Gerlach

🚚 arrived by one-ton & trailer

Over Cedar Pass into Surprise Valley, then NV-447 through the sage to Gerlach: population small, dust everywhere, the last real town before the playa. Checked in, credentialed — and the rig rolled in early enough that I taught a NuCamp workshop from nine to one. A morning of code before a month of desert.

🚚 arrived by one-ton & trailer

Everything staged in town got loaded and driven out onto the open lakebed, and that's home for the next month. There is no city yet — survey flags, work trucks, dust devils, and the early crew who conjure a city out of nothing flat. Since then it's been the actual job: empty the containers, haul out everything that slept in them since last year, get shade up over all of it.

Tower in the morning

🥾 arrived by on foot

Before the gates, before the crowds, the crews who build the city gather for a burn of their own. A smaller fire, ten thousand stars, and the people who make Black Rock City real. I'm writing this from the playa with dust in my keyboard — Build Week is roaring around me, and it belongs to another department, which is a lovely thing to be able to say.

🥾 arrived by on foot

Sunday the gates open and Black Rock City fills: art cars, sound camps, rivers of bicycles, dust storms and sunrises. A full week of the strangest, warmest city on Earth, running through Labor Day.

Wow. Big wheel.

🥾 arrived by on foot

Saturday night the whole city converges on the center. Fire spinners ring the pavilion, fireworks split the sky, and the Man goes up in a column of flame while eighty thousand people roar.

🥾 arrived by on foot

The opposite of Saturday. The Temple, filled all week with letters and memories and grief, burns on Sunday night while tens of thousands stand in near-total silence. The heaviest, most beautiful hour of the year.

🥾 arrived by on foot

When the event ends the real work starts again: the city comes down, gets packed back into the containers, the playa combed clean until it is bare to the horizon. Saturday evening the crew sits down together for the Last Supper — one long table at sunset on an empty desert.