Up to 15,000 hipsters, primed to tune in, camp out, and burn on, are beginning to make their way to Nevada's Black Rock Desert for the week-long Burning Man Festival. The groupies hail predominantly from the West Coast, and their annual return to the desert marks what may be the world's largest tribute to alternative self-expressionism. This year's theme is "The Great Above, Aliens, and the Space Age."

Since its humble beginnings on San Francisco's Baker Beach in 1990, Burning Man has experienced explosive growth. What began as a casual gathering of self-confessed weirdos has become a massive undertaking with a million-dollar price tag, forced to assume the organizational trappings of a small city.

"Last year we lost US$250,000 dollars because the local officials caught us off guard," said Crimson Rose, performance and administration manager for Limited Liability Company (LLC), the festival's organizers with a history of run-ins with locals.

Last year, officials of Washoe County, Nevada, where the Black Rock Desert lies, didn't grant Burning Man a festival license until the day before the the bash began. Then county officials confiscated $300,000 in admission fees to pay for the 44 fire and medical personnel the permit required.

To afford the Burning Man community a foothold in Washoe, earlier this year an LLC member known as Flash, moved to Gerlach, became manager of the Black Rock Saloon, and set up the Gerlach Chamber of Commerce. He helped convince the locals to view Burning Man as a business opportunity instead of a drain.

The LLC now has a team of 15 volunteers training with the US Bureau of Land Management to make sure the remote site isn't harmed. The LCC also has mustered its own police force -- called the Black Rock Rangers -- and medical personnel. The company also has several licensed pyrotechnicians on staff and onsite.

In recent years, Burning Man has attracted, much to the chagrin of many old timers, a certain crowd of rubberneckers: yuppies who cruise into the desert with their four-wheel-drive suburban assault vehicles to watch naked hippies frolic. Rose said she wants more visitors to "participate rather than spectate."

Although torching the 40-foot man will still be the focal point of the festival, this year there will be 430 interactive camps, with themes ranging from alien invasions to Catholic confessionals.

The event has always drawn artists who like to work on a large, if not larger-than-life, scale. "It's one of the only places where you can build an artistic installation on a very large scale or do performance art that involves fire," Rose said.

This year's new attractions include the Nebulous Entity, a 30-foot luminous float that sucks people up, absorbs their information, then spits them back out; The One Tree, a giant installation that will spit water by day and fire by night; and a 12-foot dandelion with a blast furnace at its base and glowing glass rods at the top.

"Each year the theme camps get more sophisticated," said Evil Pippi [Candace Locklear], Burning Man's media maven of the playa, clearly referring to the complexity, rather than the flavor of the exhibits.

Private individuals, not companies, run most of the installations, theme camps, and performance activities. In recent years, organizers have had to resist many offers from commercial interests.

"Companies tend to view Burning Man as the perfect marketing event. But we don't want it to become a trade show like Earth Day," said Evil Pippi.

For example, Spin magazine planned to distribute free magazines, and Nantucket Nectar wanted to airlift in two hundred cases of free juice. Both were discouraged from using Burning Man as a PR stunt.

"We don't want people to stand in line for an ATM to buy a life," said Rose. "People tend to deal with each other on a different level if there is no money involved. Besides, if you're naked, where are you going to keep your plastic?"

But what is Burning Man really about, if not to some extent, a free-market economy? Visitors have to make up there own mind, Rose said. "What is so exciting is that we really don't say what Burning Man is. We want you to tell us what it means to you."

But it's not for everybody. You got to be willing to survive in the desert for 72 hours, she adds.

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