I’d be lying if I said that particular act changed my life. What felt transformative was this: I spent a week outside my comfort zone, with thousands of people who were also exploring their boundaries, and whose artistic efforts succeeded or failed magnificently.

In the following years, I learned how to cut and weld steel. I helped install some of the event’s large sculptures, including a 168-foot-long skeletal serpent with 41 flamethrowers along its spine, a project designed by a Bay Area arts collective called The Flaming Lotus Girls. But if Burning Man hadn’t set the bar low enough to trip over in the first place, I never would have made it out there.

Today the barriers to attending Burning Man are staggeringly high. The festival is still five months away, but no tickets remain for sale to the general public except through scalpers. (At one secondhand ticket Web site this week, the cheapest of more than 80 available passes cost $1,225; one likely prankster was asking a cool $999,999. The aficionados who call themselves “Burners” are petitioning the site’s owners to discontinue all Burning Man-related sales.) Serendipitous trips to Burning Man, like the one I took in 2002, are a thing of the past.

How did this happen? Last year, the festival sold out for the first time, creating a market for scalpers. This year, some 40,000 tickets were distributed in February using an untested lottery method; it apparently attracted buyers who were willing to beat the system by using multiple credit cards and hoarding passes. A large portion of “winners” appeared to be first-time attendees and scalpers, which sparked a panic among the Burning Man faithful and, according to an announcement from the event’s organizers, “created holes in our social fabric.”

More than 10,000 tickets still remain for Burning Man, which culminates over Labor Day weekend. They were originally allotted for a public sale starting Mar. 28. Now, however, they will go only to handpicked attendees who “already have a relationship and contact points within the organization” of Burning Man.