Expect hippies to be blaming this on climate change in 3…2…1
Eric Worrall writes: | The Burning Man Festival, a famous Nevada cultural festival, dedicated to sharing, art, self reliance, self expression, burning a big wooden statue, and sky high ticket prices, has reportedly been delayed due to the rain.
According to the report, the festival hopes to open its doors tomorrow.
No doubt this inconvenient delay will give participants an opportunity to practice their self reliance, as they figure out where they will camp for the night, while pondering the possible environmental benefits of not setting fire to that big wooden thing this year.
Or who knows – perhaps the organisers have a plan “B”, which involves splashing a lot of fossil fuel onto the wooden man structure, before striking a match, to ensure all that wet timber lights up.
http://www.businessinsider.com.au/burning-man-delayed-gates-closed-because-of-weather-2014-8
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USA Today reported it as:
Burning Man gate shut as surprise rain soaks desert
An unusual rainstorm in the desert north of Reno, Nev. has shut the main entrance to Burning Man, disappointing thousands of would-be attendees to this performance-art festival and rave.
Monday showers turned the Black Rock Desert into “mucky mud,” Nevada Highway Patrol Trooper Dan Lopez said. Law enforcement officials were turning back a long line of cars and camping vans.
“With rain attached to (playa dust), people get stuck everywhere,” Lopez said.
Rain in the Black Rock desert happened in 2010 and 2013. Seasonal monsoon patterns, that’s all. No surprise.
It seems to have been re-opened today:
Tickets going for $380 up to $1000 according to the article. That’s some rich hippies.
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Whatever floats their boat..
….or dampens their spirits…..
Not crazy about the new blog format.
self reliance, to be fair those big generators do not turn themselves on nor do all those ‘evil fossil fuel powered ‘ trucks, car etc the use to get there drive themselves.
I suspect that everything will dry out quickly.
It’s called the weather.
Then we have this.
It’s still called the weather.
You have to ~buy~ tickets to Burning Man?
Well heck yeah. Lumber ain’t free. I believe that the organizers were granted an okay for 70,000 “counter culture” folks to attend. Who’s doing the head count, I don’t know. From the participants that, for the most part, arrive through Reno, it looks once again to be a mix of Mad Max and a Rainbow family, weed infested, orgiastic, uh, celebration. Nothing can be sold on site except ice and coffee. Weird huh. Will there be plenty of motor homes as well as artistic vehicles? Judging by the U-Haul and camper rental outlets here in town, yeah. The lots are virtually empty of campers, trucks, motor homes and vans. When they come back next week, somebody is gonna have a steady job of cleaning them all up. Glad it ain’t me.
Didn’t Willis attend this a year or so ago? It was an interesting report, as I recall.
Of some intrest what is the new low/low temp to go along with the rain.
Hard to be a full bore Climate Change beliver with the temp. below record lows.
Now be sure to not say a word about all the “CO2” burned by the cars, trucks and assorted combustion engines used to get the naked boosed up hippie’s to this location out in the desert. Not to mention the enviromental damage done by this collection of kook kanker klouds.
Hey, I survived BM2012. If there is such a creature as a stereotypical BM member, then it was a lot of them that welcomed this old ‘square’ skeptical engineer and my fellow engineer associates. Given the appropriate opportunity I would eagerly go again.
John
Have you checked out regional burns? Smaller scale, but still awesome.
If you watch the documentary movie about Burning Man “Spark: A Burning Man Story,” you will see that there is a huge infrastructure here. People are planning it all year long, and spend months setting it up. So it’s no surprise that there would be some high ticket prices.
Surely, for something so “green” and “back to nature”, the weather doesn’t matter? Or – is it only for the money?
Hey – they could call it “Drowning Man”!
TomB
August 26, 2014 at 12:17 pm
“You have to ~buy~ tickets to Burning Man?”
Yes, and wikipedia has the history of prices. THey look like Weimar hyperinflation.
Next time just leave the gate open and set up a webcam. It would be very entertaining to watch the resulting mud fest and stuck vehicle parade. Great Basin muds are special–it’s where kitty litter comes from.
Nothing “unusual” about an august rain storm in the desert west.
At Burning Man, they have this notion of “giving”; and for every “giving” there must obviously be a “taking”…
Druids used to burn gigantic effigies of Man. Stuffed with people burning alive. No wonder Californian crowd of rich socialist vulgarians is fond of this ceremony.
Burning Man is like Earth Hour, the Prius, alternative energies and climate conferences. It requires lots and lots and lots of fossil fuels in order to happen. And I think I left out a couple of “lots”.
Btw, this is supposed to be our dry time in Northern NSW, especially with an “incipient” El Nino. We’re drenched.
I was working in Empire when Burning man first started. It is funny over the decades I always hear young people say “I have been to the burn 6 times, but I stopped going because it is just not the same anymore”. I just heard that again the other day, and can’t tell you how many times I have heard it over the years. I always chuckle and say, my 6th time was in the 1990s, and the first burning man I went to had 300 people who were shooting 50 caliber tracer rounds all over the place
I seem to remember some mud at Woodstock, too. Does anyone remember the smell?
Two days ago I was in Switzerland where it was snowing in the Alps at 2,000 meters and above – in August!
Here is Willis Eschenbach’s account of 2012 Burning Man:
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2012/09/09/the-playa-willis-excellent-adventure/
Note this:
Alkaline, and now wet. That’s going to be real hard on the attendees, the alkalinity will strip the fats and oils out of their skin, convert it to soap. And the vegans don’t have much fats to spare. But at least numerous hippies will be slightly less unwashed.
This is a great site but very seriously let down by the lack of facts, vast ignorance and prejudice of this post and most of the comments so far. And the other media.. John Whitman knows something about it, good for him. I survived 2007 and it was the single most important event I’ve ever been to. The ignorance is not at Burning Man!