the Event | the Project | the Community | Search | 1997 Retrospective | Email

Important News Update

Burning Man on the Hualapai Playa

On Monday, July 28th several Washoe County agency representatives met at the Burning Man event site 17 miles north of Gerlach, Nevada. As many of you know, and as the web site and Building Burning Man newsletters stated, we were previously relegated to camping on the sage and scrub brush that surrounds the Hualapai Playa, with art and the man on the privately owned portion of the adjacent playa.

This has now changed.

We will be camping entirely on the Hualapai Playa. This should please nearly every participant as much as it pleases the County and Burning Man 1997 workers.

Careful examination of the maps along with a GPS and professional survey revealed that as the playa fills and recedes it actually has increased in size each year, and the portion of the playa owned by the rancher is in fact significantly larger than we had first understood.

The maps are from 1973. The playa boundary has encroached upon the land significantly in the past 24 years. We will be able to take advantage of this and move the entire camp onto the playa. Participants and art installations will still be exclusively on the privately owned portion of the dry lake bed. This will not effect our density as we will be configuring the camp layout in such a way as to utilize our new found space.

About the New Site

by Zoka the god of music (Michael Zelner: michaelz@zoka.com)

Picture yourself in a boat on a river, with tangerine trees and marmalade skies. Now snap out of it, open your eyes and look around. Your surroundings are not quite as surreal, but are a far cry from your usual neighborhood. You're on the shores of Hualapai Flat, a dry alkali lake bed about nine miles west of the Black Rock Desert. It's immediately obvious that this playa is not nearly as big as Black Rock's -- but it's big enough.

Think of it as the Personal Pan Playa.

If you walk straight out onto the playa, you quickly realize how big it really is compared to human scale. Remember when you were a little kid, and you paddled a little plastic pool raft out into the ocean? People on the beach soon looked very small, and you began to think that you were miles from shore, even though you were probably no more than a couple of hundred yards away. That's the sort of feeling you get walking out on the playa.

In many ways, the area is more interesting than Black Rock because of the mountains, range lands, and vistas surrounding it. Standing on the shoreline of the playa looking north, you see the distant peaks of the colorful Calico Mountains, a fleck of white near the horizon indicates the presence of Fly Hot Springs and its geyser shooting skyward.

To the east, across the playa, are more distant mountains and blackened cinder cone. Behind you, to the west, the grasslands of our campground turn to sage brush as your gaze moves up the slope. Distances are deceiving here, for it seems a short walk from here to the Granite Mountain. It looms commandingly above this scene, its peaks still clad with snow.

If you went to Burning Man on the Black Rock Desert, you'll find this new site is more featured, more complex. But it's not really a question of whether it's better or worse -- it's just not the same. In fact, every year Burning Man has been different. This year will be more different. But one thing is the same: the Burning Man, in all its uniqueness, will return.

Now get ready to go out and express yourself on your personal playa.