Campmate organizer

Looks like I'm rolling solo this year as my usual campmates are taking a break. I've got two tickets, a vehicle pass, and a 4 or 5-person RV rented out of SF. Since it's just me so far, I'm open to two possibilities:

Open camping (you know, just pulling in and parking wherever there's space).
Joining a camp that welcomes RVs. I'm totally up for meeting new people and contributing to a camp in the kitchen, for ice runs, at the bar, or leading group dance/stretch sessions ✨

About Me: She/her in my 30s, ex-professional contemporary dancer now working in tech. I'm super organized and will clean/reorg the RV at least once a day... I like to keep a nice home on the playa :) Former SF resident, now splitting time between Mexico City and a little place on a lake in the midwest.
If anyone's in a similar boat or knows of a welcoming camp that I could join, I'd love to hear from you. Or, if you’re looking to share an RV, hit me up.
Shoot me a DM or reply here if you have suggestions, tips, or if you want to join forces. Thanks and see you on the playa!
Stay dusty! 😎✌️

EDC Las Vegas 2024

EDC Las Vegas 2024 Official Trailer

Location: Las Vegas Motor Speedway 7000 N Las Vegas Blvd Las Vegas, NV 89115
Dates & Times:
May 17, 18, 19, 2024

Opening Ceremony 5:00pm–7:00pm (Friday Only); full grounds open 7:00pm–5:30am
Sat-Sun Full grounds open 7:00pm–5:30am
Parking lots open 2 hours prior to the opening ceremony or gate opening.

Box Office:
Expo at World Market Center 435 S Grand Central Pkwy Las Vegas, NV 89106
Box Office Hours:
Wednesday, May 15: 2PM – 12AM Thursday, May 16: 11AM – 12AM Friday, May 17: 11AM – 3AM Saturday, May 18: 2PM – 2AM Sunday, May 19: 2PM – 2AM
Camp EDC Hours
Thursday, May 16th, 9am – Monday, May 20th, 5pm. All campers must be fully packed and vacated from the campground by 5pm on Monday, May 20th.
Camp EDC Check-In
Thursday, May 16th: 8am – 2am Friday, May 17th: 8am–2pm Saturday, May 18th: 8am–2pm Sunday, May 19th: 8am – 2pm
PLEASE NOTE: Festival traffic begins arriving at 2pm so wait times could be longer. Please arrive only during the check-in hours posted, and allow extra time for unexpected delays, as closing times are strict. If you arrive late, we may not be able to admit you into the campground until check-in opens the following day.

Useful Quick Links:

Purchase festival passes -- LIMITED GA+ & VIP PASSES REMAINING (GA SOLD OUT)!

Purchase shuttle passes -- SOLD OUT!

Purchase Moon Glow camping -- SOLD OUT!

Purchase Desert Rose camping -- SOLD OUT!

Purchase RV camping -- LIMITED!

Purchase Premier Parking -- SOLD OUT!

Hotel EDC

Purchase Locker Rental

Lineup Flyer

Lineups by Stage

Lineups by Art Car (COMING SOON)

CampEDC Activities Schedule (COMING SOON)

CampEDC Party Schedule:

CampEDC Pre-Party (COMING SOON)
CampEDC Pool Parties (COMING SOON)
CampEDC After Parties (COMING SOON)

CampEDC Map

CampEDC The Mesa Map

Opening Ceremony Lineup --

COMING SOON!

Parking Map (COMING SOON!)

Festival Map (COMING SOON!)

Box Office Map (COMING SOON!)

Shuttle Map

Shuttle Schedule --

All hotel shuttle lots will open at 5:30pm
- Opening Ceremony shuttle lot at The Rio will open at 3pm on Friday only
Departure Times: Shuttles will operate continuously from 6:30 pm – 11:30 pm from all Standard Shuttle Stops
Return Times: Return shuttles will begin at 2:00 am and conclude 60 minutes after the music ends at the KineticField PLEASE NOTE: Shuttles will not run between 11:30pm and 2:00am.

EDC Experience Charity Auctions

EDC Wedding Info

Salvage City Supper Club

Table & Bottle Service info

Helicopter Booking

Lost & Found Information

Basic Festival & Ticketing information

When can I check in to the campgrounds?
Insomniac put together a handy entry guide for camping that is available here
What are the guidelines for camping? I have more questions related to camping!
Insomniac put together their camping guidelines and camping FAQ pages related to camping and they are very informative. I'm not going to re-type all this information here, so use the links provided.
My wristband/parking pass/shuttle pass hasn't come yet!
Be patient, they will be shipping out over 100k+ packages when they go out. You can also call Front Gate Tickets to see where your shipment is and/or set up will call pickup @ 888.512.7469. Also here's the Front Gate Tickets Support Site.
If you are coming from outside of the USA, you have no choice but to go to will call for your tickets. Please see the above event information for the box office location and hours.
I have tickets/shuttle passes/parking passes to sell!
Check out EDCTickets! Remember, even though our community is friendly, caring, and kind, there are ticket scammers out there that are willing to take advantage. Be vigilant, if something seems to good to be true, it probably is. Trust your instincts.
Where can I register my Wristband? Do I have to register my wristband?
You can register it here. The only way to recover your wristband if it is lost or stolen is to have it registered. Additionally, there is emergency contact information stored in your wristband as part of the registration process, if anything should happen to you. There is a $40 fee for a replacement wristband.
Well this is embarassing, I didn't listen to everyone and put my wristband on early/on the wrong hand, how can I get it off? I sold my wristband after I attended one of the nights, how can I get it off without damaging it?
Here's a short how-to video to remove the wristband without damaging anything. DON'T PUT YOUR WRISTBAND ON UNTIL FRIDAY BEFORE YOU LEAVE YOUR HOTEL! It goes on your right wrist, and should be able to fit a finger underneath for breathing room.
I'm going solo to the fest, how can I make friends, I need a place to stay, etc.
There are several ways of doing this. You can use the search function on the subreddit. There's also some Facebook groups dedicated to solo journeys to EDC. Once again, trust your instincts here and only stay with people that you can properly personally have vetted ahead of time.
Also, check the useful links above for ride shares, hotel shares, and tent shares!
Live sets just aren't doing it for me, I need a feel for what this place is like before I attend!
Check out Electric Daisy Carnival 2000, Under the Electric Sky, or The Electric Daisy Carnival Experience trailer from when the festival was still in L.A. If you can find The Electric Daisy Carnival Experience online for free somewhere or even for a couple bucks to stream it, I think it's a much better movie than the Under the Electric Sky movie.

FAQ

When do the set times drop? When does the app update? I can't find the app on the app store, what gives?!
Set times and app updates usually happen the week of the festival. The Insomniac app will update the week of the festival, so go ahead and install it now if you want to.
What about pool parties or other EDC Week events?
Official site here for a list of events and tickets. There's also going to be parties and pools at the campground.
What time should I leave the strip? How long does it take to get to/from to the speedway? What time should I leave the event to beat traffic?
EDC is not like a local DJ show and Las Vegas traffic SUCKS. Parking lots open at 2PM Friday and 5PM Saturday and Sunday, so I would strive to leave the strip right around that time. Without traffic it will take you anywhere from 30 minutes to an hour. The longer into the night you wait to leave the worse off traffic will be and the longer it will take to get to the show. I have heard nightmare scenarios of 2 or 3 hour shuttle rides, so don't let it happen to you!
Typically, you can leave before the sunrise sets or about halfway through it and not have too bad of a wait in traffic back to the strip in the morning! At the end of night 3, keep in mind normal people are also heading to work since it will technically be Monday morning. That's just going to add to the cluster fuck of traffic on I-15 and Las Vegas Blvd. Plan accordingly! If you are driving have a cooler in the trunk with water bottles!
Are we doing the Reddit meetup again this year?
We sure are. Check out the links up top regarding information on where and when we are meeting up. We are going to have two simultaneous "official" meetups, one for campers and one for people on the Strip. We will also have several pre and post meetups as well as one inside the festival on Saturday. All information is contained in the post linked at the very top!
What can I bring into the festival? What can't I bring into the festival? What are the searches like?
The searches could be TSA style, or you could barely get touched at all. It's pretty random. Consider stash boxers or compression underwear to get your favors inside or items that are disallowed like LED gloves, etc.
If you take your time to observe the security, you can usually get a feel of who is being a hard-ass for a dime raise for busting someone and who is just doing their job quickly and efficiently.
As for allowed and disallowed items, here's a link to those lists as well as totem guidelines.
Bring a gallon zip lock bag and put all of your belongings that you want to bring into the festival in it while you are waiting in line. All three days last year security complimented me on being organized and how easy I made their jobs because they could just scan the items in the bag, check my camelbak, give me the pat down and I was on my way.
Seriously, if you make security's lives easier in this way, they will not hassle you at all as long as you aren't trying to bring in stuff that isn't allowed. I didn't even get pat down on Night 2 because I was so up-front about all my belongings.
Any further questions, feel free to comment below, or visit the EDC Las Vegas Guide page!

Tips and Tricks!

Put an Emergency Contact Information (ICE) on your phone's lock screen. Android or Apple. This serves as two things.. One, if you lose your phone, someone can try to get it back to you. TWO, if you get hurt or fall out, the medics on site can get in contact with someone you know.
Call your bank/credit card companies and let them know you will be traveling to Vegas to avoid holds on your account.
Be vigilant on the Strip. Everyone is trying to hustle. Street performers will expect tips if you take pictures!
Hit up a Vegas buffet at least one day.
Stretch beforehand in your hotel room. Your muscles will thank you in the morning!
Wear comfy shoes and/or get insoles to replace the "stock" insoles that come with your shoes. Also, consider moleskin if your feet are prone to blistering from rubbing against your socks. Your feet will thank you!
Get to the festival early. Stop by the merchandise tent first thing. Items sell out fast. Consider a mobile charging locker to store your merchandise in! Additionally, if you bring all of your sealed items in on the first day (wipes, chapstick, cigarettes, gum, tampons, etc), you can keep them all in your locker overnight and not have to worry about getting 3 of each sealed item to bring in every single day. REMEMBER! Hide your lock combo from people that may peer over your shoulder or look at your combination wristband and try to get into your locker. Remain vigilant inside the festival!
After you get your merch and put it in your locker, you next stop should be one of the free water stands to fill up your hydration pack or water bottle. It's very important to remain hydrated, especially while the sun is still out and bearing down on you! If you tip some of the vendors, they will give you ice if the warm water turns you off.
If you need to eat something, consider the food trucks instead of the concession stand food. The food trucks have their company name out there and on the line when compared to the generic concession stand stuff, the quality of the food is unparalleled. Don't make the same mistake as I did a few years ago and get a raw onion sandwich masked as a "cheese steak".
Bring earplugs! Tinnitus sucks!
Wear sunscreen! Remember, if you are staying all night the sun is up at like 5AM and starts beaming down on you almost immediately.
If you want to ride the rides, get there early or risk missing sets while standing in line! Some rides you will be waiting for an hour or more at peak times.
Time-stamp your texts! There will be cell service congestion. Stamping your texts will help your friends know whenever you truly sent a message!
Bring an external battery pack in with you to charge your phone if you are someone who likes to take a lot of photo and video!
Bring cash. Credit and debit cards could possibly be hit or miss if the speedway's internet network would happen to shit the bed! Don't be stuck without a way to pay for something you need!
Remember to take it easy night 1! EDC is a marathon not a sprint!
Emergen-C packets are a lifesaver. Take one before the festival every night in order to help you recover from the night before and prepare for the festival ahead!
Take some time to look up and enjoy the fireworks!
Don't forget about the EDC parade down Rainbow Road every night! You should at least try to check it out one time out of the three nights you are there! Check the app for times, but it should be around midnight every night!
Follow your favorite artists' social media so that you know if they may show up unannounced, or if they are doing any surprise sets on one of the art cars, etc.
Send a post card to back home at the EDC Town Post Office. Check out Downtown EDC in general. It's pretty sweet.
If you are feeling at all dehydrated or anything else medical related, visit one of the medical tents. Staff is super friendly and you WILL NOT get in trouble for seeking medical treatment, no matter your condition. If you can't make it to the medical tent, look for a Ground Control staff member to assist you or any of your friends! Look out for your fellow ravers. If you see something, say something! This will keep everyone safe and having a good time.
If you are going to do drugs, and especially MDMA, I suggest only doing it 1 out of the 3 nights and finding something else for the other two days. Everyone is different, but be safe, and TEST YOUR SHIT. Do not buy drugs at the festival. Not only do you risk getting bunk shit, but undercover cops are everywhere!
If you are going to drink alcohol, do so in moderation and stay hydrated! For every alcoholic drink you have, you should drink 8-16oz of water!
If you are a lady, bring wipes! Usually the porta-potties run out of toilet paper. It's just a fact of the festival and usually they don't get resupplied until the following day. You will thank me if you get caught in this situation.
Bring a hand fan for the water lines! They can get pretty hot and people will love you!
Try to catch at least one sunrise set one of the nights. I recommend night 2, since everyone and their mothers will be staying on night 3. Plus, Monday morning rush hour traffic on night 3 is no bueno.
If you have a large crew and need to split up to see different sets, plan a meeting spot! Try to pick something that is stationary, like the locker area, the cooling area, one of the buildings in Downtown EDC, etc.
Buy a smoothie or a lemonade. They are a nice change of pace from warm hydrant water.
Get a bandana and tie it around your neck for each night you are out there. Put it over your mouth and nose when the dust gets to be too much. Your lungs will thank you, plus you get to look like a bandit. Win/win.
Trains of people going in and out of the crowd are going to happen, so use them to your advantage. Become the caboose to go into or out of the crowds and use your manners! Excuse me, thank you, etc go a long way when navigating the crowd!
Bring good vibes, leave the judgement at the gates, and most of all, enjoy yourself and smile! EDC is a glorious wonderland of fun. Extrude the vibes you wish to receive back to you and you will have a great time, I promise!

If you have other tips, tricks or questions, comment your thoughts below!

