Black Rock Desert, The Playa and the Festival at the Edge of Everything

One hundred and ten miles north of Reno, the road leaves the last ranch behind and descends onto a surface so flat and white and vast that it feels like a mistake, as if the landscape itself ran out of ideas and just stopped. The Black Rock Desert playa stretches across roughly two hundred square miles, and according to a detailed topographic survey, its elevation varies by just one meter across that entire area. It is one of the flattest surfaces on earth. It is also, for one week each year, the third or fourth largest city in Nevada.

The playa is the dry bed of another arm of ancient Lake Lahontan. Fine sediment settled on the lake bottom over thousands of years, leaving a surface of such extraordinary hardness and smoothness that land-speed record attempts have been made here. Andy Green drove a jet-powered car across the Black Rock in nineteen ninety-seven to break the sound barrier on land. The stillness of the place is almost physical.

In the summer of nineteen ninety, a group of artists from San Francisco who had been burning a wooden figure on Baker Beach for four years brought their event to the playa. The police had stopped them in the city. The desert had no police. Larry Harvey and Jerry James had started the tradition in nineteen eighty-six with a small gathering and a bonfire on a California beach; on the Black Rock, the event found the scale it needed. By nineteen ninety-seven, ten thousand people were making the drive from Reno. By two thousand and thirteen, more than sixty-nine thousand attended.

Burning Man became something without a clean category, part art festival, part temporary city, part annual ritual of a subculture that had coalesced around it. The Bureau of Land Management now issues a permit for the event under a formal Special Recreation Permit. The playa returns to empty afterward, swept and raked under the event's Leave No Trace rules, the deep silence settling back over the alkali flat where nothing much grows and everything seems, at the right time of year, exactly possible.