Burning Man — now a 30-year tradition
By Jenny Kane, Reno Gazette-Journal
Burning Man was born 30 years ago as a bonfire beach party in San Francisco.
An 8-foot-tall wooden stick figure planted in the sand of Baker Beach, and the Golden Gate Bridge loomed in the background. Three dozen avant-garde souls surrounded the recycled lumber effigy as it burned, the attendees summoned by two vagabond comrades, Jerry James and Larry Harvey.
“It was like a second sun brought down to this earth, it was just … it transfixed us, but … that’s where the story begins, in fact. Because at the moment it was lit, everybody on that beach, north and south, came running,” Harvey would later say in a 1997 speech.
The burning of “the man” stuck, became an annual tradition and, after a few years, the free spirits traded sand for dust. They migrated to an ancient lake bed outside of the gun-toting, leave-me-alone, 200-person town of Gerlach in Northern Nevada. Over a bizarre three-decade evolution, the getaway would turn into Burning Man, a weeklong capital of nowhere inhabited by 70,000 fancy desert rats driven by mischief and mindfulness.
