The Longest, Shortest Burn — And The One I Needed
The start of Burning Man 2025 featured all the rocky weather conditions the festival is known for, and despite that, it was amazing.
There is a saying among Burners: ‘It was not the Burn I wanted, but the Burn I needed.’
For most of this year I wasn’t even planning on going to Burning Man, as my camp—The Nest of Magical Creatures—was taking a year off. Then some life events happened, and I decided with two weeks to spare to go to the Burn after all. I found myself a new camp to be with, Oshan’s KeyHaus tea house, which was in a hub with the fine folks from Foamy Homies (aka Dr. Bronner’s), The Heart Collective, and the Zendo Project. The playa was calling me, and I felt excited to return Home.
Due to wanting to launch Love First beforehand, however, I was mostly busy with that and packing & prep, so I lacked time to really think about what kind of Burn I wanted. As a result, I pretty much just got the Burn I needed — and I’m not mad about it. Serendipity reigns supreme in my life, and the Playa’s magic started rearing its head well before I’d even finished packing.
After getting to my camp’s plot of land early Friday morning of Build week, I discovered that not only was our camp truck not there, nor our build truck, but our build lead was delayed as well. I ended up stepping up as build lead for our shade structure, after our build materials at least finally arrived in the wee hours of Saturday. (The rest of the camp materials would take another day and a half.)
Stepping into leadership felt good, and I learned a lot. For those of you who missed the news, Saturday late afternoon a massive dust– and sandstorm hit Black Rock City with wind gusts of up to 70 miles per hour. It came out of nowhere, as I was calmly grabbing an item from my car for a campmate only to turn around and see my Shiftpod being blown over and into our 40 × 100 ft shade structure — which we had just finished building. I rushed to grab onto it and prevent it from blowing away altogether—along with a 5 gallon water jug and a queen sized mattress inside of it!—and as I did so, I watched in horror as our shade structure turned into an unwilling 400-square-foot windsail.
It was a moment of rare genuine fear for me. Not so much for myself, though I did worry about getting hit in the back from flying debris, which would be impossible to dodge given the largely 0% visibility during the storm. Mainly I was afraid our shade structure would go flying and/or injury someone severely. As impromptu build lead, it would’ve been on me, as I made the executive decisions not to bolt down every single interior post (despite our annoyingly 10ft-tall posts).
I over-estimated the elements, and our shade structure paid the price.
After a campmate ratcheted down my Shiftpod so I could finally let go of it, I tried holding on to the shade structure to keep it from falling apart. It was to no avail, as I witnessed our 40 × 100 feet of metal and tarps start waving and rolling in the windstorm, in ways you genuinely never want to see happen before your eyes. Eventually, the wind tore through the entire thing, and pieces were torn apart and started falling down. The only pieces left standing after 2.5 hours of pummeling winds were the posts ratcheted down, and many of them had been bent towards the ground as well.
The next morning we surveilled the damages, and organized our materials in three piles: still good condition, usable but somewhat bent, and bent beyond usability. About 20% of our conduit and tarps was in the latter pile.
We rebuilt our shade structure at half the size, this time making sure to Bolt The Fuck™ out of every single post, and finished that work on Sunday afternoon only to be told, right thereafter, that another windstorm was coming soon. And this one would add rain.
We deliberated as a group on how to prepare for it. One campmate suggested cutting U-shaped holes in the tarps because “that’s what they do on sailboats,” but I objected this on the grounds that I believed the tarps would just get torn apart entirely by the wind, as tarp and windsail are not the same. (This was later confirmed to me by the Foamy Homies’ resident build experts.) In the end, the group came to consensus on another campmate’s suggestion: rolling the tarps up, so they’d be relatively easy to put back up after the storm, but wouldn’t turn our structure into a windsail again. This solution proved perfect, and as the storm hit that night I checked and saw our shade structure not even move an inch. A refreshing change from the night before!
The amount of rain was initially a little worrisome, but by the time it subsided I wasn’t even slightly perturbed by it. Mudburn 2023 was “at least four times this amount”, and while not ideal — a little rain is great, to tamp down the dust; a lot of rain makes the roads a nightmare — it wasn’t anything troublesome.
Or so I thought.
Monday of Burn week brought even more wind and rain, but this time we kept the tarps up and decided to test the integrity of our shade structure. Also, at this point we had moved all our tents in underneath it and, due to how crowded we had to be with only half the shade as planned, using ladders to undo and redo tarps was no longer very viable. Things held up beautifully, and I finally felt truly good about my impromptu build lead efforts. Even through all the rain that Tuesday brought, this time enough to turn the playa into Mudburn 2.0.
Building continued through Wednesday and beyond, but I was able to find some moments of adventure and exploration for myself here and there. All in all, I spent about 70% of my Burn doing build and strike, and 30% exploring, adventuring, dancing, or eating the incredibly delicious food our hub provided.
The sad news was that my bike was unusable the entire Burn, so I never got to go venture out to find friends. Thankfully, many friends visited our tea house, and I kept running into friends every time I left my camp—often right outside on our very intersection! And my girlfriend and I were able to bike around on her e-bike together and see a ton of art, music, and beautiful sunrises.
I didn’t have a vision for what I wanted my Burn to be, other than a releasing of some emotional bonds and a cleansing of my spirit, and it delivered well on those. What I got beyond that was some major growth in leadership skills during times of crisis and need, and I feel confident that this outcome will serve me well for the future.
The Man burns in 362 days. )'(
