If you'd like to see reports from previous years, you can go to my main BM page, and especially if you don't know burning man, you should read my 2002 page which has more of an introduction.

If you'd like to use my pictures in a commercial setting, drop me a line to discuss and I can give you full resolution pictures (marc<at>merlins.org).
If you want to say thanks with cash, please donate money to one of the many camps and art installations that are often out of pocket after burning man, be it Opulent Temple or others.

Of course, BM was a lot bigger this year than last time I went in 2007. I tried to bike as many streets as possible to see all the camps people built, but even after 4 days of biking and 127 miles biked :) I had to exclude the outer streets. Here's what I was able to see:

It had been 7 years since my last trip to burning man in 2007 (if you read my 2007 report it has some hints why). I think the novelty hard worn off a bit, and the time to prepare before and clean up after made it a bit less fun for me (smarter people take gear make it playa gear and never use it anywhere else again, but somehow I never quite did that since a fair amount of my gear I use elsewhere too and feel bad buying double just for that).
If that makes me a softie and loser in the eyes of hard core burners, sorry :) (and I still have 7 burns so far, so hopefully that's not too bad :) )
You can go to my main BM page if you'd like to see my other burns.

Anyway, this was the year I woke up and decided to go back, just to learn that getting tickets was now near impossible. Thankfully my friend Joyce was able to locate a spare one for me, and we flew in together:

The fun thing about burning man was how in a city of 50,000 people I ran into several people I hadn't seen in a long time, including Gen, as well as Michael and Blondie whom I recognized from their back at night while biking by. Talk about the odds :)

welcome home

my friend Gen, found volunteering at playa info

The Tech Side

remote controllable chair with driving cameras

Black Rock City

I always try to start with the city itself, visiting installations from BMorg:
Center Camp:

The Artery is a good place to go to find out where the major art installations are, as well as which burns are going to happen on a given day (you can look at the burn radius in red dots to see how big that burn will be):

this is the map where you look for the burn radius in red dots

Since last time I've been, there are now post offices and ice at 3, 6, and 9 o'clock, which considering the size of the city is a great thing:

ice at 3, 6, and 9 o'clock

we also had 3 post offices

indeed there is no team in fuck you :)

thank you to the folks providing medical care

lamp lighters every night helped us out with light

One treat at Burning Man is always the sunrises and sunset:

It's always fun to go check out the deep playa to see the contrast from the city:

Weather is also interesting, between dust storms (no big ones this year), rain and rainbows (just missed a big rain on monday before arriving), and dust devils:

Night pictures of the playa are also nice:

One thing to do during burning man is to bike to the trash fence, look a random patches of lit art, and look back at the city:

I found this kangaroo mouse, so cute

If you're lucky, you'll find a structure you can climb for better view (here Embrace):

Art

this bird would fly when you pedalled

not sure if it fits in a porta potty, but still helpful :)

playa art on wheels

Of course, night time gets even more interesting :)

this control console let you change the color patterns on this sculpture

the creator explaining how you could program the flashing patterns

Camps

During the day, I spent most of my time visiting all the camps I could see. I'll start with a few pictures of Red Lightening, where I happened to be staying:

my tent with shade and power :)

never saw these tesla coils working, what a shame

time for a nap in some shade, this definitely had customers :)

yes, glitter can be used as full body sunscreen :)

they promised to go play by the trash fence at midnight. Somehow I didn't find them there, wasn't too surprised :)

day clubbing

bad ass tatoos, impressed...

Irish bar with singing

another afternoon nap pod

'gas' station :)

went there to attend a talk about astrophysics and more, no kidding :)

I will need to get my EZpass for next year :)

flashing your junk got you a snow cone faster :)

billiards bowling

Of course, it's interesting to go see camps a night too, the other city :)

Of course, thunderdome was still there, still a crowd favourite:

Sound Camps

Opulent Temple had a great lineup announced for all

Carl Cox

White Ocean had a Trance night on wednesday, which I put on its own page, and more pictures are below:

White Ocean's lineup was a bit harder to read, and no set times :)

Sander Van Doorn

Oakey, spinning in his own camp

handing off to Above and Beyond

There were many more sound camps, but I just couldn't be everywhere. Here are some pictures:

Root Society was the major sound camp across the playa at 2 o'clock.

