Greetings MOOP maniacs and line sweepers extraordinaire! It’s the moment you’ve been waiting for all year. The 2013 DPW Playa Restoration All-Star team is proud to present the very first glimpse at this year’s Burning Man MOOP Map.

The MOOP Map is a graphical representation of what we discover as we comb the Burning Man site for Matter Out Of Place. Find out more about how it works here, or read on to see the first day’s MOOP score!

Spirits were high on Monday morning, as 90 eager Line Sweepers took their first steps into the city grid. The weather was warm, winds calm, playa smooth from a recent rainstorm. Stretching out across three city blocks from John Frum to Laissez Faire, the line marched forth to moop an impressive 76 city blocks in a single day.

The job of mooping every inch of Black Rock City may be a monotonous one, but it’s incredibly important. Burning Man is the world’s largest Leave No Trace event. If we don’t fulfill our agreement with the Bureau of Land Management and restore the desert surface to a relatively pristine state, we can lose our permit to gather here in the Black Rock Desert. The Resto All-Stars are the last line of defense, here to erase any remaining traces so our city can flourish again next year.

Want to support the Resto team? There’s one simple way to do it: Leave No Trace. Moop your camp, control your cigarette butts, don’t let wood chips hit the dust. The more you do to stop MOOP from happening, the more you ensure that Playa Restoration will be completed successfully, so Burning Man can happen next year.



As the day’s heat faded on the breeze, Restoration team leaders gathered at the Black Rock Saloon for the “MOOP Map coloring party” — a daily meeting to discuss the day’s findings, check the data and begin the process of documenting what we found, and how clean each block was when we arrived.

This tireless team starts each day with a 7:30 meeting, puts in a full workday on the desert, then continues filling in the MOOP map until dinner at 6. It’s a labor of love, and you would be surprised at the passion the Resto All-Stars muster for this, Black Rock City’s biggest community art project.

Without further ado, I am proud to share our findings with you. Here is the first look at the 2013 MOOP Map, a work in progress that will continue to evolve as we learn more about how well Burning Man 2013 fulfilled its mission to Leave No Trace. Click the image to see it bigger.

REMEMBER: This is a work in progress, not the final map. Obviously.

MOOP Map Legend:

GREEN: GO! GO! GO! The Line Sweep moves quickly because it’s clean. Minimal time and effort spent in this location.

YELLOW: Caution! The Line Sweep moves at a stop-and-go pace. Moderate time and effort spent in this location.

RED: Full stop. The Line Sweepers are on their hands and knees. A ton of MOOP. Extensive time and effort in this location.

Wondering what the black dots are? Those are the locations where we found larger items left behind on the playa last week: trash bags, abandoned tents, scaffolding, anything bigger than a bread box. All those items have been removed, but we do record their GPS points.

That’s all for today, sports fans! Tune in again for the next thrilling installment, as the Line Sweeps round the 10:00 corner and head toward their destiny: ESPLANADE. What MOOP awaits them, lurking in the dust just around the bend? Come back soon to find out.



See more photos from Playa Restoration 2013 on Flickr.