Attending Burning man is made deliberately difficult, as a way of filtering out the bozos. You have to bring everything you need - food, water, and a generator if you want power. And you have to take it all back again when you go. Signs exhorting travellers to "leave no trace" were posted everywhere.
OK, so we were lame. Instead of roughing it and spending a week in the desert in some leaky tent made out of tarps and PVC pipe like everybody else, we decided to rent a big-asstm RV. Good thing too - a number of buckyball domes collapsed under the 70mph winds we experienced at one point. Fortunately, no one was hurt.
Here's a shot of our cozy domecile, on the road.
This is what Nevada looks like. Pretty desolate, but the sky is beautiful.
Here's the big-asstm RV from the outside. Every orifice of this beastie was stuffed with water bottles, food, and survival gear. No less than eight bicycles were stacked on the master bed in the back.
No commercial activity is allowed at Black Rock City - but that doesn't seem to apply to the local gas station just outside.
We parked near the "Large Scale Sound Art" area. (What that means is 24-hour a day raves.)
Here's the center camp. The clouds of parked bikes is almost scary. In the third shot you can see the Costco Soulmate Trading Outlet, a surrealistic matchmaking service.
A fire-breathing dragon? It's a multi-segmented body, with a real flamethrower at the nose.
Along "head way" which is the inner ring road that divides the camping areas from the large-scale art pieces.
Some night shots. Hard to see what's there, but there's a cool art car in the first shot.
An attempt to portray what the festival looks like at night. It's quite awesome - a 2 mile circumfrence of lights and lasers, glowing displays of all different colors and meanings.
My attempt at a panoramic shot, standing on a 20' high scaffolding:
Here's some shots of me on top of the scaffolding, taken by Andy.
Here's a shot of Andy Hook. I tell people that Andy is "like me, only more so."
John Gilmore, Andy Hook and the other hacker types were in a camp called the Oregon County Fair. Here's a shot from inside their rather cool tent.
A typical intersection.
I don't remember what this site was called, but they had these weird shows going on all the time.
Various art cars.
I don't know why I shot this strange art car three times.
This was the most fun. A fellow brought a bunch of rolls of plastic tubing (like garbage bags, but without the perforations and heat sealing) and we held them up to the wind and made "an ocean on the Playa".
The Burn.
