an annual event that attracts tens of thousands of people to uninhabited areas of the desert. During the festival, money circulation is completely prohibited on its territory, as well as movement by car.
This place is famous for its paleological features, as well as for the fact that in the 19th century there were migration routes to California. In addition, the speed of ground and rocket vehicles is often measured at this location.
The dry surface of the lake bottom in the southern part served as a testing ground for setting a speed record on the ground. Speed record - 1 228 km / h- at a one-mile (1.6 km) distance was delivered by Andy Trin from Great Britain in a Trust SSC car in the Black Rock Desert in October 1997. The car was powered by two Rolls-Royce jet engines. This is the first car to exceed the speed of sound.