TW: drugs, sexual abuse, physical abuse, rape, wage theft, gang violence, domestic violence, and more
I have a neighbor... I am unhoused and my campmate used to help her go inside at night because she got paratransit but they would never help her go up the stairs.
We had mice getting in the tent after we started 24/7 camping because of the shelter in place order, but I think the mice at my tent and later the encampment almost 1 block over started with her place which was right Infront of where the tent was, but across the street like 20 ft away. Found out from another unhoused neighbor who moved next to me a year ago (We got into different shelter hotels in January) that she and neighbors have seen mice running all over their fence.
My campmate told me about the smell even last year and compared it to me but like 100x worse. I have hoarding disorder, but it is tied to multiple mental health issues including ADHD. I have been poor my entire adult life, the issue is that I struggle to get rid of, use up, or use and then get rid of things however my stuff always fit in my closet closet when I had everything put in it's place, but I rarely had the spoons to organize. I had a cleaning lady come every other week where she would clean and I would clear surfaces (Yay body doubling! #ADHD I am still seeking supportive services for my Aurism, however I keep getting told I cannot get them as an unhoused person. ☹️).
I wanted to ask this lady for help and to be able to take pics because I am good at organizing other people's spaces and I would like to get paid to do so. I have Autism that I cannot pass a job interview, so I am perpetually underemployed as working poor when I can manage to find a job so shitty they won't even interview me or some fluke happens that I got to skip the interview. I made about $3k in all of 2021, something like $1500 in 2022, and I only stand to make about $3k this year. I live in the US and you need to make at least $70k both for a landlord to consider you or to not be rent burdened. A full time minimum wage job only makes a little over $30k before taxes or a little over $20k after taxes. You need to work at least 120 hrs every 168 hour workweek at minimum wage to be able to have an apartment and not be rent burdened.
Well, the ADHD, and not really keeping blank paper on me meant I never asked her. Months ago, like late spring or early summer, I found out from another unhoused neighbor, that he and someone else had tried to help this lady. She offered to pay them, and they worked over 40 hrs that week. She never paid them. From what he told me, there were mice, cockroaches, and more all over the place. And one spider bit him and gave him an infection that hospitalized him and he almost died. She didn't care.
The past several months, her yard has become filled with stuff. I even saw the neighborhood abuser helping her. What I didn't know was that she was his mother and raised him to be a terrible person.
To give you an idea, he and the person who gave me the update moved about 10 ft from my tent last year. They loudly had sex, smoked meth (I am extremely sensitive to secondhand meth and am traumatized from my first month on the street when my ex street mother and I lived under a bridge and everyone smoked meth except for us--she snorted it, I am straight edge. And there was so much residue that I was getting second hand high every time I walked under. I was able to time out my symptoms from the minute I walked under there. I only stayed so long because I was waiting for a posted cleanup as my excuse. I was warned that people like to drug up newly unhoused people so they call gang rape them, and I was afraid if they knew I was leaving before they could gain my confidence, I could end up forcibly drugged. Maybe it was the secondhand meth talking. It was still terrifying and there was a lot of sketchy shit. I now know what street drug smoke smells like and it really fucking upsets me. Plus I know what effects I'm gonna have to suffer as a result of even smelling it.), drank, and the lady even loudly thanked someone from the encampment almost a block over who I thought was a friend (Her problem which I found out much later was that she was an alcoholic who kept trying to recover in order to see her daughter, but she drank because she felt so terrible about her situation and not being able to see her daughter. I have never personally seen her drink, and she kept trying to go to an inpatient rehab in another county, but something ALWAYS happened that she couldn't go. Now she's also in a shelter hotel and has been trying to go live with family in Hawaii, but it's difficult for her to get her and her dog there because they're weird about bringing in animals, and she's disabled and can't come up with the money. Anyways...).
What I quickly learned from incident after incident was that the son of the hoarder knew about the neighbor who he was taking advantage of having bipolar disorder and that he kept smoking meth in the lady's tent either with her or even when she was yelling at him, because he knew it would get her manic that she couldn't say no, and then he could get all the sex he wanted. It was terrible. I tried calling the police, but they would always turn off the music and pretend to not be home whenever the police came.
A good unhoused neighbor who has been here for at least 30 years told me that he's the guy who drinks and speeds his truck through the neighborhood at night blasting music, that he's a deadbeat with multiple bastard children he doesn't even pay child support for, and that she actually regrets saving his life at one point because he's such a terrible person.
He wound up abusing the one lady in other ways to the point she had to relocate her tent. I have text and video evidence of his abuse which I even sent her hoping she would get a restraining order. I was actually afraid to even talk to her at first, and the one time I tried to reach out while tending to my plants (Which were dying because they set up their tent on the garden side of my tent and I was afraid of COVID and the crazy abusive son of the hoarder).
But when I did try to tell her it wasn't her fault and give her my number, the guy yelled at us from the other side of the street behind us when they had just had an altercation across the street infront of us (We were on a huge parkway between two parallel streets), where he had locked her phone and purse and everything in his van and wouldn't let her get it. I find it odd that he would openly do such crazy shit to her and then act nice to everybody else, but I am not surprised because I am a victim of child and adult child abuse, and my primary abuser was the same way.
Anyways, this is the person the hoardee neighbor getting evicted raised. The woman he terrorized even turned the dirt left from where her tent was into a heart shaped mural for the whole neighborhood! But he keeps vandalizing it.
I found out today that she had everything done up for Halloween, and he ripped out all of her decorations and even TOOK A RAKE TO THE MURAL.
(1/2)

It's been one Hell of a journey but the Wifey and I have finally made our final approach and landed back home to Planet Texas.
This has to have been the best and most memorable burn ever in our lives! I must deliver thanks to the community, the organizers, the party people, the rangers, the ones who toiled endlessly behind the scenes.
First, let me talk about Angler, our tandem with terrible manners! Tuesday night, she blows an inner tube and somehow that gets wrapped around the gear cassette completely locking up the tire. We are hours away from home on foot! Special thanks go out to Silly Goat Girl and her camp of Rangers who invited us in, offered ginger beer to help my wife's nausea, and even got EMS to come give us transport back home. BTW, SGG I will be reapplying to volunteer with EMS again soon! 😉
Thank yous also go out to the hydration bar close to the Freestyle camp (I am so sorry I forgot the name. Looked over the map and its really shredded from being soaked) for letting us hang for a second after assessing how bad Angler's tire was. Your campmate let us borrow his tandem so we could track down a good tire and inner tube. During this time we missed the Naked Bike Ride and yet we still got to be a part of it, so yay we're included! We stitch the tire back together best we can, try to take it easy until we find a new tire but it still bursts not even a block away. Miraculously, Chop Shop is right around the corner and they have everything we need to get back on the road and in tip top shape!
Unfortunately, this victory is short lived as the next day the cold hit hard and the rain followed. HUGE SHOUT OUT for Dante's Inferno and all the crew for allowing us and others to take shelter in your cuddle dome which turned into a refugee camp soon thereafter! We don't know where we'd be if it weren't for our friends there. And again extra special thanks for hanging onto Angler until we came back to retrieve her!
Despite the fact we were immobilized for a day, sheltered in place for another day, tent flooded in an inch of standing water,, food in the cooler ruined, couldn't light the camp stove, portos overflowing, Mai Waife (unexpected Borat) got to experience what it's like when this community comes together. She didn't feel like a charity case or like a burden for being blind, so many people came to talk to her and learn about her. I don't think I've seen her so at home.
Wifey got to have front row seats for burn night and could not have been more beautiful and worth the extra wait. Fireworks and explosions so close her face felt a little toasty! Finish the job El Pulpo started, lol. Completely worn out from the ultra stimulation, Wiferoni would have dreams for the next three days of the magnificence she heard and what she was able to see.
Extra shout outs to Tim the Turtle Man, Hellboy the Ranger, and "Hammertime" Ian for making 6:00 and J THE place to camp! Hope all you guys escaped safely!
Also, to the really wasted handsome man who took my ear tunnel. I don't know why you wanted it so badly, but I hope it serves you well, lol!
Our traditional exodus theme couldn't have been more appropriate! "Riders of the Storm" by The Doors
Thank you everyone for your help. Thank you everyone for being there for us and with us and just being! Everyone was amazing! We will see everyone again very soon!
PS: I don't know where I lost my shoes, we were rather delirious from bacon/pancake breakfast after not eating. So I sincerely apologize if I mooped them in the street or in a camp.
PPS: had one hell of a stomach upset lately which is finally subsiding. Hope it's just isolated and wasn't food poisoning.

A repost from way back for all the people suffering from re-entry sickness after the magic you experienced. We've all been there. It gets easier after a few Burns but it does suck to see the default world through your new Burner eyes. Be kind to people, including yourself.
***
Repost from Arctic Monkey, and a video of to somebody reading (https://youtu.be/hx_RUND-wjo?si=7A_BzICZG7RF7s7b):
In the interest of helping give a concise, helpful, guided re-entry into civilization after being at Burning Man, I wrote down a series of rules for Radical Re-Entry. After seeing four email threads flare up and two potential life-changing events start up with various friends over the years, here’s the short version:
Monkey Re-Entry Rule Number 1:
Wait three weeks before you make any life-changing decisions.
But let me change that up a bit so it makes more sense.
When returning from the playa, you will be hot, dusty, tired, exhausted. Your body will have undergone immense stress, and if you live in a vastly different environment, your body will likely react by getting a cold (especially if you kissed anyone at the Space Froggie Free Kissing Booth).
Step 1. Take a shower, hippie. Shave, shower, steam everything off. Take two. Or three. Then go to sleep. You need it.
Step 2. Clean your gear. Wash your clothes, car, stuff, or pack it up into the Burner corner of your house. Pack it away and dry it out. Recycle, do your garbage, and wash your dishes. Get it put away.
Step 3. Breathe. Go through all your Burner stuff from this year, sort and organize, and then happily stash it away for good memories for later.
Now that your physical needs are out of the way, let’s go to the mental needs.
OMGWTFBBQ THAT WAS AWESOME!
Yes, it was! Wow. Did you see that one guy with the thing? Those two girls? That…why are you looking at me like that? I’m just trying to explain it to you.
Right. The people who didn’t go are going to eye you with either jealousy or trepidation, and your social acceptability standards while on playa are different from the real world. While you CAN expect the world to change to fit the Burning Man model, it seems to work better if you don’t try to put your shoulder up against the wheel of the Real World right away until you figure out how that whole leverage thing works as more than just a metaphor. A single butterfly may make changes to the world’s weather, but sometimes they just get blown into a bug zapper by the wind. Slow down there, Mr. Burner Evangelist.
You’ve got 360 days before you’re heading back to the Awesome. Let your own brain process the nifty neato cool awesome, then hand it off to others.
You just don’t get it.
Okay there, Mr Cranky McCrankerpants. Did you forget to take your 5-HTP afterwards? Are you still dehydrated? Are you wondering what the $3,490 charge for “snacks” might be on your visa bill? That’s your own stuff and it’s not up to the people around you – your loved ones, your hamster, your dog, your listmates, your campmates, your neighbor – to make accomodations for your emotional state post-playa. That’s entirely your bag of playafied emotional entanglements to work through. Take a few more minutes to consider what you’re saying on email to people. Reread, check your emotions, and maybe put down the phone to keep yourself from doing irreparable harm to your relationships because you didn’t sleep for a week and are still seeing the Sleep Deprivation Leprechauns in your dreams. Slow down. Put your gear in order, wash your dishes, go for a long walk. Then go back and talk to your friends. If this is directed at people you camped with or your patience level is abysmally low, maybe you should also take what we in the business call “A Chill Pill” and go shut up in a dark corner with some Funyuns for a while.
Not bitching people out for supposed insults or slights or yelling at people for their “stupidity” is a good way to keep and maintain your friendships. Also, try not to play Mr. Huffy or Ms. Huffy about imagined or unimagined stuff that went on or didn’t go on at the event that you failed to communicate and ergo, the other party SHOULD have known by magically reading your mind/emotional state. You will keep people from thinking you’re a total whackjob and/or raging asshat who can’t communicate. And you may keep your friends, instead of driving them before you.
And now back to Monkey Rule Numero Uno, PERIOD. (See? I ramble, but I return to the point.)
DO NOT MAKE CHANGES TO YOUR LIFE FOR AT LEAST THREE WEEKS AFTER YOU COME BACK FROM BURNING MAN.
Do not quit your job. Do not divorce your wife, husband, sister, dog, parakeet. Do not sell all your possessions and move to Tibet to be a monk. Do not ditch your car and travel the world. Do not found Hobbit Camp. Do not plan a giant zeppelin for next year’s Burn. Do not move out of your house, break up with your girlfriend, boyfriend, get married, move in your playa lover, sell your car, ditch your friends, or make other rash decisions after you come home. This is important, because the playa is still going to be in your brain, and the effects are like that of rareified stupid sometimes. It will make total sense to have a threesome with your significant other and someone in an enormous rabbit costume at the Burn; in reality the ears get caught in the ceiling fan. Make sure if you have major life decisions to make, you make them AFTER you settle down and settle in. The emotions and the stress will still be in your system for some time; do not allow them to unduly influence your life.
Take some B-vitamins, some 5-htp, drink plenty of water and eat a good meal or two that you cooked yourself, go to bed early and read a good book. You earned it. That major life-changing decision will still be there in three weeks, and if you reduce the sheer volume of stress you have, it will make those decisions easier to deal with AFTER you have time to put away all the other issues and emotions post-Burn.
You might not pay any attention to this little guide, or you might say, “That’s for suckers! Real Burners quit their jobs and go work in an iron foundry with those guys they met that one night on the playa or go get married with that beautiful playa nubnub in Vegas! We don’t need your stinkin’ recommendations, Monkey!” And you would be right (and I will happily watch you run off while popping my popcorn and pulling up a chair). But if you want to have an easier time recovering from the playa, you might take a little time down to remember what the rest of your year goes like, and adjusting your brain, your living patterns, and your emotional safety nets accordingly. It really does help, especially if you THINK you got all the dusty bananas out of your tent before you packed it away.
Anyway, that’s it. Don’t stress. Pack your stuff away, and wait three weeks before making any life-changing decisions.
Oh, and be nice to people. At the end of three weeks, you can be a jerk again if you want to.

Has anyone else gotten emails like this that seem like they're from the org only to be a disguise for someone trying to sell on playa services?? Seems very non self reliant if you ask me.

Hello everyone!
We are Burning My Crêpe, a breton-themed camp running since 2018. But what is breton-themed, you may ask? Well, it's the world's birthplace of crepes, in the western region of Brittany, France, where two of the initial camp lead trio originated from. We offer large gifting sessions (over 2 hours) of flamed crepes & pole dancing (best combination ever, by the way) at sunset on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday.
Our little secret? The batter is made from scratch and from fresh ingredients, then flamed with a delicious orange liquor. In addition, we do have some playa shenanigans running at the camp, that could be considered extra gifting (sound healing, painting workshops, etc).
We are a small camp, counting 14 people today, with a pretty good diversity: almost 50/50 on male/non-male and 6 countries represented. We want to keep it small so everyone can spend time together and form a little happy group of burners (we have been 30+ in the past and realized only too late it was a terrible idea for the 'camp spirit').
Who are we looking for?

Ideally, a small group of 2 to 4 people who have been on the playa before
You should be autonomous with your logistics in and out of the playa - we may be able to carpool with our campmates but we cannot really promise anything (Bay area, south Idaho, Salt Lake City...)
Ideally, you should have a camping solution already (RV, or tent, or w/e) - we have the option to provide an hexayurt but to be discussed
We don't care much for where you are based or where you are from, our logistics are already set up

What do we provide?

Enough space on our camp for your little setup, we usually have a good spot in the 4:30 sector (previous years we were in C or D, hoping for the same this year)
Camp amenities: large shade structure with awesome lights and a new misting system, furniture...)
A fully equipped kitchen (stoves, gas, coolers, ice...), as well as a shower and evaporation ponds
Bad playa advice and pole dancing lessons
Optional: a camp bike from our storage unit (for a reasonable extra fee)

What do we NOT provide?

Food and water (we used to have a tank, but it's not worth it this year)
Private portos - what did you think? :)
Tickets and Vehicle Passes

What do we expect in return?

Camp fees - everyone pays the same in our camp (530$ to be precise), the budget has been voted by all current campmates
Participate to the camp, notably via the gifting (twice during the week), as well as strike (sorry...), and small things (we don't keep a list or a plan, we don't run after people, we just count on everyone's proactivity as a group of friends would do)
Be willing to be part of the group and not running a boys/girls club at the back of the camp

Don't hesitate to reply to this post or to reach out in DM, we would then organize a conversation between you and us to get to know each other, this is very important to us :)
Thanks for reading this far!
Toupie-toupie and 1-40, BMC camp leads

Hello everyone!
We are Burning My Crêpe, a breton-themed camp running since 2018. But what is breton-themed, you may ask? Well, it's the world's birthplace of crepes, in the western region of Brittany, France, where two of the initial camp lead trio originated from. We offer large gifting sessions (over 2 hours) of flamed crepes & pole dancing at sunset on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, representing over 1500 crepes gifted per year.
Our little secret? The batter is made from scratch and from fresh ingredients, then flamed with a delicious orange liquor. In addition, we do have some playa shenanigans running at the camp, that could be considered extra gifting.
We are a small camp, counting 14 people today, with a pretty good diversity: almost 50/50 on male/non-male and 6 countries represented. We want to keep it small so everyone can spend time together and form a nice little group of happy burners (we have been 30+ in the past and realized it was a terrible idea for the 'camp spirit').
Who are we looking for?

Ideally, a small group of 2 to 4 people who have been on the playa before
You should be autonomous with your logistics in and out of the playa - we may be able to carpool with our campmates but we cannot really promise anything (Bay area, south Idaho, Salt Lake City...)
Ideally, you should have a camping solution already (RV, or tent, or w/e) - we have the option to provide an hexayurt but to be discussed
We don't care much for where you are based or where you are from, our logistics are already set up

What do we provide?

Enough space on our camp for your little setup, we usually have a good spot in the 4:30 sector (previous years we were in C or D, hoping for the same this year)
Camp amenities: large shade structure with awesome lights and a new misting system, furniture...)
A fully equipped kitchen (stoves, gas, coolers, ice...), as well as a shower and evaporation ponds
Bad playa advice and pole dancing lessons
Optional: a camp bike from our storage unit (for a reasonable extra fee)

What don't we provide?

Food and water (we used to have a tank, but it's not worth it this year)
Private portos - what did you think? :)
Tickets and Vehicle Passes

What do we expect in return?

