Are Nevada's small desert towns ready for Burning Man's population to hit 100,000?

Jennifer Kane | Reno Gazette Journal

'It is overwhelming'

The town of Gerlach has a saying: Is it October yet?

Gerlach, population 110 give or take, is the last stop before 80,000 people get to the Black Rock Desert each year in the months leading up to Burning Man, the notorious arts celebration held each year over Labor Day weekend.

During the off-season, the few businesses in town — a gas station, diner, motel and coffee shop/bar — cater to ranchers, rocketeers, hunters and truckers passing through.

But during Burning Man season, the town is abuzz with Burners. They start arriving before July. By the end of September, almost all of them are gone.

"It is overwhelming," said Laura Blaylock, a five-year resident of Gerlach.

The town already was stirring on a near 100-degree day in mid-July. Artists crawled around a 747 plane art installation being stored in an RV lot outside of town. A few Burning Man staff members were kicking back on the porch of their seasonal office, and vehicles with Burning Man logos drove slowly down Main Street.

"Some of the people in town, they just feel like Burning Man has been forced on them," said Blaylock, who first visited Gerlach in the 1970s.

Thing is, Burning Man — which started as a few dozen people in 1986 — might be getting even bigger, 20,000 people bigger.

Watch: Burning Man growth is hurting the playa, Gerlach local says Gerlach resident Laura Blaylock shares some concerns she and other locals have over the growth of Burning Man.

The San Francisco-based nonprofit that organizes the event wants to expand the attendance cap to 100,000; the bohemian pilgrimage has sold out each year since 2011. However, they will need the permission of the U.S. Bureau of Land Management, which runs the national conservation area where Burning Man is held.

According to the organization's proposal to the BLM, the population would increase over a period of several years, but so too would the size of the event area, the number of vehicles piling onto the playa, the amount of art hauled in, the amount of trash hauled out and the amount of resources required.

More: Dear Burning Man ravers, stop pooping on the playa

The comment period during which the public can offer input on the matter ends Saturday.

Big traffic in small towns

Most of the towns along the way to the Black Rock Desert — Wadsworth, Nixon, Empire and Gerlach — have no more than a few hundred residents.

Black Rock City, on the other hand, swells to 80,000 people during the week of Burning Man, a temporary metropolis on a desolate, ancient lakebed.

To get to Burning Man, cars zoom at 75 mph through long, lonely stretches of sagebrush-lined road and then, if they follow the rules, they will slow to 25 mph in town. That's a big if.

More: 30 campers sick after visiting Frog Pond Hot Springs near Gerlach

"I live right next to the highway, and I've just grown accustomed to (the traffic)," said 16-year-old Gabriel Frazier of Nixon, which is on Pyramid Lake Paiute tribal land.

About 27,000 Burners drive to the playa each year; add to that several thousand staff, volunteer, contractor and government vehicles. With nearly half of Burners hailing from California, most come by way of Reno and then north along state Highway 447 — the only main road in and out of the Black Rock Desert.

Burners first encounter Wadsworth, also on tribal land, then Nixon. They pass the company-owned mining town of Empire and then reach Gerlach, the gateway to the Black Rock Desert. It's less than a two-hour drive from Reno on most days, but can take more than 10 hours during Burning Man's peak arrival and departure times.

Frazier affords himself about 15 to 20 extra minutes to get to school when Burning Man is in full swing.

More: Burning Man: No fences around Man, Temple burns this year

Not only is the two-lane highway packed, but Burners will try to drive fast, and furious, passing each other with little room for error, Frazier said.

"Growing up, I'd see all these crazy cars coming down the road, I didn't really know who they were until a few years ago," he said.

Burning Man organizers are aware of the Los Angeles-rivaling traffic backups, and they are working to increase the number of Burners taking alternative transportation methods such as the Burner buses and charter flights.

In the event that Burning Man grows, the organization plans to offer more of these services.

Residents hope that will alleviate the need for maintenance of the roads, which never were built for a massive annual migration.

Washoe County, which receives about $117,000 from Burning Man a year for contracts with the sheriff's office and fire services, does not receive money to repair the roads most used by the heavy RV and semitruck traffic before, during and after the event.

Residents also hope that local ranchers will be accommodated so that they're not denied access to their properties. Ranchers recently spoke up in Lovelock, letting the BLM know that Burning Man staff rarely knew that they were supposed to make exceptions for certain individuals, mostly ranchers, when enforcing road closures.

'Business is business'

Although the traffic is horrid, the revenue brought to rural Nevada makes it worth it, for some.

Participants spend an estimated $50 million annually in Northern Nevada, according to the Burning Man organization.

In previous years, Frazier has helped his family run a car wash, sudsing the dust off Burners' rides. This year, Frazier hopes to attend Burning Man with friends.

As a member of the local Paiute tribe, Frazier and his family have free access to the event, a sort of thank you from the Burning Man organization to the tribe for its troubles.

"I think overall it's a benefit to the tribe, more people will bring more revenue, more access for us," Frazier said of the proposed increase in Burning Man's population. "We sell tacos, car washes, some (tribe members) even get dumpsters and take (Burners') trash."

Nearly every community in the area looks for ways to capitalize on the annual flood of Burners, but some are more pleased with how that’s worked than others.

"Business is business," said Lacey Holle, who co-owns the Miner's Club coffee shop and bar, formerly Bev's Miner's Club, in Gerlach. "Every good business grows."

