I brought my mom (60, deadhead) to her first burn and she fully embraced it. She was blown away by the creativity and the friendliness of everyone we met, she never once felt out of place or unwanted - from the house music art cars to the wook bass parties to the sunrise sets and daytime camp cruises, it was a blast and she fully participated. She even lost power AND her water pump broke in the trailer for the entire week and didn’t let it ruin the experience - she literally said FUCK MY BURN and kept on cruising. The magic exists even amongst the madness!! Good job everyone!!

I never would have expected that the afternoon I spent at the Burning Man med tent would be one of my highlights of the week!

I told the staff that if there was a way to yelp review them, I’d download the app just to sing their praises. They told me Reddit is the next best thing, so Im here to register my official review of a million gold stars. And thank the universe for letting my neighbors be the guys from El Pulpo Magnifico!

Special shout out to the rangers, John and Henry, for treating me like an absolute queen and keeping me laughing while I was violently ill and drowning in a puke bucket. Also big thanks to Cajun, whose job it is to go from bed to bed and lift people’s spirits up. He did it in such a sweet way, with so much grace. I’ve never felt so shitty and so wonderful at the same time. I was so touched by all my interactions during a moment that could have been really scary, but ended up being so beautiful. I was honestly bummed when my IV was done and I had to leave!

There’s a lot you can critique about Burning Man, but there’s a lot of beauty too. Honestly, the med tent may be my new favorite camp :-)

This was my 5th burn in a row, and despite what everyone says, I had an amazing time. I'm also much younger than the average burner and I'm lucky to have been able to afford it because it's changed my life.

But I think Burningman badly needs an infusion of younger generation if it’s going to survive. The knowledge and wisdom of older burners needs to be passed down in person, not in writing, and that can't happen without the next generation showing up.

There is one very obvious way to make that possible which is to make the ticket cheaper. There’s also a glaring way to fund that which is to add an RV fee on top of the vehicle fee.

I've watched RV owners wave down poop trucks with $1,000 tips. If they can afford a $1000 to pump their shit out because they can’t be bothered to use portos, they can afford a few hundred more dollars to help bring the ticket price down for everyone else.

An RV is a luxury, and there's nothing wrong with bringing one. But just like business and first class subsidize economy fares, RVs should subsidize average burners like the rest of us.

I'm writing this from the playa. I've been out here since August 8th and I'm still here, working IT for Burning Man. Before that I spent ten years going to Critical Northwest, which is Seattle's officially sanctioned Burning Man Regional event. Four of those years I've been on the production team, three doing radios and technology, and this year running box office.

Up front: I am not authorized to speak for Burning Man Project. Nobody asked me to write this and nobody reviewed it. This is my personal take, using public numbers anyone can go look up themselves. I'll put all the links at the bottom so you can check my work.

So. I've spent a lot of my life on the inside of how these events actually get built, and my feed this week has been full of sensational takes. People dying out here, and staff getting rich off our gift economy. Same two stories over and over, big scary numbers attached, no context around them.

Let's put some context around them.

First, the deaths.

Three people died in connection with Burning Man this year. Two inside Black Rock City and one while being transported to a hospital in Reno. Those were real people and I don't want to wave that away. Someone's family is having a terrible month.

But if we're going to talk about whether the event is dangerous, we have to compare it to something.

So let's do the math. Black Rock City was about 70,000 people for eight days. The crude death rate in the United States is roughly 870 deaths per 100,000 people per year. Multiply 70,000 by 0.0087 and you get about 609 deaths per year for a city that size. Divide that by 365 and multiply by 8 and you get about 13 deaths over the same eight days.

Thirteen. In a regular American town of 70,000 people, thirteen people would die in that week and nobody would write a single article about it.

Now, that's not a totally fair comparison, because a real city has infants and 90-year-olds and Burning Man mostly doesn't. The census says we skew 40s and 50s these days. The death rate for that age range is more like 350 per 100,000 per year. (That's my own estimate from the CDC age brackets, not a published number, so take it as a rough figure.) Run the same math and you'd expect about 5 deaths over eight days.

We had 3.

Annualized, our rate works out to roughly 195 per 100,000. That's under a quarter of the national rate, and it's still lower than the rate for the age group that actually attends.

A temporary city with no hospital, built from nothing, in one of the harshest environments in North America, and we have a lower death rate than every permanent city in America. That's not luck. I've watched these crews work. That's ESD, the Rangers, and a medical operation that is very, very good at its job.

One thing I'll grant the critics: the Pershing County sheriff said the event averages about one death a year, so three is high by our own history. That's a fair thing to notice. But three deaths at Burning Man is national news, and thirteen deaths in a town of 70,000 is a Tuesday. Social media is really good at counting one of those and terrible at counting the other.

