My miserable, euphoric, muddy escape from Burning Man

Thu, 09/07/2023 - 05:30

A fiery orange and red scene is covered with bright tendrils of light swishing in and out the frame, with some exploding into spiky bulbs of light. Beneath the fiery cosmic scene, white silhouettes of dancing bodies swivel around, prancing in mud. — Despite the food rationing, the mandatory pee bottles, and the malfunctioning infrastructure, Burners scraped the dirt off their shoes and got down.
Arantza Pena Popo/Insider

Around three o'clock in the morning on Sunday, as I sipped golden milk and watched a chess game besides a geodesic dome where revelers danced shoulder-to-shoulder beneath a propane jet shooting constant waves of flame, not long after an intimidatingly high-energy stranger had power-washed my friends and I's buttocks to the rhythm of thumping techno, I came to a conclusion: Burning Man wasn't completely ruined.