Burning Man 2007

So finally, the much belated report on our trip to Burning Man. I will have to supplement my story with some pictures from elsewhere since I'm not a good photographer and I got tired of carrying around my camera.

Anyway, we start with a drive into the desert. Here is my first picture of lots and lot of sand.

It seems like there is no one else around but us. Yet eventually, we get to a line of cars and work our way towards the "city". We crawl forward -- speeding limit is 5 mph in Black Rock City -- and eventually get let through the gates and start winding our way around to the spot where we are going to be camping. Check out this satellite image: Black Rock City. The roads roads going circularly around have names corresponding to the alphabet and the cross-streets heading towards the center of the circle are named after the times on a clock. The "bottom" of the circle, 6 o'clock street, is the entrance and is actually towards the southwest in the above picture. The camp we stayed at was close to the intersection of 3 o'clock and F street.

Here is an image of an intersection as we are driving our way toward our camp spot.

As soon as we get there we learn that during the time it took Justin to drive to the airport to pick me up, our tent already was a casualty of the first dust storm. We had a shade-tarp set up over all the tents to keep them cool and the wind that afternoon knocked one of the poles into our tent, creating a foot-long tear. We tried to patch it up with duct tape.

That minor problem solved, we start to unpack and "settle in" so that we can enjoy our first night on the playa. (By the way, "playa" is the name for the particular kind of desert terrain where this is at.) Here is my first photo of our entire group. (See I told you -- I'm a lousy photographer)

We get ready to go out just about the time it gets dark. And here is where the camera really shows it's weakness. I remember looking out into the darkness and seeing all these really cool tents, art cars, and people lighted up with neon and other neato glowy things. However, looking through the images I brought back, all I can see is a bunch of black with some colored dots.

That being said, there were a few really cool things that managed to stand out. One was a particular project that some of the guys in our camp had built this year. Are you familiar with the LED clocks that are made of just this single, thin stick that waves back and forth and you can see the time displayed in the air? (Something like this: LED toy.) Well, these guys decided to make a huge one of those with multiple "arms" that spin around in 360 degrees to make full 3-D images! They called it CycloVision sent out the following at one point: "Using advanced brushless motor control and LED technologies, dozens of microprocessors and programmable logic chips, CycloVision brings to life, for the first time ever, a whirlwind of images and animation formed in true 3D space." Even with that description, I know you probably are having a hard time imagining what it would look like -- I did too, until I actually got to see the thing up close. Here's a picture of it up close with the flash on.

You can see the big motors at the bottom and then there is a column up the middle with rows of LED-filled arms. Here is a photo of CycloVision without the flash.

Of course, one of the cool things about being in the middle of the desert at night is that it can get really dark, and thus whenever there is a light on, it looks like much brighter. So, in effect, when this things gets "going", you don't see all the equipment -- you just see the "image". And here is our first image:

What followed were some really cool sequences of fireworks and comets and spheres bouncing around. But all the rest of my pictures are blurred beyond recognition. Okay, so rather than try to go into detail about every little thing I saw, I'll just post a couple more key pictures. One of our favorite exhibits was called 'Crude Oil' that had this 100ft (?) tall oil rig that was faced by several 30-40ft tall statues.

Saturday night they burned the actual oil rig, but since we left early Saturday afternoon, we didn't get to see it. If you google on you-tube, you can find several decent videos of that burning, along with the actual Man, which we didn't get to see either. Despite all that, it was still enough fun that we want to go back. And part of the fun is dressing up in costumes. I didn't get a picture of myself, but here is Justin's costume.

This year the weather really surprised a lot of people by having sand storms every afternoon and actually raining one day -- a very light sprinkle for about 10 minutes. Although that didn't provide any real moisture, it did create an awesome complete double rainbow. A friend took this picture of is after it already faded quite a bit. I'll close with a link to a professional's picture of the full arc of color: rainbow.