Heyo, Skipper here! As Haus Anima is beginning our prep for the upcoming festival season, I wanted to write up some thoughts about my experience at the 2023 Burning Man event, increasingly affectionately called the Slip ‘n Slide burn. I joined a few other Haus Anima members who go to the Big Burn with a theme camp called Ultimate Celebration. Despite being “virgin burners”, Lilac & I jumped in headfirst as Interactivity co-leads. Burning Man was an incredible experience, if challenging in several unexpected ways, and I do look forward to going back after a buffer year or two. If you’re looking for a tl;dr: Burning Man is immensely challenging in many logistical ways, it is packed full of more fabulous samples of human expression & art than you could see in a month at least, and it is not for everyone (but if it is for you, you’ll probably have a really really really great time!). If you’re interested in more detail, here’s many more words about my experience.
Preparation
The premise was simple. Develop camp interactivity (Work), pack personal stuff (Play), & drive down early enough to account for transit + gate time to meet the guy hauling the UC trailer on-site (The Drive). This section is focusing on my experience pre-event, so if you’re looking for the goods on how it went or what I would do differently then skip on ahead.
Work
I have a developing theory that there are a few categories of theme camps based on what kind of interactivity they offer. Bar camps focused on drinks and conversation, food camps serving food, sound camps with music and dance areas, workshop camps with guided lessons, and so on. UC falls mostly into a category I refer to as “infrastructure” with interactive structures provided for burners at the event to engage with: climb on, relax in, etc. The UC structures are “bungee couches”, which are regular couches suspended off of the ground by bungee cord. They are very fun to jump & swing on, and stable enough to survive the week.
For some further interactivity, we had daily champagne happy hours & movie nights with popcorn leading up to a big, kick-ass Apocalypse Party on Friday night. Between the handful of camp members who DJ in NYC & the flow arts crew from Haus Anima we were confident that we could host a great party to wrap up the week. We kept most of the UC signature elements like the house cocktail - champagne & 5 hour energy - and added a few new touches like moisturizing face masks for movie night. It was a new experience for me to be a lead of an established camp with a defined offering , and I was excited to make UC’s interactivity something fun for us & memorable for visitors.
Play
I was nervous about the climate when building out my packing list. The reality was that I had just enough knowledge to fall into an unfortunate limbo - it’s well known that the playa conditions are harsh, but I didn’t know how to prioritize and sort through the varying advice found on the many “first time burner essentials” packing lists. With as much time as I had to prepare, and the knowledge that my group was driving down in a 15’ box truck, my solution was to overprepare and, in hindsight, bring possibly too much stuff. Okay, way way way too much. More on that in Reflections.
For events that are longer than a few days or where I want to prioritize costuming, I will typically make a big spreadsheet like this.
Some of the best advice that I got was from a local burner who camps with Sakenoma, a sake bar where the bar countertop is also a bowling lane. She shared the idea of a shortlist of essential items to ALWAYS have on your body if away from camp: goggles, water, closed toe shoes, dust mask, personal lighting, and a light source. In addition to those things, I focused on overpreparing in a few different areas: fun costume pieces for any possible occasion, sun protection (both sunscreens & big scarves), ad-hoc repair items (big safety pins, velcro straps, zip ties, plastic bags, etc). We also brought a variety of flow toys & a few instruments.
The Drive
Wow this was a long LONG long drive. 11 hours ignoring the traffic or stops, 14-16 hours accounting for both. We wanted to arrive around mid-morning on Thursday, which gave us a Wednesday afternoon/evening departure. Our plan was to drive the whole thing in one go for simplicity’s sake. After some normal rush hour traffic in central Washington, we had many miles of empty roads through Oregon, California, & Nevada on the way to Black Rock City. Probably 85%+ of attendees arriving by vehicle enter Gerlach from a different direction than us, which made for great time even as we got close.
