By Aidin Vaziri, Zara Irshad,Staff Writers
Aug 28, 2025 (SFChronicle.com)
The El Pulpo Magnifico art installation at Burning Man. This year’s events have been battered by storms, mud and long delays, but many Burners say the hardships build camaraderie and are worth the effort. Martin Rodriguez/Courtesy of Burning Man
At this year’s Burning Man, battered by sandstorms, rain and hours-long traffic delays, some participants say the hardships are part of the experience. Others aren’t so sure.
“The weather this year is not easy,” said Kate Sledkova, 36, a Utah-based artist. “The first day, there were sandstorms. From the second day, it has been raining, and it is impossible to move.”
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The desert festival in Nevada’s Black Rock City began Sunday, following a weekend of brutal storms that battered camps, tore down art installations and caused dozens of injuries. Yet Sledkova, attending her second Burning Man, said morale in her camp remains strong.
Her team installed two artworks — “Hand of Fate,” a 15-foot steel-and-polycarbonate hand, and “An Event Horizon,” a vortex of pulsing lights — both of which survived the storms. Pieces like the Ukrainian-built inflatable sculpture “Black Cloud” weren’t so lucky.
“Everyone is not sad despite the weather,” she said. “Real participants are ready for everything. We have respirators and rubber boots and we are in a great mood.”
Some expressed a similar sense of resilience. Vallejo residents Charles Mae Wanamaker (whose spouse is a Chronicle editor) and Hope Nastri said their camp had to rebuild three times.
“A lot of the newer people didn’t really take the time to research,” Wanamaker, 42, said. “I mean, you’re vacationing in a place where the world is trying to kill you.”
Online, frustration mounted. One Reddit user described being pummeled by 50 mph winds.
“I haven’t felt terror like that before,” they wrote Wednesday. “Rocks and pebbles sand-blasting my skin, hearing large objects whipping by me, unable to see even two feet in front of me … That’s going to stick with me for a long time.”
Though a stranger offered them shelter, they said swarms of mosquitoes drove them to abandon the festival.
“Despite meeting wonderful people and seeing old friends, the experience was a nightmare,” they wrote. “I quit my tenth Burn, and I absolutely made the right choice.”
Veterans agreed that experienced Burners know how to endure the low points.
“Everyone I was surrounded by was well prepared,” said Matthew F. Reyes, known on the Playa as motorbikematt, who volunteers on the festival’s live webcast team. “Burners tend to put themselves in risky situations and enjoy preparing accordingly. This year felt no different in that regard.”
Despite the widespread destruction caused by the storms, organizers stressed there are more than 1,100 placed theme camps — along with hundreds more unplaced camps — across the Playa. Most of them survived the extreme weather.
Still, repeated storms took their toll. “The uniquely bad grind this year was the timing and frequency of the storms,” Reyes said. “Our internal ‘Burner clock’ has been collectively reset.”
By midweek, vehicles were again entering the site, though muddy conditions forced intermittent gate closures and delays of up to eight hours each day. Organizers reminded attendees to keep electrical gear dry after a reported electrocution on Tuesday night resulted in one man being airlifted to a trauma center. (No update on the man’s condition was available as of Thursday.)
Despite the setbacks, about 70,000 people are expected through Monday, Sept. 1.
Many Burners believe the coming days — capped by Saturday’s climactic burn of the large wooden effigy of The Man — will redeem the festival again defined by Nevada’s unforgiving desert.
“The hardship definitely builds camaraderie,” Nastri said. “Everybody has a mid-week meltdown, that’s just expected. If you can overcome it, the thrill is really pretty amazing.”
Aug 28, 2025
STAFF WRITER
Aidin Vaziri is a staff writer at The San Francisco Chronicle.
STAFF WRITER
Zara Irshad is the Chronicle’s Arts & Entertainment Engagement Reporter. She joined the Chronicle as a summer 2023 intern for the Datebook team. She is a recent graduate of UC San Diego, where she studied communications. She previously interned for the San Diego Union-Tribune and wrote for her campus newspaper, the Guardian, where she served as editor-in-chief. Irshad was part of the honors program for her major and double-minored in world literature and film studies.