Camp fees - everyone pays the same in our camp (530$), the budget has been voted by all current campmates
Participate to the camp, notably via the gifting (twice during the week), as well as strike (sorry...), and small things (we don't keep a list or a plan, we don't run after people, we just count on everyone's proactivity as a group of friends would do)
Be willing to be part of the group and not running a boys/girls club at the back of the camp

Don't hesitate to reply to this post or to reach out in DM, we would then organize a conversation between you and us to get to know each other, this is very important to us :)
Thanks for reading this far!
Toupie-toupie and 1-40, BMC camp leads

EDC Las Vegas 2023

EDC Las Vegas 2023 - Official Trailer

Location: Las Vegas Motor Speedway 7000 N Las Vegas Blvd Las Vegas, NV 89115
Dates & Times:
May 19, 20, 21, 2023

Opening Ceremony 5:00pm–7:00pm (Friday Only); full grounds open 7:00pm–5:30am
Sat-Sun Full grounds open 7:00pm–5:30am
Parking lots open 2 hours prior to the opening ceremony or gate opening.

Box Office:
Expo at World Market Center 435 S Grand Central Pkwy Las Vegas, NV 89106
Box Office Hours:
Wednesday, May 17: 2PM – 12AM Thursday, May 18: 11AM – 12AM Friday, May 19: 11AM – 3AM Saturday, May 20: 2PM – 2AM Sunday, May 21: 2PM – 2AM
Camp EDC Hours
Thursday, May 18th, 8am – Monday, May 22nd, 5pm. All campers must be fully packed and vacating the campground by 5pm on Monday, May 22nd.
Camp EDC Check-In

Thursday, May 18: 8am–2am
Friday, May 19: 8am–2pm - please note festival traffic begins arriving at 2pm so wait times could be longer
Saturday, May 20: 8am–2pm - please note festival traffic begins arriving at 2pm so wait times could be longer
Sunday, May 21: 8am–2pm - please note festival traffic begins arriving at 2pm so wait times could be longer

Useful Quick Links:

Purchase festival passes -- LIMITED GA+ & VIP PASSES REMAINING (GA SOLD OUT)!

Purchase shuttle passes -- SOLD OUT!

Purchase Moon Glow camping -- SOLD OUT!

Purchase Desert Rose camping -- SOLD OUT!

Purchase RV camping -- SOLD OUT!

Purchase Premier Parking -- SOLD OUT!

Hotel EDC

Purchase Locker Rental

Lineup Flyer

Lineups by Stage

Lineups by Art Car

CampEDC Activities Schedule

CampEDC Party Schedule:

CampEDC Map

CampEDC The Mesa Map

Opening Ceremony Lineup --

Nostalgix & James Hype 5-7PM, Cosmic Meadow

Parking Map

Festival Map

Box Office Map

Shuttle Schedule --

Departure Times: Shuttles will operate continuously from 7:00pm–11:30pm from all Standard Shuttle stops
Return Times: Return shuttles will begin at 3:00am and conclude 60 minutes after the music ends at kineticFIELD PLEASE NOTE: Shuttles will not run between 11:30pm and 3:00am.

EDC Wedding Info

Table & Bottle Service info

Helicopter Booking

Lost & Found Information

Basic Festival & Ticketing information

When can I check in to the campgrounds?
Insomniac put together a handy entry guide for camping that is available here
What are the guidelines for camping? I have more questions related to camping!
Insomniac put together their camping guidelines and camping FAQ pages related to camping and they are very informative. I'm not going to re-type all this information here, so use the links provided.
My wristband/parking pass/shuttle pass hasn't come yet!
Be patient, they will be shipping out over 100k+ packages when they go out. You can also call Front Gate Tickets to see where your shipment is and/or set up will call pickup @ 888.512.7469. Also here's the Front Gate Tickets Support Site.
If you are coming from outside of the USA, you have no choice but to go to will call for your tickets. Please see the above event information for the box office location and hours.
I have tickets/shuttle passes/parking passes to sell!
Check out EDCTickets! Remember, even though our community is friendly, caring, and kind, there are ticket scammers out there that are willing to take advantage. Be vigilant, if something seems to good to be true, it probably is. Trust your instincts.
Where can I register my Wristband? Do I have to register my wristband?
You can register it here. The only way to recover your wristband if it is lost or stolen is to have it registered. Additionally, there is emergency contact information stored in your wristband as part of the registration process, if anything should happen to you. There is a $40 fee for a replacement wristband.
Well this is embarassing, I didn't listen to everyone and put my wristband on early/on the wrong hand, how can I get it off? I sold my wristband after I attended one of the nights, how can I get it off without damaging it?
Here's a short how-to video to remove the wristband without damaging anything. DON'T PUT YOUR WRISTBAND ON UNTIL FRIDAY BEFORE YOU LEAVE YOUR HOTEL! It goes on your right wrist, and should be able to fit a finger underneath for breathing room.
I'm going solo to the fest, how can I make friends, I need a place to stay, etc.
There are several ways of doing this. You can use the search function on the subreddit. There's also some Facebook groups dedicated to solo journeys to EDC. Once again, trust your instincts here and only stay with people that you can properly personally have vetted ahead of time.
Also, check the useful links above for ride shares, hotel shares, and tent shares!
Live sets just aren't doing it for me, I need a feel for what this place is like before I attend!
Check out Electric Daisy Carnival 2000, Under the Electric Sky, or The Electric Daisy Carnival Experience trailer from when the festival was still in L.A. If you can find The Electric Daisy Carnival Experience online for free somewhere or even for a couple bucks to stream it, I think it's a much better movie than the Under the Electric Sky movie.

FAQ

When do the set times drop? When does the app update? I can't find the app on the app store, what gives?!
Set times and app updates usually happen the week of the festival. The Insomniac app will update the week of the festival, so go ahead and install it now if you want to.
What about pool parties or other EDC Week events?
Official site here for a list of events and tickets. There's also going to be parties and pools at the campground.
What time should I leave the strip? How long does it take to get to/from to the speedway? What time should I leave the event to beat traffic?
EDC is not like a local DJ show and Las Vegas traffic SUCKS. Parking lots open at 2PM, so I would strive to leave the strip right around that time. Without traffic it will take you anywhere from 30 minutes to an hour. The longer into the night you wait to leave the worse off traffic will be and the longer it will take to get to the show. I have heard nightmare scenarios of 2 or 3 hour shuttle rides, so don't let it happen to you!
Typically, you can leave before the sunrise sets or about halfway through it and not have too bad of a wait in traffic back to the strip in the morning! At the end of night 3, keep in mind normal people are also heading to work since it will technically be Monday morning. That's just going to add to the cluster fuck of traffic on I-15 and Las Vegas Blvd. Plan accordingly! If you are driving have a cooler in the trunk with water bottles!
Are we doing the Reddit meetup again this year?
We sure are. Check out the links up top regarding information on where and when we are meeting up. We are going to have two simultaneous meetups, one for campers and one for people on the Strip. All information is contained in the post linked at the very top!
What can I bring into the festival? What can't I bring into the festival? What are the searches like?
The searches could be TSA style, or you could barely get touched at all. It's pretty random. Consider stash boxers or compression underwear to get your favors inside or items that are disallowed like LED gloves, etc.
If you take your time to observe the security, you can usually get a feel of who is being a hard-ass for a dime raise for busting someone and who is just doing their job quickly and efficiently.
As for allowed and disallowed items, here's a link to those lists as well as totem guidelines.
Bring a gallon zip lock bag and put all of your belongings that you want to bring into the festival in it while you are waiting in line. All three days last year security complimented me on being organized and how easy I made their jobs because they could just scan the items in the bag, check my camelbak, give me the pat down and I was on my way.
Seriously, if you make security's lives easier in this way, they will not hassle you at all as long as you aren't trying to bring in stuff that isn't allowed. I didn't even get pat down on Night 2 because I was so up-front about all my belongings.
Any further questions, feel free to comment below, or visit the EDC Las Vegas Guide page!

Tips and Tricks!

Put an Emergency Contact Information (ICE) on your phone's lock screen. Android or Apple. This serves as two things.. One, if you lose your phone, someone can try to get it back to you. TWO, if you get hurt or fall out, the medics on site can get in contact with someone you know.
Call your bank/credit card companies and let them know you will be traveling to Vegas to avoid holds on your account.
Be vigilant on the Strip. Everyone is trying to hustle. Street performers will expect tips if you take pictures!
Hit up a Vegas buffet at least one day.
Stretch beforehand in your hotel room. Your muscles will thank you in the morning!
Wear comfy shoes and/or get insoles to replace the "stock" insoles that come with your shoes. Also, consider moleskin if your feet are prone to blistering from rubbing against your socks. Your feet will thank you!
Get to the festival early. Stop by the merchandise tent first thing. Items sell out fast. Consider a mobile charging locker to store your merchandise in! Additionally, if you bring all of your sealed items in on the first day (wipes, chapstick, cigarettes, gum, tampons, etc), you can keep them all in your locker overnight and not have to worry about getting 3 of each sealed item to bring in every single day. REMEMBER! Hide your lock combo from people that may peer over your shoulder or look at your combination wristband and try to get into your locker. Remain vigilant inside the festival!
After you get your merch and put it in your locker, you next stop should be one of the free water stands to fill up your hydration pack or water bottle. It's very important to remain hydrated, especially while the sun is still out and bearing down on you! If you tip some of the vendors, they will give you ice if the warm water turns you off.
If you need to eat something, consider the food trucks instead of the concession stand food. The food trucks have their company name out there and on the line when compared to the generic concession stand stuff, the quality of the food is unparalleled. Don't make the same mistake as I did a few years ago and get a raw onion sandwich masked as a "cheese steak".
Bring earplugs! Tinnitus sucks!
Wear sunscreen! Remember, if you are staying all night the sun is up at like 5AM and starts beaming down on you almost immediately.
If you want to ride the rides, get there early or risk missing sets while standing in line! Some rides you will be waiting for an hour or more at peak times.
Time-stamp your texts! There will be cell service congestion. Stamping your texts will help your friends know whenever you truly sent a message!
Bring an external battery pack in with you to charge your phone if you are someone who likes to take a lot of photo and video!
Bring cash. Credit and debit cards could possibly be hit or miss if the speedway's internet network would happen to shit the bed! Don't be stuck without a way to pay for something you need!
Remember to take it easy night 1! EDC is a marathon not a sprint!
Emergen-C packets are a lifesaver. Take one before the festival every night in order to help you recover from the night before and prepare for the festival ahead!
Take some time to look up and enjoy the fireworks!
Don't forget about the EDC parade down Rainbow Road every night! You should at least try to check it out one time out of the three nights you are there! Check the app for times, but it should be around midnight every night!
Follow your favorite artists' social media so that you know if they may show up unannounced, or if they are doing any surprise sets on one of the art cars, etc.
Send a post card to back home at the EDC Town Post Office. Mine took until October in 2017 to land, but it was a nice surprise when it finally did! Check out EDC Town in general. It's pretty sweet.
If you are feeling at all dehydrated or anything else medical related, visit one of the medical tents. Staff is super friendly and you WILL NOT get in trouble for seeking medical treatment, no matter your condition. If you can't make it to the medical tent, look for a Ground Control staff member to assist you or any of your friends! Look out for your fellow ravers. If you see something, say something! This will keep everyone safe and having a good time.
If you are going to do drugs, and especially MDMA, I suggest only doing it 1 out of the 3 nights and finding something else for the other two days. Just to let you know as an example of responsible use, in 2017 we did edibles and shatter the first night, rolled night 2, and just chilled with some shatter night 3. Everyone is different, but be safe, and TEST YOUR SHIT. Do not buy drugs at the festival. Not only do you risk getting bunk shit, but undercover cops are everywhere!
If you are going to drink alcohol, do so in moderation and stay hydrated! For every alcoholic drink you have, you should drink 8-16oz of water!
If you are a lady, bring wipes! Usually the porta-potties run out of toilet paper. It's just a fact of the festival and usually they don't get resupplied until the following day. You will thank me if you get caught in this situation.
Bring a hand fan for the water lines! They can get pretty hot and people will love you!
Try to catch at least one sunrise set one of the nights. I recommend night 2, since everyone and their mothers will be staying on night 3. Plus, Monday morning rush hour traffic on night 3 is no bueno.
If you have a large crew and need to split up to see different sets, plan a meeting spot! Try to pick something that is stationary, like the locker area, the cooling area, one of the buildings in EDC Town, etc.
Buy a smoothie or a lemonade. They are a nice change of pace from warm hydrant water.
Get a bandana and tie it around your neck for each night you are out there. Put it over your mouth and nose when the dust gets to be too much. Your lungs will thank you, plus you get to look like a bandit. Win/win.
Trains of people going in and out of the crowd are going to happen, so use them to your advantage. Become the caboose to go into or out of the crowds and use your manners! Excuse me, thank you, etc go a long way when navigating the crowd!
Bring good vibes, leave the judgement at the gates, and most of all, enjoy yourself and smile! EDC is a glorious wonderland of fun. Extrude the vibes you wish to receive back to you and you will have a great time, I promise!

If you have other tips, tricks or questions, comment your thoughts below!

