By Simone Wilson
Not sure how exactly this happened, but it seems I’ve become a Burning Man person. I just crawled back to Healdsburg last week from my fourth Burn; my Prius is still caked in telltale white dust. Everyone has been asking me what it was like out there. I’ll try my best to explain.
Living for 10 days this summer in the pop-up desert community of ~70,000 that is Black Rock City, Nevada—a.k.a. Burning Man—felt like snipping the mental constructs that tie down my everyday reality and entering a brutalist dream world. It left me spiritually refreshed and physically spent.
The first step involved letting my phone die in the corner of my tent. Elon Musk’s Starlink internet hubs have made wifi more accessible at the Burn in recent years, especially in the fancy camps with lots of amenities—but I didn’t come across any of them this year, and wasn’t really looking. So within a couple of days, I already felt high off the simple act of disconnecting.
The news cycle melted away. A steady flow of fascinating humans replaced my social-media feeds. Whatever was in front of me at any given moment came into rich focus.
It felt like new synapses began to form. I would run into an acquaintance or hear a name or find a flier that would lead me down another rabbit hole. Infinite such holes exist at Burning Man—probably in the outside world, too, but here they’re more obvious. Walk into any of the 1,500-plus theme camps dotting the Black Rock City grid, and one is swept into another mini-universe, filled with its own set of games and shticks and nooks.
For instance, at the camp I call home—a Western saloon named “Desperados”—we construct a Deadwood-esque outpost each year where we serve up whiskey and pickles, dance on the bar, throw people out the saloon doors and orchestrate other debauchery. In 2024, we also added an Old West-style courthouse where townspeople could settle their disputes. The camp takes a ton of manual labor to build and tear down—amid a grueling whiteout dust storm this time, no less—but it’s an absolute riot, and one of my favorite (temporal) places on Earth.
Other fun camps: the Dr. Bronner’s spa experience; a massive, gothic “Thunderdome” where fighters face off with foam weapons; Naked Heart, which hosts dozens of therapeutic workshops per day including breathwork, tantra and more; Golden Guy, an elaborate Tokyo street scene lined with hole-in-the-wall bars; and myriad more spaces to lounge, eat, dance and be merry.
Traffic on the streets between camps consists of people on foot and bicycle, all dressed up in futuristic desert garb, as well as hundreds of art cars—or “mutant vehicles,” a la Mad Max—which take the form of anything from a yacht to a deep-sea creature to a sofa. One of the most freeing moves at the Burn is to hop onto an art car and see where it takes you.
The other major zone of play is a vast, open area beyond the city grid, called “deep playa.” This is where Burning Man’s two most classic structures—a huge statue of a man, and a stunning wooden “temple” for mourning loved ones—are burned at week’s end, during two nights of catharsis. Deep playa is also where artists install their large, interactive sculptures. My brother Luke Wilson, who co-leads Desperados, helped build a freestanding treehouse of sorts this year with his colleagues from O2 Treehouse, a Petaluma-based startup. They fashioned a light-and-sound installation inside the treehouse that mimicked brain synapses.
This structure was a sanctuary from the dust and heat, where people could park their bikes and climb into another little world. Not too far away, a different group built a giant sunken pirate ship and sea serpent, emerging from the sand. Yet one more exceptional way to get lost in the labyrinth.
I think also because most folks traversing Black Rock City are so open by nature, the whole premise being exploration, the potential for serendipity skyrockets. In fact, the theme this year was “Curious and Curiouser”—a nod to Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland, which organizers describe as a “topsy-turvy world immune to the laws of common sense.” Sounds about right.
