Burning Man survived a muddy quagmire. Will the experiment last 30 more years?
The blank canvass of desert wilderness in northern Nevada seemed the perfect place in 1992 for artistic anarchists to relocate their annual burning of a towering, anonymous effigy. It was goodbye to San Francisco’s Baker Beach, hello to the Nevada playa, the long-ago floor of an inland sea.
The tiny gathering became Burning Man's surrealistic circus, fueled by acts of kindness and avant-garde theatrics, sometimes with a dose of hallucinogens or nudity. The spectacle flourished as the festival ballooned over the next three decades.
Some say it grew too much, too fast.
Things came to a head in 2011 when tickets sold out for the first time. Organizers responded with a short-lived lottery system