Audio version of the story
The teenagers saying goodbye acted like they were heading to a war instead of a summer camp. Authentic tears were shed as parents signed release forms and their kids handed over their phones. The only person who looked happy was fourteen-year-old Ember Belliston. She sat in a folding wooden chair in the front row of the orientation tent. She wore simple shorts and sneakers. Her auburn hair was tightly braided. She followed the dress and grooming instructions exactly and packed all her extra clothes and toiletries in the canvas bag resting on her knees.
Ember smiled as ten boys and nine other girls slumped into the tall tent. No one smiled back at her until two adult counselors appeared, wearing white jumpsuits.
“What beautiful faces! My name is Sunshine and this is Dave. Welcome to Happy Planet Farms and Sustainability Academy!”
Sunshine raised her arms above her head in a greeting. Her hair was braided like Ember’s and she seemed on the verge of giving everyone in the tent a hug.
“This week is going to change your life,” added Dave in a voice as bubbly as Sunshine’s. “Who’s ready to fall in love?”
None of the teenagers in the tent reacted.
“Well, how many of you love your mother? By the end of the week, you’re going to love Mother Earth just as much.”
A couple of kids behind Ember groaned, but she continued to smile. This was her dream come true. When her school friends had talked about summer trips and summer camps, they had mostly meant focusing on soccer or gymnastics. Ember was not into that stuff. She was the rare kid who liked growing things. Every available window in her house was filled with soil cups and sprouts. She bought seeds online and planted them in her backyard, in arrangements known only to her. Her dad complained that he could not tell the difference between weeds and her pet projects.
Ember spent hours at the supermarket admiring the produce section. She weighed the loose vegetables and held apples side by side to compare the colors. On weekends, she nagged her mom into driving to farmer’s markets.
When Ember imagined a summer camp, it was all about fields and farms, far from the pavement of her San Jose neighborhood. She found Happy Planet Farms online. They claimed to provide an immersive experience as the world’s premiere sustainability educator. Tuition was expensive. Ember’s parents did not have $2000 laying around so she wrote her grandparents asking for help. They sent checks, but most of Ember’s camp money came from babysitting jobs. She had a reputation for being responsible. As she listened to Sunshine and Dave in the orientation tent, she leaned forward so she would not miss a single world.
“You’re about to experience the most important cycle on earth,” Dave continued. “It’s only been in the last few years that we’ve forgotten the lessons of the life cycle and worried more about the latest electronic gizmos. We’re going to re-teach you the secrets.”
Sunshine picked up a pot from one corner of the tent. Green leaves cascaded down the pot’s sides. “Can anyone tell me the five things needed to grow a plant like this?”
Ember’s hand shot up.
Sunshine ignored her and kept talking. “Earth, water air, light, and a seed.” Ember nodded her head enthusiastically as Sunshine described the magic of turning those elements into something green and living.
And then, abruptly, Sunshine dropped the plant and moved on to the subject of living accommodations. “We have separate quarters for the girls and the boys. Everything will be simple. Your needs will be met in a sustainable way.”
“While you are part of the Academy, you will wear uniforms like ours,” added Dave. “We’ll have clean versions for you each day.”
“There’s no way I’m wearing that,” cried a girl behind Ember.
Dave continued, waving away the complaint like he was waving away a fly. “Wearing your uniform is an important part of the experience and a rule you already agreed to. It will include a wide hat for sun protection.”
After more instructions about bathrooms and treating everyone with respect, the campers were led to their new accommodations and told to get properly dressed.
Ember was the first inside the large girls’ tent. A tarp covered the ground and ten simple beds were arranged in two rows. Changing stalls stood at the rear of the tent. Next to the stalls were white jumpsuits hanging from a rack. Ember placed her bag on one of the beds, found a jumpsuit her size, and slipped into a changing stall.
The jumpsuit material was tough and semi-stiff. Ember also chose a wide straw hat and was the first camper to rejoin the counselors outside the tent. One by one, the other teenagers emerged, acting embarrassed by what they were wearing. Most whispered about calling their parents to come and get them, but of course they did not have their phones.
“You look wonderful!” cried Sunshine. “Now your first hands-on lesson is only a short walk away. If you’ve noticed, we’re surrounded by fields and life.”
Sunshine and Dave talked about growth and life cycles as they led the group to a field of strawberries. A wagon sat next to the field and on the wagon were hundreds of flat cardboard boxes.
“You all get to participate in an organic harvest,” said Sunshine, handing out boxes. “We have a precious crop of strawberries out there and before we can move to our next activity, we need to fill up all the boxes on this wagon.”
Dave described the strawberries as little red miracles and encouraged everyone to lean down and taste one. Ember dropped to her knees and pulled a juicy berry from a stem. It tasted sweeter than anything brought home from a store and red, sugary liquid ran down her fingers.
“Let me show you how to get them into the box,” added Dave. He crawled along a row of strawberries, pushing aside leaves to find the ripe targets. He wanted campers to find them all and pull off the stems with the berries to preserve freshness. “Once you fill up your box, take it to the wagon and get another one. Let’s see who can get the most.”
The teenagers around her half-heartedly searched for strawberries, but Ember was not afraid to grind her knees into the soil and find the reddest fruit. She filled her box and returned to the wagon for an empty one. Before long, her fingers were pink. Sunshine interrupted her poems and songs about strawberries to compliment Ember as a harvesting star.
During a water break, Ember looked around at the flat sea of green and noticed people and tractors in the distance. “What’s going on out there?” she asked Dave.
“You don’t need to worry about that. Concentrate on what’s in front of you,” Dave replied sharply.
After what felt like eight hours, but Sunshine and Dave claimed to only be two, the campers returned to the orientation and instruction tent. Teenagers collapsed into their chairs while Dave talked about nutrition and only putting natural foods into your body.
“Who would like to pick our dinner for tonight? Right out of the ground?” called Sunshine enthusiastically.
Ember’s chair felt so comfortable that she did not want to move. But she managed to raise a hand.
“C’mon, let’s all go! This is going to be amazing!” cried Dave.
The campers were lured into a field of vegetables with promises of food and cold water. Under Dave and Sunshine’s directions, they filled buckets with carrots, potatoes, lettuce, tomatoes, cucumbers, and squash. They hauled the buckets to another tent containing tables, stoves, and sinks. Then the counselors showed them how to peel and chop. After an hour of preparation, everyone sat down to a meal of salad and boiled vegetables.
“Wow! Can’t you taste the freshness?” cried Dave. “I feel so alive with every bite. And you picked it. You were part of the cycle.”
Ember nodded and tried to smile. The other teenagers kept their heads down and shoveled potatoes into their mouths.
“Since this is only your first day, we don’t want to push you too hard,” announced Sunshine. “No more lessons or fields for tonight. You can go back to your tents.”
Ember and the other girls trudged back to where they had left their clothes. Half of the girls dropped onto their beds, still wearing their dusty jumpsuits, which had turned from off-white to a pale brown.
“I hate it here!” cried a girl named Chloe, who looked about sixteen.
“Then why did you come?” asked Ember.
“My stupid parents. They said I needed a digital detox, which is so hypocritical because my dad designs iPhones and my mom is a computer lawyer. I only agreed to it because they promised to buy me a Tesla.”
“Same with me,” said a girl named Montana. “Not about the Tesla, but my parents said I could go to Europe after. They act like they’re into all this hippy earth stuff, but they’re mostly busy on their crypto startup.”
Ember listened to more complaints as a few girls changed into sleep clothes. Others stared at the tent’s roof in an exhausted trance. Ember did not take the chance to share her own story before she fell asleep.
Sunshine’s voice woke the tent up the next morning. She promised a glorious and fun day ahead and said the girls could shower if they wanted. They needed to be dressed and in the dining tent in half an hour. Ember and the others hurried to eat their breakfast of strawberries and melons while Dave gave them a lesson on water and how it got from the sky to the fields.
“Before we learn anything else, we’ve got more strawberries to pick!” called Sunshine excitedly.
“What about the irrigation pipes? When are we going to see those?” Ember asked Dave.
“Don’t worry about that. We’re concentrating on the harvest now.”
“But I’m here to learn everything,” said Ember.
Dave smiled and ignored her.
As Ember packed boxes with strawberries, she kept her eyes on the tractors gliding in the distant fields. They were up to something interesting, maybe plowing or planting. Ember asked Sunshine if she could take a closer look.
“No, we’ve got lessons that are a lot more fun than tractors,” answered Sunshine.
The group stopped for instructional breaks in which Dave and Sunshine talked about the lifecycle of a plant. Ember had only been on the farm two days, but her counselors were already sounding repetitive. When Ember asked about fertilizer and pesticides, Dave made a sour face and said it was a good time to learn a song about the sun and the wind.
“You can sing it while we’re picking your lunch and dinner,” called Dave.
The campers were shuttled between vegetable and strawberry fields and the lesson tent. When given a chance to sit and rest, the teenagers quickly fell into a trance. The sound of Dave and Sunshine’s continual chatter reminded Ember of a radio stuck on an all-talk station.
By the third day at Happy Planet Farms, most of the grumbling stopped. The campers merely followed Dave and Sunshine’s constant directions and put strawberries into boxes. Ember panicked under the realization that things were not going to change.
“What about the other parts of the farm?” she asked Sunshine. “Can we see where the strawberries go from here? What about the greenhouses at the end of the field?”
“We’re concentrating on harvesting,” replied Sunshine. “If you can show patience and focus, you may conquer all things.”
“I don’t have time for patience and focus. I’m only here a week.”
“You look thirsty,” replied Sunshine. “Have some more water.”
The supervisors seemed to always loom over the strawberry fields. Ember did not think to question their authority until she looked up from her box on her third afternoon and realized the adults were gone. She popped to her feet and scanned the fields. A few hundred yards away, across a dirt road, she saw a tractor moving. Ember looked back at her campmates. None of them noticed her standing. She decided it was her only chance to see a working tractor up close and she started walking.
Ember crossed the dirt road into another strawberry field. She kept her eyes on the tractor until she realized there were people in front of her. They were bent over strawberry plants but not in white jumpsuits. The first person she reached was a boy wearing jeans and a long sleeve shirt. He looked a little older than she was.
“Are you in the Academy too?” asked Ember.
“I don’t think so. I only work for the farm.”
“I’m Ember. I’m here for the camp.”
“I’m Alonzo. I pick strawberries, but they don’t pay me as much as other places.”
“They pay you?” asked a shocked Ember.
“Yeah, don’t they pay you?”
“No! Just the opposite. I had to pay to be here!” Ember thought about all the strawberries she had picked and how they were probably on their way to a supermarket. “This isn’t fair! It’s crazy!”
As Ember yelled about the farm taking advantage of her, Dave and Sunshine suddenly appeared. “You’re not supposed to be here!” Dave called.
“Alonzo’s getting paid to pick strawberries! Why am I paying to do it? I had to babysit like a thousand kids to get here.”
“Ah, but you’re also getting instruction and room and board,” said Sunshine.
“I already knew everything you told me. You’re ripping us off. I’m going to tell all the others!”
“You don’t want to do that,” said Dave, no longer using his happy, sing-song voice. “Everybody’s happy the way they are and learning important lessons about hard work.”
“Well, I’m not learning anything,” snapped Ember.
“We can’t have you ruining our camp, Ember,” said Sunshine. “Happy Planet only survives because of our education program. I tell you what, since you’re such a star student, maybe we can refund some of your tuition. We’ll call it a scholarship.”
Ember quickly realized Sunshine was negotiating. “If I don’t say anything, I want a full scholarship.”
Sunshine fidgeted but said, “I think we can arrange that. If you don’t agitate the camp.”
“And I don’t want to pick strawberries all day. I want to learn about the real farm and drive a tractor.”
“Okay fine. You can go on a field trip.”
From that point on, while the rest of the camp trudged out to the fields, Ember slipped away to the buildings and equipment almost hidden in the distance. She was the first Academy student allowed to plow and plant and lay out irrigation pipes. And she learned to drive a tractor.
When camp was over, the other kids hugged their parents and said they would never look at food the same way again. Ember said the same thing and added, “Now I know I want to be a farmer.”

Story Time:
Every year burning man teaches me a huge life lesson, this year's lesson was so magical I have to share it with everyone around me. It was a tuesday afternoon with the usual explore the city vibe happening in our group. Some of our camp members are all about the food so they are always on the lookout for food camps and food events. We went out of our way to one of the classic “steak” camps that hand out amazing steaks, well at least a small taste of a steak. (Let me say before I continue that I greatly appreciate this camp and the service they are providing the playa so no hard feelings towards them)
So this year the steak camp decided to mix things up a little and instead of a line they asked everyone to dance for the steak. Okay, I get it, mixing things up a little and causing more participation. I am not much of a dancer, more of a bobber, but I can get out of my comfort zone a little and do the best bobbing I can do. Well there was just one lady who was the gatekeeper of the meat.
As she passed my group, my brother, one of the most charismatic people I know, was in the middle of narrating his personal dance song with custom moves…well needless to say she handed him 3 of the 10 pieces of meat while giving the rest of the meat to the people who had it most going on. To give my brother full credit because I love him he immediately handed out the meat to people around him. As we waited for another 10 mins for the meat to be ready the meat gatekeeper again handed out meat to everyone dancing but this time I stood back and just watched all those hungry faces swarm her just trying to do their best for a small slice of meat. I immediately felt disgusted about myself trying to conform to standards I am not comfortable with. I love people who dance their hearts out, I am a little jealous but have completely come to terms with my bobbing style of dancing which would never get me a slice of meat in this particular situation. I ended up just leaving the food camp to go discover more of the city.
The next morning I was venting about the experience to some of my campmates. “I just don't get food camps personally, you can spend so much of the day looking/standing in line for a little food that you miss all of the other amazing things happening in the city. This is why I bring nothing but MREs, I want to spend as little time as possible thinking about food at my burns. I hear about these camps that cook 6 course meals for people, now that is something I would be interested in but as far as food camps, it is a pass for me” Now I totally understand that this is just how I like to do my burns and everyone is different and valifyed. I would never stop someone in my group from getting some food at a camp and I am guilty of a random hot dog here or there.
So now to the magical part and the amazing lesson burning man taught me, we decided to venture out into the playa to see some art the next morning. I noticed a girl and her boyfriend on the “i-beam bridge of broken ankles”. The bridge was shaking violently because it had found the natural harmonics of the structure. Needless to say it was a very sketchy situation because she was at the very top of the bridge frozen by the current situation. I quickly recognized, I am a hobbyist engineer, the problem and immediately hung below the bridge to change its natural harmonics. The bridge slowly stabilized and the girl and her boyfriend were able to climb down safely.
Once they both were off the bridge they thanked us and immediately the gentleman noticed my pole vaulting tattoo. “Dude! I was a pole vaulter too!” We immediately go deep into pole vaulting while the girl had just as deep of a connection with the other people in our party. It is undeniable when the magic happens out in the playa. We intensely talked for 5 mins and when we were about to finish up and go our separate ways the gentleman asked me what I was doing for dinner that night? He then handed me an extremely heavy metal card with an invitation for two to a japanese 6 course meal! I am still smiling about this even as I write this sentence, it was so organic and so perfect that I am sure I cried a little. What did burning man 2022 teach me this year? Just be true to yourself and freely give what makes the most sense to you, with such a simple mandate you will find the connections, people, and art will overwhelm you to the point that you just want to give even more next year. Cant wait to spend 100s of hours giving back for next year's burn. Thank you Burning Man and all the magical people (especially camp Harmonic) who go and make it the event we spend all year preparing for.
EDIT: a kind soul informed me how to add paragraphs instead of just abrading me in the comments

