By Ed Fletcher, Sacramento Bee

For years, the organization behind the counterculture festival Burning Man has been urging participants to live year-round by the ideals espoused during its weeklong occupation of the Nevada Black Rock Desert.

A sudden ticket shortage just might be kicking that effort into high gear.

Two weekends ago, as many as 800 people descended on a private makeshift campground in this Modoc County town for Lunar Burn – a first-year event loosely patterned after Burning Man.

“This event wasn’t about re-creating Burning Man. It’s about showing it to new people,” said Tom Michael, one of the principal organizers.

After years of steady, unrestrained growth, Burning Man sold out for the first time in 2011. The population of festival-goers is capped by the federal Bureau of Land Management, which owns the dry lake bed that is turned into a temporary solar- and gas-powered city around Labor Day.

This year, using a new lottery program for ticket sales, the event was besieged with interest. The lottery concluded with less than a quarter of regular attendees scoring one of the 58,000 tickets available and many questioning whether the influx of new people would lead to the event’s demise.

Colfax artist Jim Bowers was one of the lucky ones who got a ticket. But with the vast majority of his “tribe” ticketless, he’s decided to raffle it off.

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