Gerlach, Nev.

So bizarre, so immense is the Burning Man Festival that it is, as its adherents take pride in claiming, a difficult thing to describe. But let me try. Annually, during the last week of August, some 50,000 people descend upon Nevada's remote Black Rock Desert, 110 miles north of Reno -- the type of place that gives meaning to the idiom "middle of nowhere." There they engage in a weeklong bacchanal that mixes Woodstock with Mad Max and, in toto, resembles a kind of surreal, sprawling state fair.

Burning Man is not for the timid. The camping conditions are horrible; daytime temperatures reach well over 90 degrees Fahrenheit, and two eight-hour dust storms struck during the course of this year's festival, reducing visibility to 10 feet and covering everything with silt. Public nudity is in vogue, and the practice of toplessness (and sometimes bottomlessness) extends from small-town teenage girls -- one was seen calling out, loudly, for the services of a body-painter -- to the 60-somethings clutching each other in a fully nude embrace at the "Polyamory Paradise" camp. Finally, the place is utterly saturated with drugs. Everything is available, from alcohol and cannabis to Ecstasy and research chemicals with names like 2C-I.

Uncomfortable with at least a few of Burning Man's debaucheries, but curious about this fabled slice of the American counterculture, I decided to go, joining a camp that included two semi-itinerant Wesleyan grads, a McKinsey consultant, the daughter of a British peer and an editor of National Review. Burning Man lures some very strange types to its brand of escapism, but they are strange affluent types.

After entering the festival gates, one passes into a demonetized society where the rides on the giant seesaws, the rounds of miniature golf, the costumes, the body-paint jobs and everything else are dished out gratis. Still, merely to participate in this bout of unreality comes with a high price tag. Gate admission is $295, and the rental RVs in which many "Burners" stay go for $2,500 for the week. And then there is the cost of airfare, gas, food and other substances. Flying from Montana, staying in a tent and splitting expenses, I spent just north of $1,000.