Part 1: Preparation and PREQUEL
4 weekends in Phoenix Arizonas 110°F heat 1 hr from home at Robert's house unpacking and repackaging the Elvis wedding chapels camp structures and decorations. It rained after we left tarps out one of the weekends so half the stuff we brought were wet. During this time Robert decided to tell us we can't go in his RV as he has his own driver (BRENT) now and he doesn't want any gay sex happening in his RV. So we buy everything we'll need to survive camping at BM which creates more crates of stuff to pack.
I organize and pack everything 4 days before we leave at Robert's house. Than pack up at our house 2 days before departure. The day of departure we show up and pack everything else of his for hours before he says he hasn't packed anything for his trip. We leave to Vegas since he has a driver and hasn't packed. We arrive in Vegas and wait 5 hours .. no response from Robert.. he than responds with a text to wait at this truck stop 15 miles south of Vegas for him. 5 more hours pass by and he responds with an address to meet him at. Later I found out he was at the address we were to all sleep at 5 hrs ago and he wanted us to suffer at a gas station on purpose for his amusement. After we arrive in north Las Vegas, we drink we eat we shower we sleep. In the middle of the night this middle aged man decided to crawl into my bed while i was drunk, dazed and dead tired and proceeded to crawl into bed and lay on me without my consent.
Part 2: ARRIVAL INTO BRC
We continue the trip with the sexual assailant continually repeating himself for us not to go ahead of them and we have to stay close together. We arrive in one town and sleep in a hotel. And continue on to the next town and so forth. We arrive to BLACK ROCK CITY IN A WHITE OUT on Thursday of build week. Around 5 PM my boyfriend starts to unload everything from the uhaul onto the Playa. No one assists so of course I do. 1 hr later and we have all the chapel structures and parts on the Playa. I organized everything so it could be a quick build but Robert thinks he knows best and tears off all my tags and just like a bag of exploding Chips all the parts scatter over and over again mixing up 5 10x20Ft canopies bars. 3 hrs later and we finally lay, not build, 4 canopies down near where they want it to face the 730&G PLAZA. The 2 RVS with 2 people in each enter into their AC and close their doors to rest. It's officially nightfall and I haven't had time to find any of my flash lights or camping equipment. We build our tent in about 90 min because the parts were finicky. Exhausted hungry and thirsty we lay down and the tent collapsed with a crucial piece shattering... next the tent wouldn't close because the tent was now deformed somehow preventing the tent from closing. We slept with an open door, no blankets, no light and got little to no sleep.
Day 1: SURVIVAL MODE
Realizing our camp won't help us even though we help them was a 1st sign. I wake up at 6am and start building a Canopy and rebuilding the tent. Unpacking more necessities and never finding some. We finish around 11am because a whiteout made it difficult to build a holeless Canopy. Than everyone gets up and out of their RVs full of AC and BRENT the sexaul assailant instantly insults me as I tell him that we've been building since 6am and need a break before we build the chapel. He responds with than go to sleep we don't need you princess. We work with his barrage of insults and yelling and harassment until 11pm... working thru a 6 hr whiteout putting up 10x20 canopies with tarps for walls and roofs. During this time 2 RV Campers explain they have to leave due to a close friend dying and a funeral in 2 days. Robert starts yelling at them that they can't leave they have to build! And Robert might i add did absolutely nothing in terms of building anything as he was in his RV with AC on the past 12 hrs.
Day 2: More building
Of course the next day I get no sleep again due to dust blowing into our broken tent and me not wearing warm clothes to bed. I wake up early and work on our setup as all of our things are still buried and packed. 11am rolls around again and everyone wakes up. We work with more arguments and yelling and harassment from BRENT. It was whiteout unto about 4pm. We lose 2 nice workers around 4pm and they leave us a trailer with all the things necessary to generate power for the chapel and fans to cool it with 200 gallons of potable water for misters. What nice people.. Right. ^{-^.} We promise to bring it back because we have a hitch and uhaul. We continue building but start to slow down because Robert won't let anyone build without his supervision. He comes out and says that all the work we've done for 2 days is wrong and that we'll have to tear down and start over.. believe it or not we did it until about 1 am. Exhausted, we fall asleep..
Day 3: WORK SUCKS
It's the 3rd day of actual building and the whole time it's only been a 73 yr old l, 30yr old and the 50yr old. Sunday brings in 2 fresh faces and of course we let them settle before they build. We build thru more whitehouts and more harrasament from BRENT and from about 9am to 9pm nothing gets done because Robert's AC BROKE and he hasn't had anywhere to hide while we work on the chapel. He refuses to exit and give us crucial parts to build the steeple. So we just organize our and stuff and head to bed... BUT WAIT IN THE MIDDLE OF THE NIGHT THE 2 NEW GUYS STARR LAYING CARPET!!! YES A GOOD SIGN! FINALLY
Day 4: BENDER
I WAKE UP and it clicks!!! I NEED TO FIND ANOTHER CAMP!!! BUT MY BOYFRIEND IS THE MAIN CHARACTER AT THIS CHAPEL AND HE WORKED SO HARD ON HIS OUTFITS AND SPEECHES... and it 90% built... I Crack and go on a drinking bender in the morning. I walk to nearby camps and offer to help build. I walk to bad asstraunauts and help them build for idk how long I was drunk. But after that I went to the next camp to help build but lone behold it's a bar and finished.. I immediately vent and breakdown and cry and explain my scenario. They offer me shoulders and hugs. Gave me camp no drama Location and more camp locations to join. After a hour there I move on drunk as a skunk wondering aimlessly in a place I've never been and having a great time. Later I wake up to and head out to zhu. Go to out to see zhu until 8am with some new friends LILLY AND GUS. I struggle to make it back due to water reserves running out out there..but make it back.
Day 5: FIRE
I completely ignore the camp I'm at because it's still not complete due to ROBERT not wanting to give us parts to the last structure. So I go on another drinking spree and wonder around at night when it's cooler. I find a bar after losing my boyfriend and I'm gifted the name FIRE. I felt like my new name could relate to Charmander the Pokémon. Because I was a Virgin Burner and if my little fire went out I knew my time here would come to an end forever... I came back home happy I'd finally seen some fire.
Day 6: Weddings
During my time away 7 people showed up to camp on our property but were not instructed by anyone that they had to help with anything. I think they helped hang up clothes for about 1 hr and 2 of them eventually helped with getting brides and grooms dressed 1 Day out of the 3 days we were open. Our friend who had left for a death in the family gifted us 2 flights over the Playa earlier last week. Wednesday at 10Am was the earliest flight. After staying out till 4am we woke up at 830am and biked to 4&H from 730 &G. We made a mistake not eating breakfast or bringing food or even water. We assumed if we were 1st we'd be back home soon. We arrived to early and were told to come back at 11am. We did that and now instead of 1st we were on 4th flights up. Oh no... we have nothing and I'm already dehydrated from last night... I panic and as I lethargicaly lay in the dirt with no shoes and no mask or Goggles because I wanted less things on me a lady named Misty saves me with a cliff bar and a camp nearby gifts me some water. I lay in the dirt for another 2 hours until 1pm rolls around and our group is up. We have a plane malfunction in the air and land somewhat safely... we bike back and start the Wednesday back to back weddings... but I started to have a heatstroke and of course Brent was there to harass me to continue to work the wedding when my muscles couldn't work and fever and clammy skin wouldn't let up. I layed face down with water controlling the audio system we had for the weddings the rest of the day while being harassed by Brent. FYI it only takes 3 other people to run the chapel because 3 people always had main character parts.
Day 7: Campers but not CampMates
After a night of recovery and lots of sleep we have another 5-18 Campers show up in 4 different RVs. I ask the ones I met if they are going to help. They explained that they were invited to camp not to work, so no. 🤷. A group of 10 men all say no. 2 ladies named Maria and Robin, and 2 gay men named George and Dora all say yes to helping. We work all Thursday until 5pm and it was splendid working with a nice refreshing group. I go have some fun at 4am. I get a flat tire deep Playa and have 2 gallons of water on me.
Day 8: Flat Tire and Physicsl Fights
I walk back my bike from deep Playa after gifting all my water away so I wouldn't carry so much weight back on a flat tire. I have 3 herniated discs from 5 and 7 yrs ago. So twisted and walking my back gives out. And my nerves are crushed. My left leg goes numb and I start to rest at any stop I can... it hurt but I made it back. The refreshing group works another successful day from 12-7pm without the help of ROBERT AND BRENT FOR THE 2ND DAY STRAIGHT. My boyfriend proposed to me and I said yes. Things were looking better until i sprained my ankle sprinting over holes... i ice it and head to bed after a few drinks. Than a whiteout hits at 8pm and I hear screaming and fighting. 2 people decided to be good people and help tear down early but ROBERT didn't want them to tear down because he wanted to instruct people how to tear down something he didn't even build... Robert screams and harasses a women in her face and she apparently pushed him back and as he moves back he cries and yells for the police and kicks them out of the camp for trying to help. As they leave in a whiteout Brent keeps chasing their car like he's some guard of some sort. As they keep me and my boyfriend up until 12am we finally get some sleep in our uhaul on the metal ground.
Day 9: Teardown
I wake up and tear down 2 other canopies people left and than our own camp and tent setup from 8am to 2pm. During a whiteout i teardown with the help of a 70 yr old named nate for multiple hours. During this time 2 RVs dip out to avoid teardown. And 3 others remains but don't help because they won't answer or open their door. So I tear down by myself in a white out... 3 canopies down and 2 to go I see Brent doing nothing and start to give him shit about not helping. After 6pm hits and Robert screams at me for trying to help teardown I finally bust out and scream at him. My boyfriend comes to my side and tells Robert to Apologize but he never does. I start to pack up to leave and lock the uhaul and reverse it into the wagon and hitch we promised our friend we would take. Robert steps infront of the uhaul as we reverse trying to stop us from leaving and telling us to do more work... i move the heavy hitch myself onto the uhaul but robert stops me and sits on the hitch. During this time brent steals our car keys in the ignition and claims he didn't. I call the cops and after 45 min of the cop interrogation he tossed the keys behind the uhaul. I tell the cop i found it and thanks for the intimidating fear. Thats all we needed. I tell our camp my keys must be in lost and found since brent didnt steal them. He gazed at me like he knew id found them but couldn't say he knew we had them or that would make him guilty of tossing them after he has stolen them. We leave the camp with 1 Canopy left to tear down and go enjoy our night out. I propose as the man burns with a gorgeous custom ring that's like a burning man logo but all gold and diamonds. I'll upload the video later. As we come back from a great night we see our rv booby trapped. Spikes and nails infront of wheels. Entire bikes under the middle of the RV. NAILS AND TRASH THROWN FRONT AND BACK. Piss poured all over our car and drivers entrance on the ground. Anything that would make noise was left on our hood so they could hear us and stop us from leaving. I quietly moved everything and drove out in a frenzy scared for my life. I drove all of Robert's things back to Scottsdale Arizona in a uhaul and dropped all his trash and structures back at his house 1hr away from mine without his help on gas or uploading. Not like he helped with any of the costs in the first place but still. What an expensive trip for someone I loath entirely hate.
That was my burning man experience

TL;DR / edit: I want to clarify something... I'm not trying to discourage the use of lag bolts. I'm trying to discourage the shorter lengths than 2ft of any earth-anchoring effort. The lag bolts led to this desire to shorten and increase the convenience level. I don't want anyone to stop using lag-bolts, I want them to consider that the trend of shorter lengths is the danger here.
Hi Everyone...
Several years back when the lag-bolt over 2' stake argument / concept came up, a whole lot of us older burners were really skeptical. There were even some ugly accusations of the millennial crowd being lazy, and sacrificing a few minutes of work for potentially dangerous convenience.
I say this with all humility, I'm sorry for being such an ass about this several years ago on Facebook and ePlaya. But the wind event we had last night (gusts clocked at only 52mph max) proved me and a lot of the crusty old burners right. Many of the structures torn out of the ground were using lag-bolts (all shorter than 2').
The images shown are from 2014. I'm not posting this to beat on the lag-bolt issue, but rather to show just how fucking powerful the weather can be out here. These are massive office trailers. They're extremely heavy. One picture that shows an office trailer that, and I shit you not, literally flipped the fuck over, not rolled, but flipped in mid-fucking-air. There were no roll marks of any kind. That was the single worst wind event we've experienced. Imagine if someone had been in that building. Imagine if we didn't stake those fucking things into the ground with about a dozen cross-rebar (aircraft style) 3ft stakes and sheet-metal ratchet straps per building.
Please plan ahead, and if you didn't buy the longest lag bolts possible in favor of "smaller and convenient", please think twice about your safety and that of your campmates. My only argument about this has been the difference ~~between taking the time to pound in 2ft+ rebar is~~ ~~merely a few minutes of your time~~ between something shorter than 2', be it stakes or lag bolts. It was busy enough last night in dispatch when this happened. The injuries we dealt with could very easily have been fatalities. Please, consider the cost of convenience versus safety. If we have another one of those with the city full, it easily could become an MCI (mass casualty incident). We train for such things here, both at the line staff level across the entire organization and in Emergency Services. But walking into an incident of that level is pretty damn nightmarish for us regardless of all that. We have some amazing resources out here, including a full field-hospital. An MCI can be a huge strain on any regular city's resources... and in a remote environment here, 100 miles from the nearest level 1 and level 3 trauma centers (about 30min by air, and those resources would be taxed as well), we'd rather hope we never experience something that severe.
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COVID planning

The ORG in not so many words stated that they are not providing Covid mitigation, testing, or specific, guidelines. This means that it will be to us as individuals and camps to do so. This means that (aside from all the heated debate that happens here and elsewhere) there are some decisions and planning that needs to happen. What are your plans should one of your campmates or somebody that shares your tent/yurt/RV present with symptoms. Will you plan on testing folks before they enter your enclosed space ? If one of your fellow attendees thinks they were exposed to Covid what are you planning to do with this data ? Do you have any immunocompromised folks camping in your group ? If you have an enclosed space are you going to have any mitigating factors in place because of Covid ? These and a few other questions is something you as an individual (and if applicable camp/village) should think about ? This post is not about vaccines, its effectiveness, or opinions, this is about having the decisions made beforehand so that the actions taken on playa is known by all, and communicated clearly for all to understand. We all plan, have contingencies in the event of mechanical issues, gate closures, etc... this year it warrants all of us to plan beforehand for Covid as well, because it is a fact, it is here, it is not going away, and it just might impact you or somebody you know. As always if you need emergency services reach out to the appropriate dept for assistance. This is about non emergent plans and actions we should all take for the well being of ourselves and others.

If you volunteer with any dept for the ORG you should contact your Volunteer Coordinator with the above questions, you might have resources available to you, once you have answers you should still plan ahead.

Bring your own tests, knowledge is power.
Put away enough water and food for 2 days that you will only use in case you (or somebody you know) needs/wants to isolate or is experiencing symptoms and wants to stay in. Use this food/liquid on Saturday, no earlier if all goes well.
If you live in an RV or other enclosed space and one of the folks that share your space has symptoms, they should self test.
If you live in an RV or other enclosed space and one of the folks that share your space has Covid, what are your plans for living arraignments ?
If an individual tests positive, it's not the end of the world, but they should plan ahead what they should do to prevent the spread to others.
If an individual has symptoms, ask for help, especially if any of these symptoms are impacting their standard of living (relative) on playa. For example if there is any shortness of breath you should escalate that. We ask for help based on signs and symptoms, in fact the vast majority of 911 calls (on playa and in the default world) work this way.
If you have any existing condition that might increase the chances of you getting sick if you contract Covid, please document this condition and keep it on you in case you get sick.
If somebody in your circle decides they want to leave playa because they have Covid, how an where are they going to ?

In short, plan ahead, what are the actions that will be taken if somebody in your circle has symptoms of Covid, tests positive, or both.

These are my personal thoughts, and do not reflect the opinion, guidance, or advice from any organization.

Three Really Scary True Scary County Stories

Number One: The Figure

When I was younger, we lived down the road from one of my aunts. So, I pretty much grew up with my cousin Tom. We were much more like brothers than cousins. Both only children, we did everything together. We had the same interests, which I guess made sense.

We lived in a more rural tri state area. Most of our extended family lived in one of the three states, but that is not really important. We both lived on a road at the bottom of a couple foothills a way from the nearest town. We lived on a dirt road, but the houses were not very close to each other. They were houses for people who wanted to own a big piece of property.

To sort of explain, there were the hills on the side of the road and the houses were set between the hills. On the other side of the road, were big rolling fields that could conceivably have been used for farm land. There were some tall, I guess wheat looking plants that grew there and rarely got cut down. Then on the other side of the fields, there were more hills. But I never went across the fields to check them out.

On the hilly side of the road, was a dense forest. Tom and I explored it quite often. We would often walk to each others houses, but it was quite a long walk. The homes in that area were really far apart from each other, and he wasn’t the next house over. It could take up to 45 minutes to make the entire walk.

But yeah, Tom and I did a whole lot of things together. Honestly, we nearly spent every single day doing something, especially during the summer time.

Obviously, since this is a scary story and I just described the road that both of our houses were on, the story has to take place there. And yeah, it did.

I was fourteen years old at the time. I had been hanging out at Tom’s house because we had different gaming systems. I would go over there to play his Sega and he would come over to my place to play my SNES. But on this day and this night, I had been over at his house. He had a new game, I really don’t remember what it was, but we were playing it all day and into the night. But it was a weekend on a fall night and I could sleep in the next day. Before we knew it, it had become about one thirty in the morning.

Now, normally, I might just have decided to sleep over at their house. But I needed to take a pill that I needed before going to bed. I hadn’t brought it with me this time, so I had to go out and walk home.

I had made the walk a lot of times, during the day and during the night. So it was no big deal for me to do it. And I was not scared or anything like that. But I could understand why others might think it was a creepy atmosphere.

It was definitely jacket wearing weather. It was also windy. It’s one of the windy nights when you hear the leaves and the branches blowing more than just the regular sound of the wind.

I was lost in my own thoughts as I was walking along there. Anyone other than me would have probably been a little scared. It was very dark out there, the sky was overcast and the breeze was chilly. There were definitely no lights out there.

I don’t know how it got my attention, but I heard some sound up on the hill. I already mentioned there were a lot of sounds due to the wind blowing, but this didn’t sound like that random sound. The leaves had already turned brown. They had only begun falling though, so there were some on the ground but enough still on the trees in order to make it hard to see up into the trees. But it sounded like someone was walking up on the hill.

I immediately felt like I was on the edge just a little. I had been walking on the side of the road that the hills were on, but I got anxious just after a few minutes and decided that I would walk on the field side of the road just to feel calmer. I felt sort of silly for doing it, but thinking that I had heard someone walking in the trees really rubbed me the wrong way.

The entire time that I was walking, I felt very tensed up. But I really don’t know where it was coming from other than the atmosphere. However, I slowly began to believe that someone was up on the hill, spying on me from behind the trees. I was convinced, though that it was just paranoia.

And that’s when I heard it. In a sing songy sort of voice that was just hovering slightly over the noise the wind was making, I heard the creepiest thing I had ever heard in my entire life.

“I’m going to get you, and then I am going to kill you. I’m going to get you, and then I am going to kill you.”

I think nowadays if I heard something like that, I would probably take off running. But I honestly thought that maybe my cousin had followed me and was playing a joke on me. But instead, I looked up into trees to see if it was him.

It was dark, though, so it was hard to really see much. I called out for Tom, trying to see if it was him out there. And I’ll never forget this. It was already windy out, but there was suddenly a huge gust of wind when I noticed movement by a tree. And there was someone there but it definitely was not my cousin. I waa not able to completely make him out, but I was able to tell that it was a very tall and very thin man. He was halfway behind a tree, obviously peering out at me.

I am not really sure what was going on. But I did know it was not someone I knew and they had been talking to me.

I had to take off right then. I ran down the road, immediately looking back over my shoulder. I expected too see the guy running after me. I was just a bit dumbfounded at first, thinking that someone who threatened me did not come down and chase me. I actually quit running for a moment.

I thought maybe it was just someone messing with me and I didn’t have to run. However, as I was slowing down I heard the voice again. “I’m still coming.” The voice came from the forest and just terrified me.

I took off running again. I kept looking back, now I was looking behind me and I was looking up in the trees. It was terrifying and I kept hoping I wouldn’t fall as I was running. Every sound behind me or in the trees was terrifying.

I didn’t hear the guy again before I made it to my house. But I ran up the driveway and onto the front porch, I looked back one last time. He was standing at the end of our driveway. He looked at me, and then spread his arms out and began running up the driveway laughing.

I ran into the house and locked the door behind me. And when I turned and looked out the window, I didn’t see anyone out there. He had just disappeared.

I went and woke my dad up and told him what was going on. He got a couple guns, gave me one and we went around searching the house and around in the yard. I kept expecting to see the guy jump out at me or something, but he wasn’t anywhere in our yard.

