Yep. That shit is impassable. The only direction of travel is down. Raining even harder this morning. I can hardly imagine The Suck out there. Hardly.
Speaking for my wife who went for 2-4 years in a row ending in 2004 (around the time it started getting more generally popular, but that wasn’t why she stopped) the one time they had similar rain, it was the way the mud clung to your shoes or accumulated in the wheel well that killed movement.
It’s the sticky, not the deep (although that doesn’t help) and the fact that there really is no drainage, you’re waiting for the water to evaporate and that’s going to take longer than the current, probably optimistic estimates. As for the health, everyone’s tents are likely flooded (there is no high ground after all) and without vehicular transport, even getting the port-potties emptied may not be possible.
Not going to be fun for those folks.
First Chris Rock is femaledog-slapped by Will Smith, then by Mother Nature.
https://www.sfgate.com/travel/article/chris-rock-says-burning-man-toilets-can-t-18344552.php
I think choice of vehicle plays a significant role in situations like this:
I don’t consider myself equipped with a robust stereotypical Guy Gene, but these things are F’n cool!
I heard a mother of an attendee say that the attendees are being asked to pee in the mud and save the port-a-potties for bowel movements.
Alrighty, then.
I would suspect that’s pretty common anyway. Shouldn’t be a problem as they will soon be out of food.
Probably close to NG helicopter drop for food time.
But there are ~75,000 people there. This is like a hurricane rescue. I wonder if the Red Cross is involved? I suspect the Green Cross is there in abundance. 
I hope this debacle puts an end to this shit once and for all.
And I’ll tell you why. I’m a notorious Spoil-Sport and Hater on Burning Man for two reasons: I’m jealous that I’m not cool enough to ‘get it’, and Burners are incredible litterers. Let me expand on this. They know damn well they can’t trash Black Rock, and are policed pretty well, so the load up their ton of dust-encrusted refuse (this year it will be 2 tons of mud-encrusted, mixed with urine apparently) and drive away… just till they get out of sight of the organizers… which usually puts them around Lahanton State Park, Fallon, Fernley, Fort Churchill Road and the Banks of the Carson River and My Fucking Backyard where they then divest themselves of a weeks worth of trash, couches, trailers, worthless camping gear and rolled-up carpets from playing Hippy. Every damn year is the same. For a month after that shit wraps up, I come across mountains of Burner trash every day. A lot of it is still out there. It’s always very obvious where it came from by the contents (lots of Trader Joe’s, Whole Foods, Organic Water and the like) and the distinctive Black Rock dust/mud. Fuckers. And they all seems so sanctimonious and smug, with dirty feet and B.O.
Kinda pisses me off.
Some on Twitter are saying its God’s judgment on the demonic rituals that go on there. Not sure what exactly goes on there, but if it Is demonic, well, no sympathy for them.
Your position is hard to argue with.
I heard that more rain is on the way.
as all roads in and out of the desert arts and “self-reliance” festival remained shut off Sunday.
I admit that I am impressed by the amount of schadenfreude that can be packed into a set of quotation marks.
Turning Burning Man into It Burns When I Pee, Man.
It would be kinda fun to pick up Chris Rock hitching down the road out there.
The concept is sort if interesting to me… If I was 21 and dumb. I think food and water drops should be the next step.
As I type this, a Wicked Black Cloud is descending on me and rain is starting to pick up. The kind of day that the dogs won’t go out. Heading straight for The Black Rock, eventually.
Not unexpected, TBH.
Organic Water?
You haven’t lived …
I’ll just throw in here that some chesty women I’ve known who enjoy naked activities will sometimes throw on a sports-bra type thing because running and jumping and dancing is more comfortable than having large titties slamming around. Sometimes, garments are for practical reasons. Likewise, wearing boots on ground tough on bare feet while otherwise bare, or carrying a bag slung over a shoulder to carry things.
That… actually makes a lot of sense. For the most part, urine is sterile when it leaves the body. It’s the poop that’s the real health hazard.
I went camping in early August this year in Northern Michigan where we had to dig our own privy in an area with thin topsoil. It really is the poop that’s the biggest problem. Although maybe tens of thousands of people peeing in the mud could be an issue from the standpoint of it taking longer for the playa to dry out. Still, it’s the poop you want most contained.
Hell, men are prone to pissing all sorts of places in less than civilized circumstances, pretty sure the desert gets “watered” a lot even during a normal year at Burning Man.
I agree, that’s disgusting and I would back a campaign to have the litterers force-fed whatever they dumped on their way out. I would allow them to cut up large items like couches into itty-bitty pieces but they still have to swallow.
I’ve been camping for decades and I pack out my shit (other than that burned or buried in accordance with good practice), always have, and dispose of it responsibly.
A couple things I gleaned from their website, it looks to me that in order to secure the necessary permits for this sort of thing from the BLM, vehicle travel on the “Playa” (dry lakebed) is not allowed when wet. That is, (even if you can’t), you shan’t. A few inches of mud will dry fairly quickly, though not overnight.
No graywater of any sort is allowed to be discharged, whether from an RV or even shower stations. All of that has to be retained and removed from the site. Part of the required equipment list before entry is allowed, includes a 5 gallon bucket, 1.5 gallons drinking water per person per day, food, warm clothing and sleeping bag and lots of related personal items.
Among their official stated “10 Principles” on their site lists “Radical self reliance”, so they should be theoretically in a lot better shape than might be supposed. But many did not plan on having their stay involuntarily extended. Pissing in buckets and saving the porta-potties for solid waste makes good sense as far as that goes.
There are a lot of “interesting” moving parts to this situation. Potentially it could cause organizers a lot of headache, since the heavy weather wasn’t exactly a secret, and were a few things continue to go “wrong” the potential is there for a huge number of RVs, vehicles and assorted detritus to be more or less abandoned in place for a while. “Leave No Trace” is another one of the stated principles of the organization. So much for that, too.
I don’t see anyone discussing the real catastrophe – with all that rain, what if they can’t light the Man?