BLACK ROCK CITY, Nevada, (Reuters) – Burning Man organizers reopened the road leading out of the remote Nevada desert festival yesterday, allowing tens of thousands of attendees to escape after they had been trapped for days by mud.
But many of the 64,000 people who remained on site as of Monday may choose to stay one more night and watch the festival’s giant namesake effigy go up in flames on Monday night, one day past schedule.
Unexpected summer rain turned the weeklong, annual counterculture arts festival into a muddy nightmare.
When the road finally reopened, a long line of vehicles snaked through the desert, inching along in an epic traffic jam as event organizers urged drivers to take it slowly on Monday and consider delaying their departure until Tuesday to reduce traffic.
Eventually the traffic formed into an organized exodus 10 lanes wide, an armada of recreational vehicles and cars seeking the promised land of a hot shower and a clean bed.
The way out is a 5-mile (8-km) dirt road to the nearest highway. The Burning Man Traffic account on social media platform X estimated “exodus” travel time at 5-1/2 hours.
The site in Nevada’s Black Rock Desert sits atop the former Lake Lahontan, which the U.S. Geological Society describes as a deep lake that existed as recently as 15,000 years ago. It is about 15 miles (25 km) from the nearest town and 110 miles (177 km) north of Reno.
For days, up to 70,000 people were ordered to stay put and conserve food and water as officials closed the roads, requiring vehicles to stay put.
“People are taking care of each other. We have food. We have provisions. We have shelter. So it’s really kind of a group effort to get through this,” said attendee David Date.
One person died at the event, officials said on Sunday, providing few details. An investigation was under way.
“It really looked apocalyptic,” said festival volunteer Evi Airy. “When you see the people walking barefoot in such a cold with the children. Some people have a small child here like three years old, four years old. I don’t know how they survived.”
Even before the gate was officially open, campers started leaving while it was still dark. Stuck vehicles littered the roads in the makeshift Black Rock City that springs up for the festival, some of them horizontally blocking lanes roads because they had lost control.
The desert path to the main gate was a graveyard of marooned cars, which will challenge the event’s ethos of “leave no trace” of human activity in the desert.