With no traffic on the road, the only challenge was keeping ourselves entertained and the driver awake. The 3 of us packed into the front of the box truck played a game that got more interesting in the final leg of the trip - what other vehicles on the road are obviously headed to the burn? Some of the clear signs were bicycles on the back of an already overloaded car, BRC themed stickers, campers with taped-shut windows, visible cargo of the common black and yellow totes… We saw our first likely candidate around Hood River at a gas station, a blue Subaru with bikes, totes, and 5 gal water cubes. The tells got a more obvious crossing into Nevada when we started to see art cars - and buses! - and rented vehicles with logos already covered.
It’s hard to pinpoint when exactly the transition happens from The Drive to The Burn. One option might be the check-in point when you have your tickets scanned and you’re officially through Gate. For me, that was still sitting in the same car and didn’t feel very much different. There’s another one when you make it through Ambassadors; in our case, we zipped through in what might be record time (1 hour!) & arrived early enough that the Ambassadors hadn’t started yet for the day. For me, The Burn really felt like it began during the slow crawl around the outside of the city as we headed towards our campsite. BRC is huge. It has a massive footprint for a temporary event, over 2 miles across. In the minutes we crawled up the ~2.5 mile outer street I developed an acute feeling of “I can’t believe I’m actually here” that was absolutely surreal. I felt giddy in a way that was unexpected, I was so excited!! The lack of sleep & egregious amount of caffeine definitely helped, too.
The Burn
How can I summarize an event like this? This is one of the most fun events I’ve ever experienced, made even better since I got to contribute to it in a tangible way. I was inspired by an endless parade of costumes & art cars, swapped stories with burners from around the world, and saw more exceptional big art pieces than I can recall without looking back at pictures. It was also a week peppered with extremely challenging situations that had no “good” outcomes. Absolutely would go again.
The Fun
So much art - sculpture, costumes, dance & acrobatic performances, live music & DJ sets, immersive spaces, light shows, and hundreds of hours of interactive experiences. I danced at a live performance of a favorite musician. I saw Saturn through a high powered telescope, watched live (foam weapon) combat by contestants suspended from the air (in the aptly dubbed “Thunderdome”), and was inspired by incredibly talented fire performers. I was gifted ice cream, fresh pizza, crepes, grilled cheese, breakfast sandwiches, french onion soup, pho broth, and more. So many gifted cocktails. I walked local streets and made friends with burners in my neighborhood, and enjoyed different scenery every time I walked into new sections of the city. I climbed on TWO different human-sized cat trees! I visited a “brodega” and was offered a twizzler & protein powder sandwich (requested instead a commemorative “Shrimp Fest 2023” sticker as we had just eaten). I experienced life as a minnow, “swimming” across playa on a single speed bike, dodging art cars the size of yachts. I stood on the second story of a bar with great friends and looked across the playa, pointing out our favorite scenes from the view. In the back of my mind throughout each of these experiences is the awe-inspiring fact: none of this was here a week ago, and in another week it will all be gone. Throughout the week I was struck with wonder at the incredible human capacity for ingenuity, adaptability, creativity, perseverance, and all kinds of other things. People contain multitudes, as Lilac says, and Burning Man and burner culture manage to distill that feeling.
There are plenty of writeups of the “best” art of the 2023 burn, so I won’t spend a lot of effort on more words about it. Suffice to say that many of the large art installations would be a featured piece at any world class music festival or town center, with the key difference in the encouragement for burners to not just view the pieces but to engage with them physically. Here are some of the pictures I took, many featuring Lilac with horses of various sizes.
The Challenging
Burning man is a challenging event - an endurance race of fun & build & survival & strike at high desert temperatures sandwiched by long transit times. With folks flying in from all over the world, it’s common for regular theme camps to house their equipment in trailers that live full time close to Playa, and service providers can be called on within BRC to deliver potable water or pump out grey water tanks. Because of the rains ahead of build week, our trailer dropoff was delayed by a day and a half, and we almost missed our drinking water fill-up. Thanks to reasonable daytime temperatures and great planning from our camp Lead, we managed to finish build on time and only got on each others nerves a little bit!
