A wooden figure stands silent watching over the desert. His body is expertly crafted, his spiral limbs circle up to join his angular body. His triangular grid-like face is expressionless. At the end of the week he will be burned in front of thousands.

Meanwhile, a community will be created around him, and it will be called Black Rock City. People will come from all over the globe to participate. They will bring sculptures, records, cars, flame-throwers, fireworks, paragliders, costumes and anything else they can manage to squeeze into their U-Hauls, and they will live together under the burning Nevada sun and the clear star-studded nights for eight days. Most importantly, they will bring their imaginations and their deep desire for a wilder, more playful way of life.

The first Burning Man Festival began the Summer Solstice of 1986 when Larry Harvey and Jerry James built an eight-foot tall wooden figure and ignited it on Baker Beach in San Francisco. As the flames began to swallow the structure, the crowd doubled. Harvey and James realized the power that the burning of this wooden man had created.

Burning Man is an experiment in community. This year there were over 350 theme camps. Each of these theme camps was its own mini-universe, from the Space Lounge dome constructed entirely out of CDs, to Infinity Camp, where stomping house rhythms pumped from sunset until morning. Black Rock City and the surrounding desert expanse—known as the playa—seemed strangely immune to law enforcement as we know it in America. Austin Lambe, a video artist based in San Francisco, experienced this peculiar freedom four years ago at Burning Man.

"I was driving across the playa with a DJ station on board with an outdoor sound system plugged into the generator and there were several naked women up on the roof. I was drinking a beer. The next thing I knew, these two state troopers pulled up behind me. I thought, ‘Fuck, I’m going to get deported for this, they’re not just going to lock me up; there are naked people on the roof, I’m drinking, and I’m flying across the desert.’ But they just drove right on by. At that second, I got it. You can do what you want out here, as long as you respect other people."

While Nevada Sheriffs and Deputies were at the event, they were a small, unimposing presence. The main group of people who helped keep order and safety at the festival were the Black Rock Rangers, Burning Man’s own protection / enforcement agency. The founder of these rangers, Michael Mikel, is renowned for his ability to be in two places at once, a valuable talent considering the size of the playa. Known better as the Danger Ranger, Mikel modeled the Black Rock Rangers on the frontier rangers that preserved law and order in the old American West.

"In the frontier states, you had to be sensitive to the needs of the community," says Mikel. "Similarly, in Black Rock City, laws need to be adaptable enough to meet the needs of the community, to ensure that justice and equality are here for all of our citizens. This is probably the freest community in the world today, yet along with that freedom comes a lot of responsibility."

A strong statement perhaps, but a couple of hours on the playa and you start to wonder if he might be right. The community at Burning Man is strongly influenced by the art and values of San Francisco, and so exhibits some of that city’s cultural and artistic wealth. Yet the environment of the Black Rock Desert is not a mini-San Francisco; it is its own world that begs for excess, begs for us to push ourselves to the edge of what we consider acceptable. Black Rock City is centered around the sense of exploring personal and societal boundaries. As we step outside our everyday persona and look upon ourselves with virgin, outlandish eyes, we come to new realizations about who we really are.

One of the most remarkable aspects of Burning Man is how much time and planning goes into the relatively short festival. Yet the ripples of attending Burning Man can be felt by participants months after the event.

"We create this city which exists for just a few days and then we wipe it all out. The only thing that’s left is the experiences of the people who come out here, and information. We use this information to recreate the next city, and the people come back because of their experiences. Some things work, some things don’t work, and we make adjustments accordingly. It’s a process of evolution and I think that that the process of evolution out here holds a great deal of hope for mankind in general." The Danger Ranger

Peter Gault and Amy Rachelle, two performance artists based in Atlanta, returned to Burning Man again this year. Gault, also the author of the book Knucklehead, wrote this about his experience: "We recently stayed nine days in the Nevada Desert at Burning Man. Burning Man is a microcosm of society based on alternative values: art, debauchery, excessive consumption, presided over by the Man himself who is symbolically burned, dying in a blaze of glory."

Burning Man represents a return to the idea of society as a supportive environment for life and growth, instead of being a discouraging one. Burning Man teaches us not to judge by appearances; it breaks us of our habit of pigeon-holing people. Amy Rachelle talked about this sense of freedom: "You should be able to express yourself, walk around in your underwear or just your little G-string or whatever makes you feel good and pretty. In our society that’s looked down upon, but in Black Rock City that’s beautiful, and you’re celebrated for it. It makes me want to come back every year."

On my final night, I was cut across the playa to my temporary home at the Duck Camp on 18th Street. After a minute of walking, the sounds of society began to fade; I paused and looked around. Stars hung low and dazzling above the horizon. The lights of the city were to the right, with uncharted darkness to the left. A thick green laser sliced through crisp air scanning the sky for signs of alien life. I felt so strangely alone and tranquil out there. I sat down and savored the feeling, until I was lying on my back, my limbs and head pointing in the four directions. The playa was buzzing, and without the aid of any substances, so was I. As I began to approach the city, I felt such a strong feeling of closeness to the human race.

Nate Kretzschmar, a festival-goer from Atlanta, Georgia talked about the feeling of acceptance on the playa.

"The part of Burning Man that I enjoyed the most was that I could walk down the street, talk to anyone, say hello to anyone, sit down in anyone’s tent and I was welcome. It seemed like there were no barriers. You could be naked both psychologically and physically out there."