When I described him to my dad, he had an idea who it was and thought it was just a guy messing with me. He said he would “take care of it.” And if he did, I never found out. My dad was a big brawny bar room brawler type so if he knew who it was, he probably scared the crap out of them.

I don’t know. It made it scary for me to ever go for a walk at night again.

7Number Two: The Rider

I don’t know if this story is as much scary as it is really just disturbing. So, I apologize beforehand if anyone is disturbed by it.

My family didn’t move around like a lot of other families that I have known. I grew up in just one house. In fact, my parents still own and live in that house. It is a nice two story house sitting on a country road.

There wasn’t much that you could count on. But there was one thing that I could always count on. There was a guy who always rode around on a riding lawn mower. He was always out every day, going up and down the road. He was an older guy too. His mower also had a trailer that it pulled along.

I really didn’t know exactly why he was always riding on that mower. But I would hear it off in the distance and know he was coming. I lived off a flat dirt road and my house was at

Anyway, it was a normal thing to see. A normal thing to hear.

We didn’t have air conditioning and occasionally we would have a hot and miserable summer time. And when this story happened, we were having just that. It was very, very hot and even worse inside the house. I was out on summer vacation and I just couldn’t spend the time inside the house.

The day was hot and I took a beach chair and put it on my front lawn. I had some lemonade. I was doing my best to try and keep cool. And I was miserable, but I guess I dozed off at some point.

I was barely conscious when I heard the familiar sound of the lawn mower coming down the street. It was like a dog barking at night, though. I was so used to it that I didn’t really hear it. In a way, it was sort of a comfortable noise, like white noise or something.

However, it was the next noise I heard that totally broke me out of my sleep. I don’t even know how to describe it. But it was a horrible noise and it was very loud. And it caused me to open eyes. The old guy that had been driving the lawn mower was lying on the ground. And he was laying under the lawn mower, which was still going on.

I jumped out of my chair to run over to where the guy was laying. It was actually terrifying to me but I thought it had to be much worse for the guy who was laying under a running lawn mower.

When I first got up there, I wasn’t sure what to do first. The guy looked like he was unconscious but I figured I had to turn the mower off before checking on him. I don’t know a lot of about riding lawn mowers, but I assumed you had to pull a level or something in order to make the blade start working. However, as gruesome as the site was, it was obvious that it wasn’t mowing him. But he body was a bit mangled from being ran over though.

I got the key and turned it off. I then tried to turn my attention to him. I first I thought he was knocked out or something, But unfortunately I was wrong. The guy was dead. I tried performing CPR on him. I would have yelled for help, but there were no houses close by. When I couldn’t revive him, I ran in the house and called 911 and then went back out to help the guy.

Apparently, the man had a heart attack and fell off of the lawn mower which then rolled right over him. We were not able to bring him back, unfortunately. I’ve had dreams about it since then and unfortunately, the blades were working in the dreams.

The Visitors
William M
01/09/2022
I first visited South Central New Mexico back in the early ‘70s, while hitchhiking around the country. I was 19. Two recent graduates from New Mexico State picked me up in a white ‘66 Chevy Van on the southbound side of Interstate 25. I stayed with them for a few days, fishing, hiking, and swimming. We had some interesting discussions around the campfire, that lasted late into the night. We talked geography, topography, politics, religion, but especially Anthropology: the pre-Columbian inhabitants before the advent of the mass European migration which prompted “Manifest Destiny” westward expansion, and Horace Greeley’s “Go west young man” cliché among others. The opportunistic colonialist philosophy of the times, led to one of the most extensive takeovers and mass purging's of an entire race of people along with their Millenia old knowledge of pharmacopeia and the flora and fauna they relied on for shelter, clothing, and sustenance in US Western History and one of two greatest crimes against the so-called: “Primordial Humanity?” of the last 400 hundred years. Slavery was the other. Whenever I would tour long distances, I almost always lived on the “out.” My routine was to first establish a remote base camp somewhere in the surrounding area that would put me as far away as feasibly possible from civilization. I would ride or sometimes walk, the 10 miles round trip, into and from the nearest town: Las Cruces (The Crosses) New Mexico. I would go into town every few days or weeks, to purchase supplies, do laundry, shower, bike repairs, work, etc., and stay, sometimes, for a few days or weeks in nearby Motels, Hotels, or apartments, if any long-term jobs called for it. During the 5 years, I resided in and around the Chihuahuan Desert, I stayed and worked in Las Cruces, Mesilla Park, Silver City, and even as far away as El Paso, TX. My base camp in Las Cruces was composed of a combination of natural foliage and cast-off or discarded materials found in and around the area. Access to water, absolute solitude, near-total invisibility, adequate shade, and natural defenses against wind, rain, and even snow were requisites. I’d learned through trial and error that the best base camp was unknown and unseen and unfrequented by anybody but myself or a few select animal buddies. Otherwise, I didn’t want anyone else there, for obvious reasons. My Desert Residence, or “Retreat” as I liked to call it, was about 10 miles east of Las Cruces, NM, and near a wash that had running water at least part of the year: the winter months (snow) and summer months (monsoon) and was built around a large, densely overgrown Desert Willow tree. The Desert Willow, a large deciduous tree, masked perfectly any detection for miles around including Mount Tortuga (Tortoise Mountain) a 5,000-foot massif about a mile south of base camp, across Highway 70 and 10 miles east of town. Once a year, the members of the Diocese of Las Cruces, et al, would organize a feast and pilgrimage in Tortugas, a small village south of Las Cruces. The practitioners would walk barefoot to the top of the mountain as a sign of devotion to the Holy Spirit. Some would fast before their hike but once they reached the top, they would celebrate the feast of Posadas: 9 days of food, drink, music, games singing, and prayer. The Desert Willow’s thick foliage, surrounding berms, and land-locked sand bars made detection, even from 5,000 feet, practically impossible without long-distance binoculars or a high-powered telescope. The vastness of the terrain, created by the last 100-year flash flood was now a habitat for a vast population of Rats, Voles, Moles, Rattlesnakes, Coral snakes, Gila monsters, Falcons, Scorpions, Tarantulas, Tarantula Hawks, Honey Bees, Ants, Toads, Rabbits, Owls, Nighthawks, Coyotes, Lobos, Mountain Lion, Deer, Vultures, Eagle, Ravens, Coatis' et al. Their burrows spanned for miles around and were composed mostly of sticks, wood, rocks, roots, leaves, sand, and dirt. The Chihuahua Desert was once considered by the US Department of the Interior as wasteland. Meaning that nothing lived there. I guess you’d have to have lived there to know. The structure I built was composed of underground river rock, excavated by hand out of a nearby wash; my alternate source of water. I had to dig into the sublayer about 6 to 8 feet with a scraper rock, flat on one side and sharp on the other I’d fashioned with a hammerstone. The deeper I dug; the rocks got bigger and heavier especially when the hole started filling with water. The scraper rocks were used to dig the floor below ground level, and as construction material for the hearth, and as paving stones for the floor. Some were used as base stones for the walls, which I hauled by hand while terracing and beveling the surrounding terrain for run-off during the monsoon. The wall was set into the earth, sand, and rock, at a roughly 75-degree inside angle. I used the excavated soil and rock to add an additional 4 feet to the wall’s height from the outside ground level up. Some fence posts I found, were sunk equidistant into the top of the wall and draped with two layers of mesh, which made the overall structure about 10 feet high from the inside but appear only about 4 feet high, on the outside. Well below the actual height of the tree. Because I have always been loath to unnecessarily disturb any of the flora in the surrounding area, the outside structure was laced with creosote, barrel cactus, ocotillo, brittlebush, beavertail cactus, prickly pear, et al, for natural cover and camouflage. The roof which was about 100 square feet, was stretched and sewn into the massively sprawling Desert Willow branches. This proved to be a challenge; cutting the mesh around limbs of various shapes and sizes, and then sewing it all back together again. But encasing the ceiling from detection from the air, sunlight and pests proved to be inspired. The New Mexico National Guard flew Helicopters around the area, monitoring the border every few days, so the mesh protected me from more than extreme sun, heat, or inclement weather. Honey Bee swarms would sometimes visit, flying over the Chihuahua desert during the summer, looking for a new hive. Few ever got in. Honey Bees have never posed a real threat to me, despite being stung many times. They were out looking for some new digs for their new queen. Or die trying. Fortunately, they didn’t decide to take up residence at base camp. They dropped by from some of the surrounding apiaries I ran into in my daily explorations. I also encountered wild Honey Bee swarms at least twice during the time I lived there. Wild Honey Bees can be particularly aggressive. And then, there were other swarms or, as I liked to call them: visits: Pogo-Rugoses: a large, aggressive black ant, along with Pogo-Barbatus: a large, slightly less aggressive red ant, both packing plenty of formic acid, would swarm the area during the summer months, looking for food, moisture, and building materials. It reminded me of “Leiningen vs. The Ants.” Then, there were the Horned and Spadefoot toad visits. Also occurring seasonally; usually during and after the monsoons. The spadefoot's multi-throated serenade woke me up on more than one occasion. I'd look out to see hundreds having a massive puddle orgy. Just before sunrise, they would breakfast on ants and would themselves be scarfed up by snakes, (where rattlesnake venom comes from) who would then be scarfed up by falcons, hawks, eagles, other snakes, and sometimes even humans. It was like takeout. One of the more miraculous visitations, after a particularly severe winter snow one December, that blanketed the desert in two feet of soft, white, slushy, were hundreds of cottontail rabbits surrounding the area, their red eyes glowing in the flashlight beam. After the sun came up, you could see them out and about, sniffing, grazing, chasing each other, and just kind of being soft and cuddly and incredibly cute. Reminded me of “Watership Down” which I'd read in High School. Fortunately, they weren’t looking for a new warren. The mesh, though time-consuming, had to be completed before I paved the floor. Otherwise, I’d have to have a ladder to finish, and the last time I looked, there weren’t any ladders lying around. The floor was cobbled with flat slate-like rock, limestone mostly, and smoothed with sand. The floor was two-tiered: higher where I slept, about 3 feet below ground level, and about one foot lower for the rest of the retreat. The thick black pliable black mesh I used for the roof; was from a plant nursery someone had dropped off near a solid waste dump about 5 miles west of base camp. Despite a lot of holes and tears, it was a real find. When the average monthly summer temperatures would rise to the middle and upper triple digits (112 – 116 degrees Fahrenheit) having more than enough mesh, cut down significantly on direct exposure to UV and temperature by as much as 30 percent and 30 degrees respectively. Finding it was a God-send. Finally, I sealed all the holes with river rock. This was the ultimate defense against ants, snakes, scorpions, tarantulas, et al, breaching the perimeter. By the end of the first year, that following Spring, I had about 6 Black Widow nests intertwined into the wall rock. They too proved to be another line of defense against critters or bugs getting inside. We had a mutually beneficial symbiotic relationship. Some people have cats. Some people have dogs. And some people have...
Early in the first year, when I was coming back from combing the area for wire, wood, fence posts, etc., I noticed something near the entrance to my shelter coming straight at me and fast. When I realized that the creature was a snake and that after about three inertial steps more, a rattlesnake about 4 feet long, I somehow managed to perform (still holding about 60 pounds of hot, steel fenceposts) a perfect backward jump to about 6 feet behind where I’d been less than a second or two before, the fences posts still gouging my shoulder. Likewise, the rattlesnake did a complete about-face and headed back the way it had come, somewhere near my shelter: 'a little too close to home I thought, and you know what they say about first impressions? Standing there amazed by the behavior of the snake (it acted like a dog I had once that would always come out to meet me after work) and my somehow transporting myself backward out of reach, without knowing exactly how I warily carried the fence posts up to just outside the north wall where I had previously cut a mesh entrance.
The cut was a single 7-foot vertical slit, which I held together and apart, when need be, with wire hooks for clasps I’d fashioned with an old pair of barbed wire cutters I’d found lying in the desert and some stout fencing wire. I found the cutters at the same long-abandoned campsite, I’d found a set of stainless-steel forks, spoons, knives, a cup, and even a pot and pan lying out, purified and scorched clean by the sun. Cautiously, I scanned the area around the structure in the hopes of discovering where the rattlesnake had gone. It wasn’t outside. I feared the worst. Peering through the slit, I saw what looked like a stick lying atop the inlaid stones of the hearth. Because I’d never seen a stick stretch itself out, basking in the warmth of the banked coals from the previous morning’s breakfast, (I always banked the breakfast coals for lunch and supper against the scarcity of wood) I just knew it had to be the snake. LOL. Clever girl.
Sticking my head through, just this side of one of the horizontal trunks the wall structure was built into, (Desert Willow usually came in three branching trunks springing out of a three-branching taproot). I began talking to it. “Well, hello.” I gushed. “Just look at you lying there... You have got to be the biggest and most beautiful Diamond Back rattlesnake I have ever seen. And you, just a youngster. Oh, and a female youngster at that!” It was a female. Seemingly completely fearless. I decided to call her Razz, because of the effect her presence had on my ‘fight or flight reflex. She turned out to be a friend and ally, not only from the first time I met her but more accurately, the entire time I lived there. Based on her overall length, she looked to me to be about 5 or 6 years of age. Possibly one of the few young survivors after the most recent 100-year flood. Surmising that she was alone, I later discovered the tree had probably been her summer home, her entire life. I put one foot in, resting my leg on the massive horizontal trunk while watching and listening for any sign of movement or aggressive display. She just lay there, innocuous to my presence. Finally, I sort of hopped over the trunk and stood there on one leg, waiting for anything, holding a real stick firmly in my left hand while bracing myself with my right to step right back out if she became suddenly hostile. Still no movement. Not even the tell-tale tongue, tasting the air. I cut to the chase. “You know this is impossible. One day you are going to get too close while I’m working on something and you are going to want to bite me and if you do that, you know I’m going to have to kill you! If you threaten me, I’ll have to kill you. If you bit me, I'll have to kill you!” She never did, so neither did I. Carefully, I put away my tools, along with the wood and fence posts, and it being late, I decided to let it go and seal myself up inside my Bivy and make it an early night. The next morning, she was gone. As the days passed and the nights got colder, I worked to secure the base against the encroaching cold. Razz had taken, to crawling under my fold-out camp chair placed near the fireplace for warmth. I’d find her coiled either before I’d sat down to read or do my crossword puzzle and after I got up to turn in. I woke up one exceptionally cold morning to take a piss. The temperature was about 2 degrees below freezing. I found her lying coiled next to the hearth. Since we were on speaking terms now, I told her: “Razz, you know you’re going to have to go to your winter burrow. It’s starting to get really cold and you’ll freeze if you don’t.” A minute or so later, I watched her slowly climb up and over the horizontal tree trunk, through the slit, and to her Winter burrow. She did not appear the next Monsoon season until the next after, and when she finally emerged, she was woefully emaciated and haggard. Two shakes from her rattle told me it was her, but she never did show herself again except only briefly, and then it was when I was further down the wash from base camp collecting wood. Two short shakes were all I heard with a brief glimpse of tarnished gold and flat black diamonds shining dully in the sun and then she was gone. Razz proved herself, time and again, to be a friendly, respectful, and intelligent campmate. She helped to keep potential invaders, like rats and other snakes from entering our space. I told her that I very much appreciated her friendship and that the best way for each of us to avoid any unfortunate accidents was for her to always let me know if I was somehow too close to where she was, whether day or night. Sometimes I would be gone for days, or even weeks at a time, exploring Mount Tortuga to the south or the Rio Grande River about 20 miles west of the valley, or on one of my little excursions to the Mexico Border. She’d always let me know by shaking her rattle twice to indicate who and where she was at the time. She heeded my words and never struck at me or threatened me. She always announced coming out in spring from hibernation and when she would return to her winter den in the fall. One of the advantages of living on the “out” is that you get to know well, where you are, and who you’re with. The flora and fauna in the Chihuahua unlike the Sonora Desert further west is both sparse and redundant. There is less variety but more singularity, due in part to less rainfall, low ozone, high altitude, and high UVR (Ultra Violet Radiation), giving the atmosphere a kind of glaring whiteness during the day and a crystal-clear clarity at night. It was almost lunar-like at times when the UV was particularly high, especially during the summer. Add to that the excessive heat and the effect would literally distorts your vision like a funhouse mirror. It made me sweat, dizzy, and caused severe headaches. UV glasses proved to be absolutely essential. One particularly cold, blue-tinged, blindingly bright morning, I was out, about 5:00 am scavenging for wood, when I came upon a fallen but still living Desert Willow about 2 miles east of base. The tree had fallen over, not so much because Desert Willow trees tend to sprawl as they get older, but because the great flood had knocked it over years earlier. Part of it was buried in the soft, deep sand of the flood plain. It had remained alive and well all these years and was still growing but on its side. Noticing that there was just enough room between two sets of branches for me to vault over, something stopped me. Cautiously, I climbed onto the trunk that was nearly perfectly horizontal to the ground and about 3 feet thick. Looking straight down, right below where I stood, facing the rising sun, was a snake that could only be described as a clear quartz rattlesnake. It was a rattlesnake with a body, that shown the absolute clarity of crystal mixed with the opaqueness of stone. It lay there, unmoving, iridescently reflecting prisms of rainbow hues. It was the most beautiful snake I had ever seen. Its skin was so transparent, I could almost make out its skeleton and internal organs. It just lay there completely still and totally vulnerable. I went on fetching wood, giving it ample time to take shelter against the cold once the rising sun warmed it enough to move on. Later in the day, I went back to see but it was gone. The following summer, it found its molted skin on the trail I had inadvertently created through my continuous travels to and from base camp, Las Cruces in the west, the San Andres Mountains in the east, across the open desert to the north, and all points south. The skin measured about 2 ½ feet, with crystal and opal-like highlights, still reflecting the hot summer New Mexico sun. I left it on the trail so as not to damage it. When I returned from town, it was gone. In July of 2000, the temperature was about 115 degrees in the shade. I was gathering wood, breaking much of it into firewood as I went when I got too close to an unusually large Diamond Back Rattlesnake under a Mesquite Tree. It was just “chillin’ like I should have been doing. The heat was so intense it physically had weight. Unmoving, I listened to the rich, lower register and complex cadences, each segment made. It turned out to be another she, but considerably larger and older. She convinced me that she would be a particularly aggressive and powerful adversary. She would take in air, like a king cobra, drawing herself up to her full height, and then let it out forcefully, shaking her tail fiercely. I had seen snake hunters with my binoculars around the area, catching rattlesnakes to make money off their venom, so I knew she had every reason to be afraid and aggressive. Since I never posed a threat, or she me, we just left each other alone. In the area, I lived and for about 2 square miles around, I learned that there was a kind of faunal society at work there, where the top of the food chain wasn’t always, necessarily, the troops of coyotes that roamed the area, their large extended families crying off and on through the long, hot and cold, summer and winter nights; communicating with other groups, roaming not far off, creating a kind of hauntingly beautiful panorama of sound: some close, some far, some a tearful plea, some a heroic challenge, some lone and some with many adjoining voices. I likened the top of the food chain to be more the extreme density of rattlesnakes and rattlesnake dens, some pretty old and not always occupied by snakes. Or, the desert rat towns, almost like prairie dog towns, with the tall, deep, and soft mounds of sticks, rocks, cactus, and dirt you could twist an ankle or break a leg in. I noted the absence of horses the entire time I was there. But then again, there are always exceptions. I learned when living on the out, to not presume anything. The mounds were not exclusively occupied by rats. I discovered snakes with young, in some of them and everybody knows that the younger the rattlesnake, the more powerful the venom. And then there was the packrat population. Once, I found a cache or stash, filled with stuff. There were spoons, forks, my Swiss Army Knife, coins, my handkerchief that had mysteriously disappeared off my clothesline. Parts of my crossword puzzle I’d left out. Matches. Even my lighter. How I ended up finding all of it was when my lighter turned up missing. Since I didn’t have any more matches at the time, I knew I had to find my lighter, or else I'd have to ride back into town which was about 20 miles round trip. Thinking I had somehow misplaced it, it suddenly occurred to me that there were packrats in the Chihuahua Desert. Just like there are in almost every desert around the world. Instantly, I went to the nearest, largest, and most active rat mound in the area and began pulling it apart piece by piece. The part of the hill I did the most digging was riddled with tunnels and I nearly twisted the shit out of my ankle. After about 10 minutes, I found a pocket about 2 feet down in the soft moist earth. It was filled with stuff. My stuff. Suffice it to say, the thefts, chewed tent straps, glass jars filled with dried food, broken on the hearthstones, etc., stopped almost immediately. As my reputation grew: that I was a non-hunting, non-killing, crazy human, that just happened to be living in their neighborhood, different creatures, like Razz, showed up to pay me a visit. One full moon night in September, the late-rising moon was so bright, it woke me up and after groggily getting my bearings to get up and check the area, I sensed that I was somehow being watched. Unzipping the fly slowly and quietly so as to not disturb or scare away anything that might be out there haunting the surrounding area, I looked directly into the eight shining eyes of a Whip Scorpion about as big as my hand. It was completely black and completely still. It was about 2 feet from the entrance to my Bivy and with the lunar-like atmosphere of a straight-up, noon on the moon night, we were each able to examine the other as thoroughly as we wanted. It was amazing and surreal. In some parts of the world, Whip Scorpions, which are non-venomous, are considered to be a delicacy. I assured it I had absolutely no intention. Bidding it a good night, I went back to bed, and apart from some disturbed soil around the tree trunk where it had appeared the night before, there was no sign of it the next morning. I never did see it again. Apart from the intermittent visitations of coyotes, javelina, peccary, a great 5-point stag standing over-watch from a ridge about 1/4-mile northwest of base and even a lone male mountain lion prowling the area, probably in pursuit of mule deer, one of the most infrequent and yet unusual sightings in the time I spent there was a pure white dog that visited me twice. Once after the first year of my stay and again about a year or so before I left. Each time, I was out and about, collecting wood, scavenging, or exploring the area around my camp for signs of scat or spoor. Both times I just happened upon it, sitting in the shade under one of the overhangs that dotted the washes here and there, or under a group of Desert Willow trees growing over a nearby wash, both in the shade and both freshly eroded due to a series of flash flood monsoon rains that summer; there was the rich smell of moist sand and lime earth, mixed with decomposing tree litter: leaves, sticks, branches. The San Andres about 25 miles to the east would flood the washes with water during the monsoons that the further downstream it got, and at lower elevations, would eventually become underground streams and rivers. The dog, or whatever it was, was about 130 pounds, pure white, with black eyes, no collar, and pink and black mottled toes and footpads. It was well taken care of, as though it belonged to somebody nearby. But from the vantage of many of the berms that dotted the area, I never saw where it went once it left, and never saw it with anyone along any of the roads to town. After discovering it the first time, up-wind from where I was working, I remember it just looking at me and smiling and then just getting up and leaving. It was the tamest critter I had seen the entire time I lived there. I never heard or saw any others. By the end of the 3rd year, I had saved enough money to move on. I put together all my gear (I’d purchased a new mountain bike) and traversed the 50 miles from the base of Bear Mountain to Silver City, New Mexico about 100 miles north and east of Las Cruces, I worked and lived there for almost 2 years. It's a little resort town, filled with ghosts. But that’s another story. I left base camp, after entrusting it to one of the few friends I trusted. He told me before I left that I would be back. “Guys like you always come back. You’ll see.” I never did and neither did he.

