Jetpack

(A trip report by Jetpack)

Burning Man 2024 was, technically, one of the best years to be at Burning Man in recent memory. There was a bit of wind and rain during build week, that was all gone by gate opening at Midnight Saturday. And with the weather behind us, we had one of the most spectacular weeks in years: a perfect week with virtually no dust or wind and reasonable temperatures. In fact the first time this year’s Burning Man Virgins even knew what a whiteout was happened late Sunday night, during the temple burn, which, by the way, was so surreal and cool.

This year’s predicted apocalypse, the world-shattering, paradigm-breaking catastrophe of the event not selling every last ticket, resulted in a city with probably 67,000 peak residents instead of the usual 75,000. The easy availability of tickets was healthy for the city in a number of ways, bringing more last-minute and lower income participants, and reducing the Placement department’s ability to use their monopoly on Steward’s Sale tickets to cajole theme camps into working themselves to death just to get a ticket or two.

The theme this year, if I remember correctly, was Curiouser and Curiouser, which doesn’t really mean much in terms of Burning Man art, since we’re all doing Alice in Wonderland every year anyway. The man base was spectacularly beautiful and its spiral ramps gave a sensation of movement bursting out of a static object. The way those ramps brought you near, but not with, the people who had chosen to ascend a different ramp resulted in a moment of spontaneous interactivity as you waved and called your friends across a little chasm. This year’s Temple of Together, by Caroline Ghosn, recalled some of the delicateness of last year’s Temple of the Heart, but at night, it was better lit than any temple has ever been, which made for what was probably the most ornate and gothic temple we’ve ever had; it felt like it would not have been out of place as one of the great cathedrals of the world (without ever feeling sectarian).

Mutant vehicles? They just keep getting better. Mayan Warrior 2.0 made its surprise debut, and, as much as I wanted to be skeptical, found it to be absolutely stunning, four stories high, and with the best sound we’ve ever heard on playa. There were many other new mutant vehicles, large and small, including a simply massive one with a gigantic multi-tiered stage area behind the DJ so that there is virtually unlimited room to participate, even if you’re not a supermodel or friend of the DJ.

This year placement offered theme camps the option to take the year off and still get guaranteed placement for 2025, and a surprising number took them up on it, including some very major camps like Playalchemist, Distrikt, and queerborhood anchor Comfort & Joy. The result was interesting. Placed camps only went as far as approximately F or G this year, so there was tons of room for open camping. A lot of new, creative, smaller camps got some attention this year. My camp, the Future Turtles, had only 43 members but we managed to put on four big parties that were all mobbed. Many of the other newer queerborhood camps established in the last couple of years are starting to become institutions, from Pink Ponies to Fruitpop. This year saw Banana Hammocks, long established at Love Burn in Miami, establish their playa presence, along with a bunch of all new camps including Queertirement, Sandy Taco, Olympus (the first Queer camp on Esplanade in years!), BRC Municipal Pool (out of NYC! represent!), and Womxn Sex-positive & Pleasure Sluts, the first new all-women camp in the Queerborhood since Beaverton. The main drag of the Queerborhood was really F from 7:00 to 7:30 and the frontage of the camps there, many of them refurbished after last year’s mud, was absolutely perfection, making for one of the most on fleek blocks of Burning Man, with bars, clubs, sex clubs, a movie theater, cafes, Dusty Frogz’ Eiffel-fricking-tower, a candy shop, all done beautifully and without a single U-Haul truck or RV on the frontage. Gymnasium brought back their perennial favorite, naked oil wrestling and naked yoga, and also made room for the Pink Gym for lifting weights. Paradise Motel was back, after a year interruption, with sno-cones: show your junk to skip the line. 8-bit Bunny brought back the hot sauna and added a cold misting fan. Some of y’all ran San Francisco-clone parties with the usual pop music, tall men with perfect abs sipping vodka sodas and judging everyone, you know who you are, stop it, we don’t need to hear brat summer and feel bad about ourselves for not pulling some twink, when we could be biking into the playa exploring an infinite array of transcendent monumental art.