A Burning Man 292
may be like Disneyland, but we are like Disneyland turned
inside out. Because at the heart and center of this thing you
will not find a commodity to be consumed.”^100
One night in 1986, at Baker Beach in San Francisco,
Harvey torched an eight feet [2.4 m] high wooden stick
figure in front of only a few people. Four years later, the
number of visitors had grown so much the festival had to
move to the Black Rock Desert in Nevada. The tradition
to burn a wooden figure continued, thus the name of the
festival.^110 Because of the ever growing interest – 120 000
people wanted to buy tickets to the 2012 edition of the
festival – the number of participants had to be limited to
around 50 000.
The festival’s camp is called Black Rock City and looks
like a half-eaten donut if you fly over the area. The donut
itself is divided into two main parts: one quieter and one
louder. Cellphones used to be banned from the camp, but
it’s today acceptable to use them as long as the call is not
made in a public space.
No soft sand dunes can be found in the Black Rock
Desert, so the ground is drivable. The British ThrustSSC
jet-propelled car set the world speed record on land in
the same desert. Equipped with two engines from the F-
4 Phantom II jet fighter, the car rushed through the desert
with a top speed of 763 mph [1228 km/h]. Before Burning
Man begins, but with a slower speed than the ThrustSSC,
several of the visitors drive through the desert in their own
special mutant vehicles and art cars. These vehicles look
like something from an art exhibition. But they are not