On the playa for 10 days now. My camp is still completely put together, with all the decorations and everything. Plan is to pack up all night, and moop in the morning. Had a great time this year. Couple of exceptions (such as having the ghost of a sparkle pony for a campmate), but overall it was pretty great. Don’t think I’m going to be doing the big camp thing anymore. I really liked just focusing on making camp exactly the way I wanted.
I just can’t leave when you’re supposed to leave. I hate seeing people break down their accounts on Saturday night, and I’m still not terribly thrilled about it on Monday. I need a lot of decompression time out here. One thing I’m sitting here thinking is why can’t I be on the playa after a burn and see a UFO? How awesome would that be?
Thursday, 1:05 AM: sitting outside my tent, smoking a couple of cigarettes (only on the playa,yo) after spending a couple of hours in there, packing things up. It’s a huge tent, with a lot of stuff in it, so that process is likely to unfold for the next four hours. Listening to pretty loud music from about half mile away, add account that is still here. They’re probably breaking down as well. Right now they’re playing the entire first album from Deep Forest. It was my favorite album when it came out.
7:45 AM: have yet to finish the interior of the tent, though it is well on its way. Switched to breaking down the exterior of the camp. Was thinking that I would just go ahead and extend my stay until tomorrow morning, but then saw that it’s going to rain around 3 AM or so for quite a while, so I definitely don’t want to get caught in that. Probably just going to continue to break down everything and get ready to leave, and then maybe nap on the side of the road outside of the playa. There’s still a handful of stragglers here. I’m looking at a bus straight ahead of me, about a half mile away. There are a handful of camps still here — probably about six or so. My generator broke down the second day I used it, so I have been needing to charge my batteries from neighbors.
3:09pm: Took a nap for about five hours. Was feeling a little blue, and drawn towards the snooze. Spirits are better now, and the majority of the inside of my tent is packed up as well as camp at self. Going to sit here and smoke some cigarettes, and then make a big push so that I can get all of my mooping done while the light is still good. Looks like I’m going to get one more decent poop in a bucket before I leave. I must say that I like not having to wander all the way to a porta potty for such activities, though it is kind of nice to say hello to all of theFellow poopers on the way in and on the way out. Plus: it’s awesome not to have to sit inside of a sauna while pooping. Having a nice breeze, while you’re looking at the mountains in the distance is a dramatic improvement…
TMI? What’s that???
7:37 pm: crazy town. At about 5 o’clock there was this insane dust storm. One of the bigger ones that I’ve seen out here. My tent is an ice fishing tent, and the floor is not attached. Stupid me did not make sure that the tent was secured to the ground well enough, and it blew over, along with my shade structure, which got totally destroyed. I would say the winds got up around 40 miles an hour or more. At one point the dust was so sick that it was almost like night time. I went out to pick up the move that went far away, and ended up dragging a ton of stuff back to my account that didn’t belong to me, including a mattress. Looks like I will be taking that home and figuring out how to dispose of it later. I was crossing my fingers that things would mellow out, and they were relatively decent for about an hour and a half, or I got some more work done, but then another dust storm came up. Fortunately one of the things I did was secure my tent better (it is completely full of playa dust, and a big on water jug spilled over on my carpet, so now I have a nice mud pile in the middle of the floor that every time I step on it I got a layer of mud glued to my shoe. I’m currently writing out the dust storm in my tent. It is highly possible that I’m not going to be getting out of here until tomorrow sometime, which means I’m going to be in the middle of some rain for a couple of hours. Oh the fun of the playa! The move situation was going to be quite challenging, because the winds are really doing their work. If the rain comes like it’s supposed to, I really don’t know how I’m going to properly mope, because the player is going to be hardened with God knows what mixed into it. It’s not just my stuff. Stuff has blown here from all over. I will do my best to have due diligence and lay down the grid and go out it, but at this juncture it’s anybody’s gas… to top it all off, I can’t find my dust mask, so I am breathing through a sock. My goggles are all fogged up so I am unable to proofread that at the moment I’m just dictating. Got to love the playa!!
One big joy that I forgot to mention is right before the giant dust storm happened that destroyed everything, I was sitting down to take a lovely playa dump in my bucket, and had pulled my pants down and was just about ready to go when the wind exploded. The entire storm that I was holding my tent down so that it wouldn’t blow away, my pants were halfway down. Got to love that one!
2:19 PM, Friday: it’s been raining/sprinkling all day, since the morning. The sun has just come out. I’m hoping that it will stay this way so that things can dry out a bit and I can finish packing up. There’s still about five or six camps out here. Lots of friendly camaraderie. My spirits are relatively good considering that there is such a disaster surrounding me at the moment. I’m just about to start getting the last of the crap in my tent organized to pack up, but I won’t be loading anything until the playa dries out. Quite the experience. Last night the winds were so crazy. Constant wind storms. My tent was getting battered around. The noise was incredible.
Some genius, as most of you have probably seen, left a porta potty out here on the Playa. It was already such a giant fuck up, but the winds last night blew it over. Getting anywhere near it is quite the stench factory from what my neighbors told me.
Very much looking forward to getting home and clean and laying in a clean bed for a while. The cleanup is going to be quite a process. I had a neighbor early on, during burn week who gave me a flower that is still alive. Actually gave me four of them, but two of them bit the dust. I’ve managed to keep the other two alive, and I’m hoping to plant them in my planter outside my front door. I hope I can keep my pet burning man flowers alive for as long as possible.

(Reposting this, as the links to the Burning Man pipermail listserv appear to go to , and I need it right now. I do not take credit for this, but it's definitely a tool in my toolbox. Arguably, could be used for Juplaya, regionals, etc. now that we are emerging into the "new normal".)
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In the interest of helping give a concise, helpful, guided re-entry into civilization after being at Burning Man, I wrote down a series of rules for Radical Re-Entry. After seeing four email threads flare up and two potential life-changing events start up with various friends over the years, here’s the short version:
Monkey Re-Entry Rule Number 1:
Wait three weeks before you make any life-changing decisions.
But let me change that up a bit so it makes more sense.
When returning from the playa, you will be hot, dusty, tired, exhausted. Your body will have undergone immense stress, and if you live in a vastly different environment, your body will likely react by getting a cold (especially if you kissed anyone at the Space Froggie Free Kissing Booth).
Step 1. Take a shower, hippie. Shave, shower, steam everything off. Take two. Or three. Then go to sleep. You need it.
Step 2. Clean your gear. Wash your clothes, car, stuff, or pack it up into the Burner corner of your house. Pack it away and dry it out. Recycle, do your garbage, and wash your dishes. Get it put away.
Step 3. Breathe. Go through all your Burner stuff from this year, sort and organize, and then happily stash it away for good memories for later.
Now that your physical needs are out of the way, let’s go to the mental needs.
OMGWTFBBQ THAT WAS AWESOME!
Yes, it was! Wow. Did you see that one guy with the thing? Those two girls? That…why are you looking at me like that? I’m just trying to explain it to you.
Right. The people who didn’t go are going to eye you with either jealousy or trepidation, and your social acceptability standards while on playa are different from the real world. While you CAN expect the world to change to fit the Burning Man model, it seems to work better if you don’t try to put your shoulder up against the wheel of the Real World right away until you figure out how that whole leverage thing works as more than just a metaphor. A single butterfly may make changes to the world’s weather, but sometimes they just get blown into a bug zapper by the wind. Slow down there, Mr. Burner Evangelist.
You’ve got 360 days before you’re heading back to the Awesome. Let your own brain process the nifty neato cool awesome, then hand it off to others.
You just don’t get it.
Okay there, Mr Cranky McCrankerpants. Did you forget to take your 5-HTP afterwards? Are you still dehydrated? Are you wondering what the $3,490 charge for “snacks” might be on your visa bill? That’s your own stuff and it’s not up to the people around you – your loved ones, your hamster, your dog, your listmates, your campmates, your neighbor – to make accomodations for your emotional state post-playa. That’s entirely your bag of playafied emotional entanglements to work through. Take a few more minutes to consider what you’re saying on email to people. Reread, check your emotions, and maybe put down the phone to keep yourself from doing irreparable harm to your relationships because you didn’t sleep for a week and are still seeing the Sleep Deprivation Leprechauns in your dreams. Slow down. Put your gear in order, wash your dishes, go for a long walk. Then go back and talk to your friends. If this is directed at people you camped with or your patience level is abysmally low, maybe you should also take what we in the business call “A Chill Pill” and go shut up in a dark corner with some Funyuns for a while.
Not bitching people out for supposed insults or slights or yelling at people for their “stupidity” is a good way to keep and maintain your friendships. Also, try not to play Mr. Huffy or Ms. Huffy about imagined or unimagined stuff that went on or didn’t go on at the event that you failed to communicate and ergo, the other party SHOULD have known by magically reading your mind/emotional state. You will keep people from thinking you’re a total whackjob and/or raging asshat who can’t communicate. And you may keep your friends, instead of driving them before you.
And now back to Monkey Rule Numero Uno, PERIOD. (See? I ramble, but I return to the point.)
DO NOT MAKE CHANGES TO YOUR LIFE FOR AT LEAST THREE WEEKS AFTER YOU COME BACK FROM BURNING MAN.
Do not quit your job. Do not divorce your wife, husband, sister, dog, parakeet. Do not sell all your possessions and move to Tibet to be a monk. Do not ditch your car and travel the world. Do not found Hobbit Camp. Do not plan a giant zeppelin for next year’s Burn. Do not move out of your house, break up with your girlfriend, boyfriend, get married, move in your playa lover, sell your car, ditch your friends, or make other rash decisions after you come home. This is important, because the playa is still going to be in your brain, and the effects are like that of rareified stupid sometimes. It will make total sense to have a threesome with your significant other and someone in an enormous rabbit costume at the Burn; in reality the ears get caught in the ceiling fan. Make sure if you have major life decisions to make, you make them AFTER you settle down and settle in. The emotions and the stress will still be in your system for some time; do not allow them to unduly influence your life.
Take some B-vitamins, some 5-htp, drink plenty of water and eat a good meal or two that you cooked yourself, go to bed early and read a good book. You earned it. That major life-changing decision will still be there in three weeks, and if you reduce the sheer volume of stress you have, it will make those decisions easier to deal with AFTER you have time to put away all the other issues and emotions post-Burn.
You might not pay any attention to this little guide, or you might say, “That’s for suckers! Real Burners quit their jobs and go work in an iron foundry with those guys they met that one night on the playa or go get married with that beautiful playa nubnub in Vegas! We don’t need your stinkin’ recommendations, Monkey!” And you would be right (and I will happily watch you run off while popping my popcorn and pulling up a chair). But if you want to have an easier time recovering from the playa, you might take a little time down to remember what the rest of your year goes like, and adjusting your brain, your living patterns, and your emotional safety nets accordingly. It really does help, especially if you THINK you got all the dusty bananas out of your tent before you packed it away.
Anyway, that’s it. Don’t stress. Pack your stuff away, and wait three weeks before making any life-changing decisions.
Oh, and be nice to people. At the end of three weeks, you can be a jerk again if you want to.

