Total Crew on Playa: 153

City Grid Blocks Completed: 4:30 to 2:00 DE, EF, FG, GH – 2:00 to 10:00 CD – Center Camp

Location: Black Rock City, NV

Weather: Sunny, clear, hot

Temperature: 84°/35°

Wind: 0-8 mph

Dear Black Rock City,

How long did it take you to clean up your camp and leave no trace?

A few hours?

A day or two?

How much square footage did you have to cover?

Try two weeks and a 156 million square feet.

Walking in circles for eight hours a day, staring at the ground for two weeks straight while picking up MOOP scattered over 156 million square feet may have some adverse side-affects on our Playa Restoration All-Star Team. Today the troops seem to have gone a bit mad, subjecting themselves to blasting the same song over and over and over again on the loudspeakers– Gayla Peevey’s ‘I Want A Hippopotamus for Christmas’. The troops call this a “meltdown song” and every year there seems to be a chosen winner as the song that best exemplifies the endlessly repetitive nature of our work. It goes something like this (on repeat).

Oh but it gets worse. While Gayla Peevey’s ‘I Want A Hippopatomus for Christmas’ was the clear winner this year in sticking in everyone’s head, there were some unfortunate others that the Resto crew loved to break themselves against.

Here’s a silent video of Resto’s Line Sweeps by Moon Mandell to play along with the music for full effect.

Do you see, Black Rock City?! Full blast! On repeat! This is what picking up your Matter Out Of Place in the dust is like for us. This is why your Leave No Trace effort is so critical to our wellbeing.

For as good of a job as you do, whether your camp was Green, Yellow or Red, you all still miss stuff. And for as good of a job as Resto does, we still miss stuff. And the playa at this time is constantly shapeshifting – hiding MOOP with dust dunes and then revealing them by blowing the dust away. The MOOP that we all miss is the MOOP that shows up during the BLM Site Inspection, yet, somehow we manage to pass the BLM MOOP Standard of no more than .002% of MOOP per acre.

Anyway, here is the MOOP Map after Day 5, where we broke a record for completing our first pass of the City Grid in just five days. Next, we’ll be going over target specific blocks of the City Grid for a second pass to find what we may have missed. So, if we still find MOOP on blocks that we’ve already colored, there’s a possibility that we will alter the MOOP MAP to reflect any additional time and effort spent in that area.

As always, the MOOP Map is a work in progress and a final hi-res version will be made available only after we’ve completed our work on the playa, reviewed all of our data, and verified that all of the Theme Camps are in their final correct placement.

If you are the official leader/contact of a theme camp and would like to request a MOOP Report you can do so by filling out a MOOP Report Request Form. Due to high demand from Green camps with a little bit of Red, priority will be given to Red camps.