'Incredibly unusual': Burning Man ticket sales dry up after sloppy year

https://sfstandard.com/2024/08/08/burning-man-tickets-rain-heat-weather/

Burning Man, the annual desert bacchanal that last year became a mud-
soaked quagmire, has released a last-minute pool of around 3,000 tickets 
in response to sagging sales. Attendance has faltered post-pandemic due to 
extreme weather events, from heatwaves to flooding, which last Labor Day 
Weekend sent many burners, including comedian Chris Rock and DJ Diplo, 
fleeing from the Nevada desert.

While it’s not unusual for a pool of tickets to be released in the weeks 
before festivities, the festival’s organizers have usually required those 
who want last-minute tickets to pre-register earlier in the year. 
Organizers have also reopened their ticket aid program, giving people 
access to lower-priced $220 tickets, to encourage newcomers and returning 
burners who were turned off by their experience last year. 

“We are pleased to have fulfilled demand for our earlier sales and be in a 
position to offer greater access to more people as the event nears,” 
Marian Goodell, CEO of Burning Man, said in a press release. “This ticket 
sale is an exciting opportunity to connect more people interested in 
Burning Man and the arts and culture.”

However, veteran burners say, this exciting opportunity has also come with 
more headaches and hardships in recent years.

For the past 20 years, Alameda resident Marisa Lenhardt has led the Death 
Guild Thunderdome camp, one of the better-known desert camps specializing 
in concocting gothic (but friendly) cage fights. She said that it was 
“incredibly unusual” for the festival not to sell out by this point, and 
attributed this year’s low attendance to extreme weather events over the 
last two years and soaring ticket prices, which are at least $780 for 
entry to the festival with a vehicle.

“There are huge climate changes and finances are fuckin’ real,” Lenhardt 
said by phone. “Several people have told me they won’t come back without 
something air-conditioned.”

With celebrity sightings, private parties and an enormous glut of fuel and 
resources required to make the whole festival happen, the state of Burning 
Man today is a far cry from its beginnings on Baker Beach in the mid-80s, 
when a group of 35 attendees burned an eight-foot-tall effigy as a pagan 
tribute. The effigy, along with the crowd, slowly grew until 1990 when 500 
proto-burners flocked to Black Rock Desert for what people would later 
compare to the beginning of the internet. 

By 2011, the event was so popular that it sold out for the first time 
within a day of ticket releases, turning an event based on radical 
inclusivity into something that only a lucky 53,000 could attend. Less 
than a decade later, attendance rose to nearly 79,000. 

Like most global events, the festival was put on a hiatus in 2020 due to 
the pandemic. Still, that didn’t stop about 5,000 Burners from 
congregating in the Nevada desert and around 1,000 from descending on 
Ocean Beach in San Francisco for an extemporaneous shindig—the latter of 
which was lambasted as irresponsible by Mayor London Breed.

In 2022, temperatures reached 103 on the alkali floor of the playa during 
the reborn festival—the highest in recorded history for the area, 
according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Association—leaving some 
attendees addled with heat stroke. 

Last year, the festival experienced its most epic debacle when record 
rains ravaged camps across Black Rock City and left around 77,000 
attendees temporarily marooned along the swirling concourse of rock and 
clay.

Veteran attendee Ryan Considine told The Standard that his San Francisco-
based camp, Ideate, would not be returning to the playa this year, citing 
burnout and costs. 

“I did a shit ton of work last year, [and] I feel like we had a great 
camp,” said Considine. “But it’s a very expensive run.”


-- 
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