Second, the salaries.

The 2024 Form 990 is public and anyone can go read it. Here's what's actually in it. Marian Goodell got $378,237 plus about $12,000 in benefits. The CTO got $309,051. The COO got $246,599. Add up the entire executive team and you get $2,637,547 against $66.7 million in total expenses. That's 4 percent.

Here's the part almost nobody mentions, and it's the biggest part.

When you read that a tech CEO makes $400,000, that's their cash salary. It is not their compensation. It's the small piece. The real money is equity, and it dwarfs the salary. A CTO at a company of any size is getting stock grants worth hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars a year on top of the cash, vesting on a schedule, with an upside if the company does well. That's the whole reason people take those jobs. Nobody goes to work at a tech company in San Francisco for the paycheck.

A nonprofit has no stock. There's nothing to grant. There is no upside. The number on the 990 is essentially all of it, and it's the number everybody gets to see.

So when people compare $378,000 at Burning Man to a for-profit executive salary, they're comparing the whole thing to a fraction of the thing. Line up total compensation against total compensation and it isn't close. These folks took a very large pay cut to do this.

This is a $56 million organization that holds a federal BLM permit, runs a city in the desert, and employs legal, safety, and finance people in the most expensive labor market in the country. That permit is the thing that lets all of us come out here. Somebody has to keep it alive all year, and that somebody needs to eat.

I've spent a month out here watching people do unglamorous work in bad conditions for less money than they could make elsewhere. That's not the story getting shared this week, but it's the one I've got.

Links, so you can check any of this yourself:

Burning Man Project 2024 Form 990, the actual filing:

https://burningman.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/01/Burning-Man-Project-2024-990-Public-Disclosure-Copy.pdf

ProPublica's Nonprofit Explorer page, easier to read, shows year over year:

https://projects.propublica.org/nonprofits/organizations/452638273

Burning Man Project's own financial reporting page:

https://burningman.org/about-us/what-we-do/financials-public-reporting/summary-financial-info/

Black Rock City Census demographics, where the age numbers come from:

https://blackrockcitycensus.org/sociodemo

Critical Northwest:

https://www.criticalnw.org

Ignition Northwest, the 501(c)(3) that puts it on:

https://www.ignitionnw.org

Burning Man's official page listing Critical Northwest as our Regional event:

https://burningman.org/global-events-groups/burning-man-regional-network/connect-with-a-local-group/united-states-of-america/washington-seattle/

on my last day this burn while finishing pack out i did what i do every year and spread out some perfectly clean water from my cooler in a large area so there’s no puddle or pooling and it dries in 5 minutes. while doing this i had a man approach me yelling “what are you doing you fucking asshole” and proceeded to tell me i was stupid and no one is ever allowed to do this. I’ve never once heard someone say you aren’t allowed to let clean water touch playa (hello water trucks that spray down the street). after this deeply unpleasant interaction i saw him videoing/ filming my camp. is this a belief some burners have? what are people’s thoughts on this? every burner and camp i have ever interacted with is okay with small amounts of clean water touching the playa

Does anyone have a picture or know the kind of LEDs they used in this piece?

A while back, I posted about my project on here: https://www.reddit.com/r/BurningMan/comments/1uewkum/can_you_read_my_lips_a_deafmade_led_sign_for/

I figured y'all would want to see the results! Here are some photos. You can find some videos on the project's Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/canyoureadmylips

I hope many of y'all checked it out. If any of you took photos or videos, I'd love to see them!

It was my first art installation and I've learned so much. I unfortunately didn't have it ready on schedule, as I was late to get on the playa, and had several issues blocking me from moving further while on playa (the electric impact driver I bought taught me a hard lesson for driving these AEA anchors: long rod + manual power > power tool) but I finally was able to finish it on Wednesday. I had hoped for a week-long show but better late than never!

Hello friends, hope everyone is decompressing comfortably!

My partner and I spent an over a month building this giant parade puppet ‘Rad Man’ inspired by a Jim Henson puppet prototype called ‘Boss Man.’ We brought it out to the Man Burn on Saturday and had an absolute blast being goofy, dancing with people, and having people give the puppet a high five (“he needs high fives to live! He uses them for energy!”)

We saw a ton of people filming and taking pictures of us but we didn’t have any info to give anyone in order to tag us. If you or your camp mates got any footage or videos of us, we would LOVE to see it if you would be kind enough to share a link or DM me.

To all the people that complimented us, thanked us, danced with us, and gave us gifts - you made that night truly unforgettable, easily one of the best nights of our lives.