The climate brings out the sense of community in Black Rock City. Day temperatures in the 100’s and ferocious rain and wind storms force people to interact with their neighbors. On my third day there I felt the pressure of the climate. I woke up in my tent at 8 AM and it was already a glorious 100+ degrees. The dust had coagulated with the sweat streaming off my body, creating a gray slime. I had slept barely an hour. Every cell in my body was calling for a Motel Six. But that’s the point; you get through those moments and the community is the structure that helps you through it. You know that most people there are feeling similar to you, and the majority are so cheerful about it.

Burning Man wasn’t all fun and games. The blankness over the playa mirrored the unnecessary weight I was carrying around with me. I like to swim upstream; I like to exhaust myself. My mind felt like it was being physically forced apart by the openness of it all. Inner conflicts and dramas are glaringly obvious in this reflective environment. You realize how free you can be, or perhaps how far you truly are from that stage.

It was Janice Houston’s second year at the event. "I had just woken up frustrated as shit because it was 110 degrees, thinking, ‘Why the hell am I here?’ when this guy teeters over on stilts with a checkered shirt and suspendered pantaloons holding a parasol and says, ‘Welcome home to Black Rock darling, where ya’ been?’ It knocked me out of my mindset and I felt like part of the community."

Part of the Burning Man experience is the challenge of survival. You have to have some manner of shelter out there, and the quality of that shelter determines to a certain extent how comfortable your stay in the desert is going to be. Will your tent be flattened by wind? Is your tarp going to be taken to a neighboring town by a dust storm? Do you have enough water and food? These are very real questions.

One of the surprising aspects of Black Rock City was there was no food vending allowed. There was a central coffee house to help people caffeinate their way through the heat of the day. Everything else in Black Rock City had to be paid for using the barter system. People would barter all sorts of things: food, possessions, stickers, rides, drugs and booze. I heard one happy Black Rock Citizen exclaim, "Bartering is good!" as he swapped something for a vodka cranberry.

Every night the north end of Black Rock City was hopping and pumping to the sounds of house, techno, breakbeat and jungle music. Arcane Alchemy and Pandora brought their booming Urban Assault Squad sound system, which rocked the playa through the days and nights.

"The thrill of the experience for us was doing a free concert, coming out to the desert and supplying enough sound to make everybody happy," they say. "It gets crazy when you create a full-on rave for eight solid days. We saw all kinds of strange things—dancing aliens and people having sex behind the speaker bins."

Their sound system was one of the most popular spots to get your groove on. Pandorra talked about her experience during the dust storm: "We kept the system going for four hours through the wind and rain. We had people hanging onto the tarp to keep it from blowing down. The wind was taking the whole structure over, ripping three-foot sections of rebar out of the ground. Arcane Alchemy just kept spinning [mixing records] the whole time!"

The horizon stands constant at the visual edge of the limitless playa. It is this limitlessness, this untarnished and undervalued grandeur that propels participants at Burning Man to realize the unbounded possibilities in their souls and minds.

Artistic concepts and innovations dot the playa. Nate Kretzschmar experienced one of these mind benders.

"I’m hanging out with this kid way out on the playa at night and we see this little tiny red light way off in the distance, three or four miles away. He says, ‘I’m going to go see what they are, wait for me.’ I tell him he’s crazy and watch him disappear into the darkness. I stand there waiting for ten minutes, but he’s gone. As soon as someone gets a hundred yards from you, you can’t hear a thing. I decide to start walking back, I mean he’s not going to be able to find me out here, even if he is looking for me. It’s pitch black, other than the stars and the lights of the city in the distance. A few hundred yards before I reach the main Esplanade on the south side he comes flying up on his bicycle, gets off and he’s all excited. He’s jabbering at me, ‘You wouldn’t believe it, I get all the way out to the red light and all it is a little table with a typewriter on it that looks like it’s from the 1920s, and a plaque on it that says, "So glad you’ve found me, I’ve been waiting for you for so long."’ We looked out into the playa again and we saw five or six little red lights identical to it, way out there in the desert."

Finally, six days after my arrival, it was time for the Man to burn. As I gathered my equipment to photograph the burning, I knew I was running late. Eventually, I stumbled out onto the playa like a loaded mule, tripod in one hand, camera in the other. I saw them light the two globes that flanked the Man. I was too far away to get a picture. Hurrying, I wanted to get as close as possible before zooming in with my telephoto. A human covered in flames jumped up onto the haystacks under the wooden legs of the Man. I watched the flames jump up and begin to rise. Oh f..., set the tripod up, get the camera, check the camera, film’s at the end of the roll! As I noticed this challenging situation, the flames jumped up to the Man’s body. The pyrotechnics exploded sending up a burst of light so bright that the playa was lit up like a ballpark for several miles around. All I could do was gasp at the splendor, as my camera hung limp in my hand. Some things are better seen with the naked eye.

I walked further toward the flaming interior. Several smaller fires had begun on either side. The explosions continued, flames swallowed the entire structure of the Man. Drums and shouts came from every angle. All of the audience’s faces lit up blood-orange. The energy on Black Rock had torn through the heavens. These people had traveled hundreds of miles to throw off the masks they’d been wearing, to stomp around like wild beasts on the sand, or to learn how to adapt and survive. Now they were celebrating, screaming, drumming, shooting fireworks towards the stars. The sky began to light up with fire. Someone had lit a row of flares. They burnt hot red far away on the playa. Many people had come with objects to throw into the fire. Together we watched it all burn.

I watched as thousands had gathered here in this ancient sea bed for the burning of this figure. Desert horizons reached out like an old man’s palms towards the stars. Anything was possible here; it was a waiting canvas. Here’s a brush, neighbor.

This year, from August 31st to September 7th, Black Rock City was the sixth largest city in Nevada; it could very well be even bigger next year. Volunteers are the backbone of the Burning Man organization. For more information on the festival or how to volunteer visit www.burningman.com.