"I like that it's all at once too because I like that Gerlach is a small town, and I'd like to keep it that way," she said.

Holle, who has lived in Gerlach for a decade now, said more business means "more expansion for everybody."

Roy Edgington, the mayor of Fernley, the small but growing city of 20,000 just east of Reno, agrees.

“It’s a pretty dramatic lifestyle change for us for a week, but we sell a lot of gas, motel rooms, etc. We're a cheaper option than Reno. We just want (Burning Man) to let us know what the expected increase is gradually. We’d like to see it done in stages, rather than an extra 20,000 overnight,” Edgington said. “That way we can prepare.”

While he does hear complaints that people “wear costumes, or lack thereof,” in stores, business owners often report that late August and early September is when they see some of their best sales.

For the city of Lovelock, which sits an hour east of the main route into the playa, Burning Man is not as lucrative. Each year, Lovelock, the seat of Pershing County where Burning Man is held, provides county law enforcement and court services. The county receives $240,000 a year for those services, but little money for the businesses.

In a recent meeting with Burning Man organizers and BLM officials, some of the citizens asked why the vendors at Burning Man didn’t pay a business license fee to the county, required for all other businesses in the county.

Burning Man organizers and BLM officials both assured the county that they would look into it.

"The BLM needs to look at income sharing," said Pershing County Commission Chairman Robert McDougal.

Burning Man pays several million dollars to the BLM each year for the management of event resources. Last year, the organization paid the agency about $4.5 million in all.

Don’t trash my backyard

Blaylock, of Gerlach, wishes some of the money would trickle down to Gerlach.

The town could use a new water tower, better Internet, better health care for the elderly.

Near and dear to Blaylock's heart, though, is her wish for better trash pick up, a common concern among locals in the communities all along Highway 447.

Year-round, Blaylock -- who has a tattoo reading "Be Playa Friendly" on her wrist -- collects litter from off the dust flat. The bits and bulk are not just leftovers from Burning Man, though a lot of it is, she said.

Blaylock, who land sails, flies kites and even kayaks when water pools on the playa, spends about 100 days out on the surface a year, more than anyone else that she knows of.

“I was out there for Christmas, New Year’s – it speaks to me," said Blaylock, 70.

Every time she visits her beloved playa, she marks her calendar to keep count. Every time, she finds trash.

From orange traffic cones to metal bolts to bicycle baskets, she finds much of it in the dunes created by the tracks left during Burning Man, and the dunes from the dust that gets loosened during the event.

The dunes, although seemingly trivial in a landscape with scant flora and fauna, are hurdles for recreationalists like Blaylock who want to take advantage of the playa’s flat expanse. The land speed record was broken there in 1997 at 763 mph, but the site is no longer suitable for challengers because of Burning Man’s bumpy footprint.

“You can still see the outline from the city, you can still see where the man was,” said Blaylock, who has attended Burning Man for the past 10 years and spends much of her time at the event advocating Burning Man’s Leave No Trace principle.

“They’re not a leave no trace organization,” she said. Leave no trace is a common outdoors principle encouraging people to pack out all waste when visiting nature.

Burning Man organizers have tried to both educate and pick up after attendees. A “Resto” crew spends a month after the event collecting not only litter but also contaminated dust, wood and ashes.

Last year, additional volunteers were needed to fetch the more than 3,000 bicycles left behind, some of them brand new. A specific crew is responsible for cleaning up the roads where people abandon trash bags and sometimes even vehicles that have broken down.

The Burning Man organization has spoken with local authorities to better regulate trash disposal and vehicle abandonment, according to Burning Man’s associate director of government affairs, Marnee Benson.

What’s next?

The BLM is aiming to make a final decision regarding the proposal to raise attendance and expand the event space by June 2019, but there is a lot that will happen before then.

The public comment period closes Saturday.

The Burning Man organization and BLM will be working with a contractor in coming months to create a draft of the environmental impact statement. That document will compile all the ways in which Burning Man has had an impact on the surrounding environment and communities, and all the ways in which it might have an impact if it were to grow.

Resources to be addressed in the analysis include: public health and safety, air quality, environmental justice, social and economic values, Native American religious concerns, recreation, cultural, National Historic Trails, wildlife, migratory birds, threatened/endangered and sensitive status species, soils/playa resources, invasive species and paleontology.

The public will have time to respond once the draft is completed, and the final should be finished in May next year.

The BLM in the past created an environmental assessment, most recently in 2012, and found little of concern to the BLM related to Burning Man’s activities each year. Federal officials have requested that the BLM cut the report from the usual 700 pages to less than 300, meaning much of the information that was helpful to readers will be omitted, according to BLM Black Rock field office manager Mark Hall, though any excluded studies will be available on the BLM's planning site.

The document has to be done next year and will determine what the new parameters are for Burning Man moving forward.

“If you didn’t think the government made decisions quick enough, you may be soon thinking that the government is making decisions too quick,” Hall said during a recent public hearing about the analysis.

The statement, whether or not it allows growth, will be effective for the next decade.

Want to express your opinion?

Email your comments to: blm_nv_burningmaneis@blm.gov with "Burning Man Event Special Recreation Permit EIS" in the subject line

Mail your comments to: Mark Hall, Authorized Officer, 5100 E. Winnemucca Blvd., Winnemucca, NV 89445