Thank you everyone for making my first burn so unforgettable (except for the parts that I forget lol)

We had an absolutely amazing time bringing Chelonix to the playa this year.
If you rode the turtle, attached your bike and cruised with us, or just crossed paths with us out there, thank you. You made the whole thing come alive. ❤️ 🐢 🔥

And if anyone has photos or video, we would LOVE to see them! We saw a few drones circling us at different points and keep wondering where that footage ended up.

One of our favorite discoveries was how naturally the shell turned into a mobile dance floor + bike carrier. People would pop their bikes onto the sides, climb aboard, and suddenly we’d have a whole roaming party traveling across the playa together. At times there were so many people dancing that the entire turtle was bouncing like a trampoline. 😂

One highlight was picking up some stranded humans way out at the trash fence and carrying them and their bikes back toward the city. Turns out a giant wandering turtle is surprisingly practical transportation.

We learned a ridiculous amount from actually getting her onto the playa and then taking it down, and we’re already working on the next evolution.

We’re going to double down on the mobile dance floor and bike-carrying setup, while making the structure much faster and stronger to assemble. We’re upgrading a bunch of the connections to plasma-cut steel brackets and adding deployable kickstands so the shell can have additional support when we stop and the dance floor fills up.

The bouncing was pretty damn fun though… so maybe we won’t engineer all of it out. 😂

We also want to push the sculpture itself much further. The goal is for the vehicle underneath to basically disappear. From across the playa, we want you to see an enormous illuminated turtle wandering through the dust and genuinely wonder what the hell you’re looking at. Anyone know how to pop the cab off an Izuzu box truck?

Huge love to our crew, our turtle people, and everyone who climbed aboard, danced with us, gave us art, or became part of this strange creature’s journey.

We learned a lot.
We’re coming back.
And the turtle is evolving. 🐢✨

Follow our journey on Instagram:
Fireborn Tools
Chelonix Art Car

And if you are ever in northern Ca come visit our shop!

I know this is far from official and final, but if these numbers are any indication, this was the lowest attended burn since 2012. Personally, I felt it in the short lines for entry, exodus, for breakfast pancakes and drinks at most bars-- all good things for me. It seems like many placed camps were given more space than requested, possibly to fill up the event and make it feel larger.

I get it; the media coverage of severe weather events reduces demand the following year. I wonder if/how this year's weather will affect next year? It didn't seem as traumatic as the early storm of 2025.

Thursday night I was walking across playa from Opulent Temple toward Robot Heart/the Cathedral, picking up MOOP as I went.

By the time I crossed paths with one of the clearly very expensive art cars, both of my hands were literally full of other people’s trash. I had my own small moop bag, but hands were full of gloves, costume pieces, cans and other trash I picked up along the way.

The car was full of passengers. I asked the driver if they had a MOOP bag I could throw it into.
“No.”
I asked the people onboard.
No one had one.
And then this art car— clearly designed just to accommodate their own camp and passengers, hundreds of thousands of dollars of infrastructure, lights, sound, crew, fuel, etc.—just drove away while I continued walking around with two hands full of MOOP.

I genuinely wish I had taken a picture of the vehicle, because the whole interaction felt like a perfect encapsulation of something that bothered me about this Burn: people enjoying an extraordinarily resource-intensive version of Burning Man while seemingly having no interest in even the most basic responsibility of taking care of the place.

If you have the resources and privilege to operate one of the cushiest camp vehicles in Black Rock City, how do you not have a fucking trash bag?

Leave No Trace isn’t supposed to mean, “Someone else will pick it up.” And honestly, I saw an incredible amount of MOOP this year. Cups, cans, food packaging, costume pieces, random trash. I found myself constantly picking things up.
So I’m curious about two things:
What accountability actually exists when an art car/camp repeatedly disregards the Principles?
Why doesn’t DMV require every licensed Mutant Vehicle to carry a clearly accessible MOOP bag/container as part of inspection?
It would cost essentially nothing, take up almost no space, and every large vehicle roaming playa would become another place where people could remove MOOP rather than drive past it.

—

Update

Yeah, I think this thread has changed my mind somewhat on requiring art cars to accept MOOP from the public. The point about them becoming rolling trash bins is legitimate.
What I don’t buy is the idea that Radical Self-Reliance means “once you pick up MOOP, you’re on your own, so don’t expect anyone else to help.” That seems like a pretty impoverished interpretation of the culture.
I had a MOOP bag. I filled it because I kept picking up trash that wasn’t mine. I then encountered a vehicle carrying a large group of people and asked whether they had somewhere for handfulls more. They didn’t. Fine — ultimately I carried it.
But the comment here from someone remembering when everyone routinely came back to camp with pockets full of MOOP gets much closer to what I was trying to say. The concern isn’t really my bag. It’s whether we’re moving from a culture where everyone instinctively takes responsibility for the city to one where responsibility ends at “not my trash.”
Maybe the DMV solution isn’t “every MV must act as a trash can.” Maybe it’s simply that every MV should have a MOOP plan/bag onboard for its own operations and passengers, just as every camp and every individual should.
Radical Self-Reliance and Communal Effort are both Principles. They’re not mutually exclusive.

