Earlier this year, over 70,000 people descended on Black Rock City, the pop-up town that emerges in the heart of the Nevada desert every year for the annual Burning Man festival. But have you ever thought what happens when these nine days of sex, drugs, and art end?
A new video by EWU Crew on YouTube, gives a fascinating insight into the process of cleaning up and trying to restore some kind of normality to the battered desert.
As the group explains, there’s a huge difference between bagging up all of your trash and leaving the dry lake bed untouched, restored to it’s original condition. To be fair to the hundreds of construction crews that form the city, they do a great job at taking everything apart, however countless tiny pieces of trash, hardware, and other pieces of useless rubbish still remain.
To tackle this problem, a cleaning crew is employed to carefully rake over the 125 million square feet of salty sand.
Using actual rakes, they find all sorts of junk from batteries to bottles to unrecognizable materials with no apparent use. The whole clean-up process normally takes around two weeks of fine combing the desert.
You really have to hand it to EWU Crew. They have a massive passion for the festival and aim to restore nature to its original state.
The cleanup really isn’t as fun as building the city and some of its wild structures.
Watching the video make me think that maybe the most responsible way to organize a festival of Burning Man proportion would be to leave nature out of it and do it in areas that are prepared for its impact.
