A hurricane hitting the desert was not on anybody’s Burner bingo card for 2023.

Burning Man, the annual 80,000-person bacchanal, occurs about three hours outdoors of Reno, Nevada, within the Black Rock Desert each Labor Day. It’s a spot of extremes: excessive temperatures, excessive mud storms, and an excessive lack of water.

Climate change, and all its excessive unpredictability, has arrived on the playa, the dusty-dry lakebed the place the occasion is located. Last yr, temperatures soared to 103 levels Fahrenheit. This yr, not solely did a tropical storm roll by, however an unseasonable rainstorm adopted inside the week. The ensuing epic mud pit, stuffed with all method of litter and trash, would possibly pressure the sources of the Burning Man Organization—the gathering’s governing physique, additionally known as the Org—to the breaking level.

But it additionally would possibly hit the reset button on the occasion. In the previous 5 years, Burning Man has gained a status for being a playground for billionaires and influencers, stuffed with luxurious RVs and personal, air-conditioned domes with open bars. This newest wallop may pull it again from the brink of full Coachella-fication and into its radical, community-focused roots.

More importantly, the playa’s devolving right into a muddy, trash-filled lure for Burners has raised questions on whether or not there may be such a factor as “radical self-reliance”—one in every of Burning Man’s most cited ideas—on a boiling planet. Perhaps the opposite, much less fetishized tenants of communal effort and civic duty may shine a light-weight ahead for the occasion.

If it survives.

Sparkle Pony Shortages

As Burning Man approached this yr, the same old mad scramble to search out tickets was absent. Instead, the other occurred: There was a mad scramble to promote them.

In years previous, those that did not get tickets within the preliminary sale needed to work all their connections to discover a spare one. With regular-priced $575 tickets vanishingly uncommon, some threw down $2,750 to safe their spot. But this summer time, a shocking variety of tickets had been being offered for below face value on social media.

A wide range of causes was given, the main one being that the current layoffs within the tech business had gutted Burning Man’s goal market. A satirical Medium article spoke of a Sparkle Pony Recession, during which fairly (principally feminine) influencers had been unable to search out rich sponsors to fly them in and put them up in luxurious RVs. Camps that normally aimed for 80 p.c returning members had to soak up round 70 p.c newbies to fill their roster.

Other causes: It felt distasteful to do one thing so reliant on diesel throughout a local weather disaster. People understandably needed to take the $5,000-plus {dollars} they’d usually lay out for journey and provides and spend it on a trip to Europe as an alternative of on Mad Max cosplay. People had been exhausted from the scorching and very un-fun 2022 Burn and, seeing this yr’s doubled RV costs, determined to take a yr off.

“Last year was my worst burn,” says Kristen Nadaraja, a longtime Burner from San Francisco who was on the fence about going. “People were angry.”