WINDSURF MAGAZINE 63Y
eah yeah, you’re going windsurfing at Burning Man. I know what
you’re thinking, sounds like a big excuse to go party your ass off.
Beautiful girls and rock and roll. Well, not so much rock and roll,
let’s say tons of E.D.M. - Electronic Dance Music. But Burning
Man is more than that, it’s a festival of creativity. Many of the artists and
support crew can only be described as mad scientists, spending immense
amounts of time and energy creating some wild thing that people can climb
on, ride on, dance around, or stare at for hours on end. You cannot believe
the amount of time, money, and thinking outside the box that goes into this
festival. The art projects, the party palaces, the lights, the sound systems, the
infrastructure; there is no real way to describe it. Whatever you think it is,
or think it could be, multiply it times a hundred, and then a hundred again.
Amongst the planning of going to Burning Man for the first time, I asked
everyone I knew about it. I got ideas and information, and comments ranging
from “You’re going to have an amazing time!” to “Why the hell are you
going there?” I started my journey to Nevada from Punta San Carlos in Baja
Mexico. Yeah, you heard that correctly, from one of the most dusty, sandy,
salty, desolate points of Northern Baja to the dryer, maybe even dustier
Nevada desert with an international border crossing between. Talk about
a drive. The 5 hours at the border didn’t help, neither did the nice border
officer who put me in a secondary check for 2 hours going through my van
looking for more, I guess dust, which made a long drive even longer.
Burning Man is an eight day, 24-hour-a-day, out of control party. It
is a combination of art, music and cooperation that one must experience
and absorb to even begin to fully comprehend. Some veteran burners start
planning a year in advance. Others start packing a month early to ‘ease into
the burn’. For some people, Burning Man is their life. Truly. It started out
as a humble hippie celebration of fire on Baker Beach in San Francisco.
Now, twenty years after it moved to the Nevada Desert, it hosts over 60,000
people each season at Black Rock City, a temporary city erected in the Black
Rock Desert of northwest Nevada for the duration of the festival. Art, music
and lots of dust puts it gently. I want you to feel what it is like to walk,
ride, or as I did, windsurf on a landboard across the desert’s dry playa, but
I simply cannot.“ART, MUSIC AND LOTS OF DUST
PUTS IT GENTLY.”