Will this year's Burning Man Festival need to relocate?

That question came up in early spring when massive lakes of water spread across Nevada's Black Rock Desert where the event has been held since 1991. After unrelenting winter soakings, the region flooded and people were kayaking across the Playa.

The water ranged from several feet to a couple inches deep and reached its peak in mid-May and has been evaporating ever since.

Large puddles less than an inch deep remain, but the water will likely be entirely gone and the ground dry by the start of the weeklong-festival on August 27, according to Kyle Hendrix, the Burning Man public information officer for the Bureau of Land Management office in Winnemucca, Nev., that oversees the festival's permit.

"There is a little bit of standing water left," Hendrix says. "The Playa should be dry for Burning Man. We're confident the event will be able to be held in the usual spot."

Jim Graham, a spokesperson for the Burning Man organization, concurred with this statement.

"We've been monitoring the situation closely and are reassured by the forecast, which calls for lots of hot, windy weather in the coming days," Graham wrote in an email. "We're confident the site will be suitable for event preparation and operations to start on time, at our usual location on the Black Rock Desert."

Hendrix says the last time the region faced extreme flooding was 2008 and that year the water level crested at the end of May, about two week's later than this year's peak.

"In that year, the playa dried out and the event went on as planned," Hendrix says.

Photographer Robert Stolting, who has lived in nearby Fernley, Nev., since the fourth grade, thinks the last time Black Rock saw this much water was quite a few years back.

"I've been going to Black Rock since about '09," Stolting wrote in an email. "Just love it out there and the huge wide open space and skies. This is a rare event. I've never seen it like this. Some locals from Gerlach told me it's been 20 years. So I've made it a point to kayak in the waters and to photograph it's beauty."

Every summer, during the Burning Man festival, a city blooms in Nevada's Black Rock Desert complete with an organized network of streets, a hospital, a post office and even an airport. Some 70,000 people come from across the globe—arriving in buses, motorhomes, art cars and private jets—and spend a week romping around in outlandish costumes, building massive art structures, putting on fantastical performances, and zipping across the Playa in bicycles, cars, vans, churches on wheels.

Festival-goers usually enjoy the amazing party in a swirl of dust that gets into eyes, cakes cars and bikes, and gives the sky over the Playa a golden hue. Hendrix says the dust might be lighter this year.

"It all depends on the month of July, when we we could see rapid evaporation rates, leaving the Playa in its typical state."