Burning Man is a wrap for another year.
For the life of me, I still don’t understand the annual pilgrimage through the desert to meet up on the playa. Thousands upon thousands of people travel from all over the world to spend days living on a dry lakebed in the Nevada desert. This year was no different.
Last week, we had days of 50-mile-per-hour winds raging across the desert, carrying dust finer than baker’s flour. That dust finds every crease, every cranny, every zipper, every vehicle, every tent and every single thing unfortunate enough to be standing in its path.
Then came the rains, which are now apparently considered monsoonal. I’m not sure when that happened, or why someone decided the word seemed appropriate. We live in the desert. It rains sometimes. Apparently now we have monsoons.
Burning Man affects our little town perhaps more than any other along the route, with the exception of Gerlach itself. We know when the Burners have arrived. The bottled water begins disappearing from the shelves—hundreds of gallons at a time. Walmart is ravaged. So much packaging is removed and discarded before people head onto the playa that extra dumpsters are brought in to handle it.
Restaurants fill.
Gas stations fill.
And then there are the people.
The wonderful oddity of the people passing through is never lost on the residents.
Did you see that?
What was that?
Who was that?
There always seems to be a that involved—something unfamiliar, unexpected and decidedly foreign to our sweet little town.
For a short time every year, two completely different worlds collide here in the Nevada desert. They come through with their bicycles and supplies, extraordinary vehicles, costumes, art, and enough water to survive on a dry lakebed. We watch the parade go by, sometimes amused, sometimes bewildered, and occasionally wondering what on earth we just saw.
Then, almost as quickly as they arrived, they’re gone. The shelves recover. The restaurants quiet down. The dumpsters disappear. Traffic returns to normal. And our little town becomes our little town again.
It’s a strange relationship between them and us. One I haven’t quite figured out yet. Maybe I never will. But there is something rather wonderful about watching people so completely committed to doing something I have absolutely no desire whatsoever to do.
So, bye-bye, Burners. Burning Man 2026 is history.
Safe travels home. We’ll see you next year.
And we’ll try to remember to buy our bottled water before you get here.