Saturday, September 5, 2026
We made it, the Man burns today!
We slept in hard, and spent most of the day at camp. River went out in the late afternoon for a bit.
A little after 7 PM we departed in the art car. For this burn, sort of like the Titanic burn yesterday, all the mutant vehicles come out to play, if they can. An enormous ring around the Man is created by the big vehicles, parked end-to-end facing sideways, and the little vehicles like ours park just inside that ring. Past that ring is the hodgepodge of bikes and pedestrians, and along the fire ring guarded by the Black Rock Rangers, people sit, up to 10-16 rows deep. Then the chairs, than standing room. It’s all most or less self-organized, which is amazing.
The burn started at 9 PM when the Man’s arms raised. For most of the next hour, fire performers in the inner ring danced and tossed and performed around the Man. We were too far away to see it, but we’ve been in the seated section before and watched the performers. These performers are burners like everyone else, except they know how to perform with fire.
Then the fireworks. So. Many. Fireworks.
More fireworks.
Whoopsie, looks like something caught fire due to massive explosions.
Let’s do some more fireworks as the Man burns.
And the burning really gets going. The Man’s arms get tired and one by one drop back down.
It might be hard to see in the images, but this burn threw up a lot of very large burning chunks in addition to the usual tiny embers. Those flaming chunks rained down on us. As waves of people moved around the playa in front of us to get out of the embers’ path, we brushed off the flaming debris from our camp chairs and from the art car. This was new. Usually, only little embers drop on the crowd. Some passers by even hid behind the art car while they took pictures of the chaos.
Finally, the Man burned down far enough that we decided to head out to the playa.
Like “the king is dead, long live the king”… the Man burns in 364 days.
Last Drive of the Art Car
We drove around the playa a bit, the last drive of the art car for this burn.
We stored the art car back at camp, then headed out on bikes to see if there was anything left to do. There wasn’t. Things were semi shut down, bars were mostly empty, and the streets were thin. Most people were still out on the playa.
We headed back to camp and to bed.