Thousands of Burning Man festival-goers, trapped for several days in the middle of the Nevada desert, transformed into a quagmire after heavy rains, finally began to return home on Monday.

As the sun shines again on the short-lived community of “Black Rock City”, home to 70,000 people, the roads were opened on Monday afternoon, kicking off the official exit process.

“Burning Man” is a nondescript annual gathering, part counterculture celebration, part spiritual retreat, created in 1986 in San Francisco. Since the 1990s, it has been set in the Black Rock Desert, Nevada.

Access to Black Rock City, a few tens of kilometers from the first dwellings, had been closed on Friday due to bad weather which transformed the “Playa”, a huge open-air site, into a visibly impassable muddy expanse.

“Exodus operations have officially begun in Black Rock City,” the festival said in a statement posted on its website. The driving ban has been lifted.

Organizers, however, called on visitors to delay their departure from the site – set in a dry lake bed in a remote part of the Nevada desert – until Tuesday to avoid massive traffic jams.

The so-called “burners”, dressed in the eccentric outfits that characterize them, made their way through the thick and sticky mud, socks wrapped in plastic bags as boots.

Some left on foot, walking for hours in the middle of the night to reach the only passable road, some 8 km away, and hitchhike back to civilization.

Among them, celebrities like comedian Chris Rock and artist Diplo who were picked up by a fan after a grueling walk of several kilometers in the mud and recounted their journey on social networks.

Laura Kennedy, with her husband and a friend, also ventured to leave Burning Man on foot, to return to her son.

“We walked – to the city gates, through mud, dry areas of the Playa, two shallow rivers and (past) several abandoned cars,” she told AFP on Sunday.

An approach that is not to the taste of other festival-goers, respecting the instructions issued by the authorities and remaining on site.

“They leave their entire camp behind them. They abandon their cars, their garbage cans, their tents,” lambasted one of them, David Date, Monday on CNN.

The festival, for which tickets cost hundreds of dollars, culminates each year with the cremation ceremony of a 12-meter wooden effigy, which has been postponed to 9 p.m. Monday evening (0400 GMT Tuesday).

Telephone masts were deployed and the site’s wireless internet signal was opened to the public, but connections remained spotty.

According to state police, bad weather at the festival caused one death, but authorities did not provide further details on the circumstances of the death.

The rains caused flooding elsewhere in Nevada, including in the city of Las Vegas.

The Burning Man had been confronted last year with an intense heat wave with strong winds which had already made the experience difficult for the “burners”, nickname of the festival-goers.

09/05/2023 04:29:38 –         Black Rock City (Etats-Unis) (AFP) –         © 2023 AFP