Silicon Valley’s favorite festival, Burning Man, was hit by a massive dust storm that messed up travel plans for tens of thousands of its participants.
On Monday, the last day of the weeklong desert festival, the dust storm at the event held at the Black Rock Desert in Nevada reduced visibility to only about five feet, San Francisco Gate reported.
The X account Burning Man Traffic said on Tuesday that those leaving the venue could expect waiting times of up to six hours.
“The dust in Black Rock City is causing rolling white-outs,” it said in a separate post, also on Tuesday. “PLEASE STAY IN YOUR CAMP FOR UNTIL CONDITIONS IMPROVE.”
Burning Man is an annual music festival known to be a hot spot for Silicon Valley’s ultrarich and Instagram influencers, who pay thousands to attend.
The festival initially started as an annual music and arts festival in San Francisco before moving to its desert location at the Black Rock Desert in Nevada in 1991.
By the mid-1990s, it started attracting the attention of tech elites such as Google’s founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page and Amazon’s CEO Jeff Bezos.
This year, hundreds of charter and private planes touched down at a makeshift airport in the desert, which is only open for two weeks for the festival. A spokesperson told BI that on peak days, the airport handled about 500 takeoffs and landings daily.
However, sales for this year’s tickets, which are usually sold out long before the festival’s opening day, slumped unexpectedly. There were still tickets available for the event before its first day on August 25, CBS reported.
The dust storm is not the first time the event has seen bad weather.
This comes as the past two cycles of the festival were dampened by stormy weather. Participants shared stories of flooded tents and porta-potties in 2023.
DJ Diplo documented his journey leaving the event in 2023, walking six miles in mud to his private jet to then fly to Washington, DC.
The exodus from the event has been documented to be notoriously slow and difficult.
The event’s website states that because there is a fixed number of vehicles that can leave Black Rock City and get onto Country Route 34 per hour, exiting participants often face long waiting times.
At press time, the annual exodus appeared to be back on track.
“It’s taking about 20 minutes to exit Black Rock City. Exodus is continuing and conditions are great,” the Burning Man Traffic X account posted on Tuesday night.
Burning Man’s press team didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment from Business Insider, sent outside business hours.