I run a private campground. Last post I asked all of you a question about how to manage it and the consensus appears to be to leave the harvesters alone. There were some really good suggestions on how to handle the harvesters and the people that encounter them. I liked the idea of having a sort of instructional hand-out for people, so that they come back and eventually receive whatever item the harvesters fashion for them. I’m thinking of titling it “So you’ve survived an encounter with the inhuman” and maybe doing the “Captain America sitting in a chair” pose on the cover but I’m not actually that photogenic so I’m not sure on that one.
Maybe I can get Beau to pose for me. 🤔
Anyway, If you’re new here you should really start at the beginning and if you’re totally lost, this might help.
If you read the title of this post and thought, ‘yeah no kidding’, okay, I guess that’s fair, but up until now it’s been manageable. Sure I’ve had to make my share of apologies over the years and there’s been maybe a couple bodies both human and inhuman that resulted from it but overall it hasn’t been catastrophic, right? None of us are without our flaws. At least I’m aware of this one and can take measures to prevent it from making mess of things. You know. Like preparing the agenda for a meeting far in advance so that I don’t get surprised and my brain doesn’t activate the part that goes OPEN ALL THE HATCHES, RELEASE THE ADRENALINE, WE GOTTA PUT A MOUNTAIN LION IN A CHOKEHOLD except the mountain lion is one of my employees asking why they’re not allowed to have locks on their lockers, that’s such a stupid policy.
(it is a stupid policy. It is no longer a policy. I’m not sure why it was ever policy in the first place)
I feel like I veer wildly between my extremes. Without my anger, I can’t even hurt my mortal enemy. With my anger, I could kill a wanna-be god.
My anger is no longer a manageable problem. And it has become so due to forces outside of my control.
The problem starts with rule #1.
If you hear something trying to enter your tent at night, sit up and say in a clear, calm voice that you are not receiving visitors, but it is welcome to visit in the morning. If a stranger appears the next day asking for entrance to your camp, invite them in and give them food and drink. This will give you good luck for the rest of your stay.
I’ve talked about this one before and the general consensus among everyone seemed to be that the visitor is one of the more benevolent entities of the campground. It’s easy enough to survive, provided you keep calm and remember what you’re supposed to do. And not only do you survive it, but you can then receive its blessing.
Honestly, I was considering it as a candidate for becoming the ancient thing. It already takes care of campers, provided you show it hospitality. I think Beau is setting himself up for the position better, since there’s apparently prerequisites that need to be met, but I wouldn’t mind the visitor being in the running, should it take an interest.
Look at me, calmly considering what it is that’ll kill me someday. I’ve always known that the land will be what takes my life, but to contemplate it this calmly, this rationally… feels wrong.
Maybe this is why my anger has taken such a bad turn.
Not that any of it matters. I’m no longer so certain I will get a choice.
We were hosting a small event and had a decent number of campers on site. I won’t say what the event was, as I feel it prudent to protect the privacy of any organization that rents the campground, but it wasn’t a very large group and they didn’t have a lot of money on hand to spend on a venue. This was why they had their event early in the year, when it’s still getting cold out at night. My costs scale with demand.
I received a phone call to the camp emergency line. It wasn’t the only one I’ve gotten during the event. I had someone call about frost on their tent and when I went out there to check on them, it was just normal night frost on the exterior of the nylon. Annoying to be dragged out of bed for, certainly, but I’d rather that then they dismiss it as inconsequential and it turns out to be the frost. Especially with how aggressive it’s gotten this year.
There was another emergency call that turned out to be someone drunk dialing the number. They’d put it in their phone and for some reason it was in their phonebook as “Manager, Campground” which put it next to “Mom” so I guess I saved someone from drunk dialing their mother at two in the morning. Honestly, I’d rather they have woken up their mom. Trying to impress upon a drunk person that I can’t have them repeatedly calling this line and tying up the emergency number was a challenge.
I had to fit that in between them trying to tell me about that time they were sick and asked their mom to save them a brownie for when they got better, only to have their mom eat the brownie ‘so it wouldn’t go stale’. So if there’s a mother out there reading this that recognizes this incident, your child was not kidding when they said they’d never let you forget you ate their brownie.
Honestly I’ve considered hiring someone to field emergency calls overnight so I don’t get woken up all the time, but I’m sure I’d have to increase someone’s salary to get them to work nights and I’d rather just take a nap during the day. With the hammock monster gone there’s a lot of new napping options available.
The only real emergency call we had was about the visitor. I didn’t get a call from someone panicking because something was trying to get into their tent. He’d already had that happen and while terrifying, I’m sure, he handled it as he was supposed to. He sat up in his sleeping bag and announced that he wasn’t receiving visitors. Then the creature left and he was alone with just the sound of the night breeze and the distant call of an owl.
That’s when he called the emergency line.
“What was that bullshit?” he said, after I got done confirming that he wasn’t in immediate danger. “That thing was trying to get in my tent!”
Yes, yes that’s what it does. But so long as he told it to go away and come back in the morning, everything would be fine. I wasn’t giving him my full attention, I admit. I was tired. I wanted to go back to sleep.
“I didn’t tell it to come back,” he grumbled. “I don’t want anything to do with it.”
We know the pattern works. We don’t know what happens when someone deviates because we don’t do experiments around here. It’s a good way to get yourself killed, as I’m sure you’ve all seen from my own instances of going against the status quo over the past year or so. So when the camper told me he hadn’t invited the visitor back, my blood ran cold.
“I’m going to come take a look around your site to make sure everything is okay. If you see headlights, it’s just the four-wheeler.”
I was getting out of bed as I said this. The camper started to reply that he didn’t want me coming out there, he’d already had his sleep interrupted enough, but I was too annoyed to care. I hung up on him and was left with the blissful quiet of my empty house and the weeping girl outside. I hastily dressed and hurried out to the garage to get the four-wheeler.
The night was cool with a touch of a breeze, perhaps just enough to form a fine frost on the budding leaves before morning. The hills were slowly, resolutely, turning green and with their awakening came a stirring in the creatures of this land. Everything was coming alive. Everything.
Have you ever walked in the woods in early spring and felt like you could walk for days without tiring? Like you felt alive, like you were being renewed along with the new leaves and new growth? There is a reason for this feeling. Enjoy the strength it gives you, but take care not to stray off the past, lest the forest swallow you up for good.
I was careful to keep to the road as I made my way towards the campsite in question. I’d at least gotten him to give me where he was located before he turned difficult about things. I stopped the four-wheeler a little bit off from the tents and turned the engine off. I’d go on foot the rest of the way. There was no sense in needlessly antagonizing him further and besides, his campmates were trying to sleep. It’s not until our big events that we have roaming patrols all through the night.
We’re not just trying to keep people safe from inhuman things. We’re trying to keep people safe from themselves. There’s a lot of drinking at these events, after all.
But this was one of the more quiet events. The only sound was the crunch of gravel underneath my feet as I approached. I kept my flashlight beam low to the ground, illuminating only my steps so that I didn’t trip over anything. This group hadn’t followed rule #2.
Place solar lights near your tent stakes. This will keep people from tripping over them or the ropes at night.
Lots of people don’t, especially at smaller events when tents have room to spread out. It’s really more of a recommendation, to be honest. Follow it if it makes sense.
I picked my way carefully through the tents, taking care to be as quiet as I could. Nothing seemed amiss. As far as I could tell, I was the only person walking around through here. The visitor may have truly left. Perhaps the ‘come back tomorrow’ bit of the formula wasn’t necessary. Perhaps the invitation to come back later was implied in the dismissal. I fervently hoped so.
Then I heard a tent unzip and I groaned inwardly. I desperately hoped it was just someone that had to take a piss in the middle of the night, but I knew that I wasn’t so lucky. Sure enough, the person made their way directly towards me and I could see from their outline that they were a man. Broad-shouldered and tall.
“I said I didn’t need anyone to come out here,” he hissed as he got closer.
“It’s part of my job to make sure everything is okay,” I replied politely.
“Yeah? Then why not do something about these - these - stupid pranks!”
He brandished a piece of paper at me that I could only assume was the pamphlet. My heart started to pound inside my chest. This happened sometimes. After encountering something that they can’t comprehend - no, that they don’t want to comprehend - they start inventing reasons it wasn’t real.
I understand. We want the world to be a safe place. We want fairytales to remain mere stories, because we know fairytales are warning us of a world where we are subject to powers that far exceed our own.
He was not the first person to blame me. He won’t be the last.
“This is bullshit,” he continued.
“It’s clearly stated in the pamphlet you received,” I replied, using my best manager monotone. Not quite a customer service voice, there’s a sprinkling of ‘take no shit’ in it. “You received that in the mail with ample time to cancel your reservation and still receive a full refund.”
“Yeah, but I didn’t - it -”
He couldn’t quite bring himself to finish. I knew what he was trying to say. He didn’t think this was real. Or that if it was, that it would happen to him. And… something in me snapped. This isn’t surprising. I hear this so often and I’m just a bit sick of it. Look - I get it. You think you’re safe. You think your house is secure and there’s nothing out there and the streetlights just happen to flicker like that and all the missing people are for boring, mundane reasons. And you don’t want to hear otherwise.
But you know what? You’re not safe. None of us are. I’m just saying it out-loud instead of lying to you.
This is what I wanted to tell him. Instead, I did what I always do. I swallowed my anger and it tasted like broken glass in my throat. And I told him I understood he was unhappy and he could come by tomorrow for a partial refund. But in the meantime, I still needed to check over the site and in the morning, he needed to invite the visitor in for breakfast and coffee.
“Like hell I will,” he spat, and tore my pamphlet in two.
The shock of it hit me like a bucket of cold water in the face. Sudden, blinding anger can be like that. It’s a jolt to the system. It snaps us out of the world we knew and throws us into a new one where the lines are stark and the edges are sharp and our focus is narrow.
In the distance, something roared. I knew its voice.
Dawn was hours and hours away, but still, the beast was coming.
“What the hell was that?” the man asked, startled. He turned to stare in the direction of the sound.
“Go back to your tent,” I said urgently. “Stay in there, no matter what you hear.”
I wish he had. I wish… I wish he’d done anything differently.
Instead… he argued. Well. More like demanded. He wanted to know what that noise was, if it was some other “prank”. And then the beast roared again, but closer, and he started to grow more panicked. What was out there? And I think he was starting to realize that this wasn’t a game, that this wasn’t a joke, and that the world was much larger than he thought.
He wasn’t going to go back to his tent. He didn’t even need to say it. I recognized the terror in him, even if he was trying to hide it with outrage.
“Fine,” I snapped. “Don’t go to your tent. But we need to get out of here - fast. Come on. I’ve got a four-wheeler by the road. We’ll go to the office and work on your partial refund.”
I turned my back to him and began to hurry away. Not quite jogging, but certainly not a leisurely stroll either. I didn’t look back to see if he was following. Perhaps if he realized I really would abandon him to his fate, he’d stop being belligerent.
I wasn’t wrong. He was following. At least, he was until someone stopped him.
“And where are you going?” a voice said that I did not recognize. “We have business still.”
They stood somewhere behind me. I hastily turned, stumbling as I did, and my flashlight beam fell upon the newcomer’s back. They were perfectly average - average height and average build. I couldn’t determine their gender. Inhuman things can be difficult like that. It doesn’t matter to them, after all.
They were blocking the path of the camper. He cast a desperate glance across the newcomer’s shoulder, trying to meet my gaze. I had no help to offer him. I didn’t know what this was, either. In the distance, the beast had gone silent, but I knew it was still coming. I could feel its presence, like a weight on my chest.
“Aren’t you an ungrateful brute,” the creature continued. “The campground manager has offered up her hospitality and here you are, scorning it.”
Oh no. No no no. Hospitality rules. This was the visitor and it was here because the camper had broken them, first by not inviting it back and then by being rude to me. But this wasn’t what I wanted, not at all.
“He’s fine!” I called out. “I’m not offended.”
My voice was shaking. At the edge of the campsite, just beyond the tents, the beast loomed. Its glowing eyes were fixed on us. Like a cat preparing to strike.
“Whether or not you take offense matters not,” the creature replied, not turning around, its gaze fixed on the terrified camper. “There are rules to these things.”
“I’m sorry!” the man replied, his voice shrill. “I shouldn’t have torn the pamphlet up!”
“An apology? You don’t understand.”
A low rumble split the air. The man turned and saw the beast standing there, at the edge of the clearing. He screamed. And he ran towards me, as my nerve broke as well. I turned and ran for the four-wheeler. I threw myself onto it and with shaking fingers, started the ignition. Then I turned to look to see how far behind me the camper was. My heart hammered frantically in my chest. I desperately wanted to flee, to get as far away from the beast as I could, but I had to give him at least a slight chance to also escape.
The visitor had him by the throat. It held him up in midair.
“You never insult your host. Never,” it snarled.
The man struggled, kicking helplessly in the creature’s grip. He coughed, gasping for air, clawing frantically at his captor’s fingers. And I… I thought, I should run out there. I should beg for the visitor to release him. Intervene on his behalf. Surely, surely as the host I had the final say here.
But I remained where I was. It was like I was rooted to my spot, my fingers frozen on the handlebars of the four-wheeler. For the beast towered over the pair, blocking out the night sky, its eyes replacing the stars. I could not move. Transfixed, terrified, at the sight of my death looming so close at hand.
How did my father do it? How did he go out there, dragging the little girl by the hair, and throw her to the beast? How did he gather up the courage to stand against it, all by himself?
Anger does that to a person, I guess. But my reserve of anger was spent and I was left hollow and afraid.
So I fled. And I heard the beast’s triumphant roar as the visitor threw the camper to it and I heard his screams as it tore him apart. It reminded me of the little girl. And I knew that someday that would be me, for I felt its eyes on me the entire time it devoured that camper, boring into my back while I fled for the safety of my house.
It is patient. It knows. It knows it is my death.
I’m a campground manager and I have yet another missing camper to hide. I don’t even have the heart to detail what excuses we’re making. The old sheriff is being the liaison for us with the police force and I’m leaving the details largely up to him. At least none of the other campers woke up, even with the beast right there, ripping their campmate to shreds mere feet away. I’m not surprised by these things anymore. The forest has a way of swallowing up the people it wants gone.
I’m glad I have the old sheriff to help. Because I just… I keep thinking about the beast. How it’s the third creature on this land with the potential to ascend. And how, perhaps, it is even fated to ascend. Maybe I can’t avoid it. Maybe it’s always been this way.
Because when I got back to the house, I was in a rage. I stormed into my bedroom and slammed a fist on the window pane.
“Did I call it?” I screamed at the window and at the little girl weeping outside it. “Am I the one doing this?”
Yes. She said yes. I am. It’s me.
We’re connected, the beast and I. I think I always knew this. It has our fear. It is bound to me. All it lacks is my demise.
My parents always said that when this land turned ancient it would no longer be inhabitable by humankind. Perhaps this is why.
The land will belong to the beast. [x]
The next post.
Read the full list of rules.
Visit the campground's website.

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