Looking back, all of the real challenges at Burning Man come down to internal struggles. Staying calm when adjusting logistic plans last minute. Not internalizing disappointment if there isn’t much interest in your workshop, ignoring the annoyance over inconveniences. Finding self-assuredness to go to an event solo, or bravery to speak to an interesting stranger. Quieting anxiety about a disrupted exodus plan. Finding grace for burners who are going through their own struggles.
I’ve reflected on and off over the months about the Burn, and I keep thinking about a slogan from a shirt my dad wore when I was a kid, “Attitude is Everything”. Other than the administrative support & core infrastructure, Burns happen because of volunteers and artists and attendees that bring something to share (many folks fit all three categories!). I think this is a transformative event for many because it’s a snapshot of a more nuanced version of the human experience. When something annoying or inconvenient happens, It’s not a company that you’re getting mad at, it’s a community member! Someone who may have just had a different preference or capability or awareness than you. Amidst all of the sensory overload and week of chaos at this Burn, my hardest earned lessons in the end were the impact of practicing patience, for others and for myself. That, and that wearing a big scarf over my neck and shoulders is a WAY better sensory experience than sunscreen layered over 3 days of dust.
Everything Else
Is it even a burn if you don’t wrestle at least a little with logistics and the weather? We were surprised by our placement a little bit and had to do some last minute layout reworking. The water delivery happened when our camp lead (the only one who knew how the system worked!) was unavailable, and we had to figure that out. Lots of newbies to the camp got to figure out how to assemble big temporary structures that were a little older and had a slightly confusing set of instructions, but we got it all set up. There was really nothing that happened too far off of plan for the first half of the week.
Things changed on Friday, though. In the words of Mike Tyson, everybody has a plan until they get hit in the face. For the population of BRC on that Friday, the sudden rain was a meaty right hook! The timeline of that day is the clearest for me - Lilac and I were taking advantage of the cooler morning temp & overcast sky (foreshadowing!) and had biked across the city to visit some other Seattle-area burners. The afternoon found us struggling to rush back to camp across increasingly muddy ground that the bikes really disliked. The rain continued for the next 12 hours, and we resigned ourselves to packing up as much of the camp as possible - nothing we had brought was suited for wet weather, and we didn’t want to deal with waterlogged couches!
After Friday’s miserable night (our party is canceled! leaking housing structures! we’re a national emergency!?) I experienced something incredible on Saturday. Everyone did their best to weatherproof and regroup, then kept the party going in new ways. Camps hosted mud wrestling contests! Sculptures of all sizes had been created everywhere out of the playa mud! Neighbors worked together to reinforce walkways, share water & food, and keep spirits high. It had been a looming disappointment that Saturday’s burn night was canceled, but as I walked across the playa with friends and a mug of pho broth I felt distinctly awed and inspired by the resilience of the human spirit.
(These photos came from reddit, I haven’t been able to find the original uploaders)
After
The BRC roads had solidified enough by Monday that we felt comfortable driving the truck back towards Gate, about a day and a half after our intended departure. The drive home felt longer than it was because all of us were so very tired (we were also very dirty and very aware of our dirt washing our hands at our breakfast stop). This event gave me a lot to process, both fun and challenging, and I REALLY understand why this is an event that many burners only attend infrequently; I can also really understand why many burners attend every year no matter what.
This year I’m finding myself with a new appreciation for comfy space-style camps - there’s never enough! - and driven to create costume pieces with function in mind rather than just fun. Inspired by many personal structures at the burn, Lilac & I have upgraded our tent and we are thinking about getting Haus Anima some shade structures for our regional burns. I am now the proud owner of my own impact driver after seeing many unfortunate popup-turned-tumbleweeds during gusty dust storms. I am also participating more than ever before with Ignition NW and volunteering as a lead for Critical 2024. Burns are a special community in the modern age, one where someone’s impact is often measured by effort over net worth; you put down roots by showing up to make the experience better for everyone.
The Big Burn is probably not happening for me this year, mostly because of a schedule filled with more regional events than ever. If you see Haus Anima on the camp list at your local burn, come by and say hello - we’ll have more comfy stuff than in previous years and we’ll be excited to host you.
More horse photos!