DanceTronauts had an awesome mobile installation:

People

BM of course is known for its parades. I happened to catch critical dicks going by (critical tits was whited out by a dust storm):

The billion bunny march is always fun too :)

nice :)

Vehicles

I'm on a motherfing yacht! :)

I actually found the number of crazy bikes went down, but still caught a few:

And then this:

Speaking of bikes, when biking in the middle of the playa at night, more light is usually better (as soon as you don't blind people coming the other way). It's most useful for seeing sand pits ahead of you and steer around them:

this is a normal high power 1000 lumen flashlight

My 3000+ lumen firesword, love it :)

Miscellaneous:

water truck to to make the roads easier to use

nice :)

DPW, Department of Public Works:

propane refills for all your fire needs :)

Other random vehicles (not art cars) seen during the week:

Fires

After people and vehicles, I have my usual Fire picture section, fire shows, fire dancing, fire structures, and random burns:

Alien Siege had an awesome structure and burn. The pre-burn show easily rivalled the man's, the alien was attacked with pyrotechnics and fought back by shooting at its attackers:

nah, it's not even hot :)

Other miscellaneous burns:

Embrace

Very unusually the burn was at 07:00, which meant I went to bed for 2h and got back up somehow to go see it. That was tough... This was supposed to be for lower winds, but honestly the winds at 04:00 are pretty much always lower than winds after the sun rise. Anyway, the structure wasn't chiefly designed for being burn, so the outer skin went up in blaze quickly, and the inside structure which was very soundly built never came down. I personally gave up after 1h of waiting and went to bed :)

it was touching to see them burn together

this is as far as it burned :)

Temple Of Grace

The Man

Then came the burn:

ranger meeting before the burn

lots of pyrotechnics, that was impressive

this is why I check the wind direction and don't sit downwind :)

the core man was strong, it didn't really burn or fall

note how the legs were cut, but that didn't help

But finally, after way too long, the man fell down, but it wasn't really a clean burn, there were beams across the ground, so the dancing around the fire wasn't easy when you had to jump over half burning beams that were still lying across.

nothing bad can happen here if you jump high enough :)

Conclusion

Since it had been 7 years since my last bm, the changes are obviously bigger with more people. We didn't get any severe weather after monday (I arrived tuesday), so that part wasn't too bad for a change.
I think I made the mistake to try and go see as many streets as possible, and ended up not spending enough time on the center playa to see the cool stuff there. At night, it was a bit gruesome to get so little sleep and twice wake up for sunrise (once for a DJ set, and once for the Embrace burn).

While the non burning man with no platform is hopefully something that will get remedied next year, I otherwise found that BM didn't change in worse ways (as in the "it was so much better last year" meme), which is a good thing. The ticket limit, auctions and scalping are a problem, but on the plus side while BMorg actually did a better job in the last 7 years keeping the ticket prices from rising as much. Ironically the only sane way to fix the ticket problem is to make an auction with higher prices, cutting out people who can't pay as much.
I was just not very impressed with some law enforcement apparently having sting underage officers (between 18 and 21) trying to get alcohol without being carded to bust camps. I'm not an alcohol person, but having to carry your ID around the playa is kind of a stupid thing if you lose it. That said, all officers I saw were actually doing a good job of trying to enforce the law in helpful ways as opposed to unhelpful ones. Hopefully the trend continues in that direction. Hopefully the cowboy save the world local sheriff or DEA agents are an exception.

Anyway, after 6 days it was time to fly home, 'till next time :)

traffic pulsing on the way out (allows you to wait with your engine off/take a nap)

Tips

More regular tips from others:

Thanks