Burning Man is an annual week-long gathering in Nevada's 📝Black Rock Desert built around community, 📝art, 📝Radical Self-Expression, and 📝self-reliance, culminating in the burning of a large wooden effigy called the Man.
The event began as a solstice bonfire on San Francisco's Baker Beach in 1986 and moved to the desert in 1990, where participants now build Black Rock City, a temporary city roughly 100 miles north-northeast of Reno, each year around Labor Day. There are no headliners or scheduled performers: participants create the art, camps, and events, guided by the 📝Ten Principles co-founder 📝Larry Harvey articulated in 2004, including 📝radical inclusion, gifting, 📝decommodification, and 📝leaving no trace. Its vocabulary is collected in the 📝Burning Man Glossary.
The nonprofit Burning Man Project entered a period of financial strain after 2024, when the event failed to sell out for the first time since 2011 and the organization reported a $10.7M net loss on $57.5M in revenue. CEO Marian Goodell launched a $20M fundraising campaign and restructured ticketing around a baseline cost per participant of about $750. The 2025 event, Tomorrow Today, was hit by severe dust storms and flooding. The 2026 event, 📝Axis Mundi, ran August 30 to September 7 under a Bureau of Land Management permit that caps attendance at 80,000.
I first attended in 2017, camping with 📝Swing City, a group formed from the 📝Original Muscle Beach community, and returned in 2025 with my housemates and BFFs, 📝Chase Riner and 📝Taylor Montague. It's the stupidest thing you'll ever do on purpose.
Related
Contexts
- 🏷️#burning-man (this is the 📝Root Memo)
- 🏷️#music-festival (See: 📝Music Festivals)