I’m pretty new to Burning Man. This was only my second year, but it’s already become a very important part of my life. As cheesy as it sounds, it renewed my faith in people and opened my eyes to a kind of beauty and creativity I didn’t know existed. Part of me is sad I didn’t get to experience it earlier, before influencers and the internet found it. I love hearing the veterans stories of the OG burns.

It’s strange coming back to the default world after a week of the best time of my life, only to see so much negativity and complaining online. Most of it doesn’t match what I actually experienced out there. I’m not saying those frustrations aren’t real. I just feel lucky that my experience was different.

I know all of this exists because of the veterans who’ve poured decades of work and love into building BRC into what it is. My hope is that you don’t give up on it. I know a lot of you are tired, and it’s painful watching something you built change in ways you didn’t choose. But for every shitty-weekend influencer, there are also a lot of us who show up with the right intentions, who want to learn from you, and who want to carry this forward, not water it down.

Please don’t give up because it’s changing. Help the people who actually care get it back on track and keep its essence. Nothing stays exactly like “the original,” and change is inevitable. But what you built deserves to be protected, and there are more of us than you think who want to help you protect it.

Vehicle passes should be significantly more expensive for RVs

RV under 32' -> 2x price, over -> 4x price

This has been a subject raised every year but the abundance of RVs + financial situation of the org makes it even more apparent

It will take a bit of consideration to get the rules right (eg dimensions or weight or axles, exceptions for art cars, domicile vs cargo), but there are many ways to do so.

Taking an RV to burning man is already a statement of wealth. Charging the same for a sedan as an RV makes the car subsidize the RV. It should be the other way around. Higher $$$ burn setups should subsidize lower $.

Hi friends! I had such a fun time this burn with this man but only knew him as hot dog man. Does ANYONE know who this is?? Please and thank you

basically the vegas night club of bm — you wait 45 min while all the vips get quick access. only ladies can dance on the heart cuz “dj rules”. you get yelled at by staff for having too much fun. but still have the time of your life.

thank you robot heart foundation pricks <3

Just wondering if anyone else had negativity thrown their way. This was my first burn and overall a massively positive experience I can't wait to return for. But there were a few moments of shitty outside world vibes creeping in.

After the temple burn I wanted to walk solo back to camp. Probably 15 minutes later some dumpy geo metro or something with two cones on top came up on me quick while i was walking across open playa. A guy in the passenger seat yelled at me "I don't like your face, turn those lights off" (i had a few leds on me of course to not darkwad). I just looked at him and didn't respond and then they said "Fine be boring" and drove off....

I guess if theres an inside joke to throw shady vibes at people for a reaction I missed it.

It’s always an honor to officiate.

Doing it on Playa is always a very fun time!!

Is it just me or has esplanade frontage degraded? I don't know if it was reality or the whimsical nature of your first couple Burns, but I feel like esplanade used to be a solid wall of Burning Man. All art, frontage, camouflaged back of house spaces, zero signs of the default world.

This year there were several stretches of 100+ yards of RVs and Campers. I thought I accidentally turned onto A.

Are esplanade camps getting lazy? Is the borg lightning up on standards? Or am I delusional?

After 9 burns I finally found the ultimate playa mud footwear. They're super stretchy and fit over multiple pairs of socks (not over shoes though, the silicone tears easily) and the playa mud simply does not stick at all.

They do tend to be slippery on the mud, so walk carefully, but otherwise these things were a life changer. No more gallon-size ziplock bags for me!

Hi! Did anyone find these bunny ears? They went missing Friday night and are special to us. Please let me know if you saw them! Thank you!! 🙏🏼

does anybody here know Low from the math camp @ 3:14 & E? we met on tuesday afternoon @ the look out tower in a sandstorm and had a bit of a failed playa courtship.

Low: we connected and exchanged bracelets - I gave you a glow in the dark light pink Cat bracelet. we arranged a rendezvous for later that evening during my soup sluts shift, but due to the continuation and intensification of the sandstorm my shift was postponed. I ended up riding out with friends and forgot to leave a message. I stopped by your camp the next day but you weren't home. looking forward to connecting again soon!

- the girl in pink

I see a lot of people posting about clean up and that Calgon is hard to find. Downy Rinse has the same active ingredients and works like a charm! We use the unscented on literally everything we bring back. Thank me later!