Before it even got going, the event known for its whimsical art, leave-no-trace ethos and sharing economy began with a brief disruption by climate activists blocking its entrance. The 10 protesters from the “Seven Circles Alliance” chained themselves to a trailer in the middle of Highway 447 and put up handmade signs proclaiming “Abolish Capitalism,” “Burners Unite” and “Ban Private Jets.”

In other pre-event excitement, I saw an SUV and attached trailer burst into flames due to some bad choices in gasoline storage. Then a campmate of mine fell off one of those electric, one-wheel skateboards, breaking several ribs and other bones.

Within minutes, Josh, who had come from Mexico, was picked up by a playa ambulance. Within hours he was flown to Reno for a better diagnosis and surgery, and within days, repaired Josh was back with one steel plate and six screws. Mere seconds after returning, he was back at work with his one good arm. 

This was his first time at Burning Man, but like me, he was there to help get its basic structures ready to welcome this year’s 73,000 people, all coming to the middle of nowhere in Nevada.

In my 26 years of helping out and writing about Burning Man, I’ve talked about its art that you’d see nowhere else, a clown committing a felony, clothing-optional celebrators, flaming objects and soul-crushing dust storms. It still is all that times 10, but this year it added several days of mud to the mythology.

You may think you know mud, but there is no mud like the playa mud of the Black Rock Desert, some 100 miles northeast of Reno. Once it was part of Lake Lahontan, which was more than 500 feet deep about 14,000 years ago. After its water evaporated, a deep layer of silt got left behind, and now even a small amount of rain can turn that silt into a mud bog.

Around midnight on August 20, hurricane Hilary sent a lot of rain our way, and by morning the water was ankle deep outside my trailer. The sun did not shine for 36 hours, roads were closed and nobody could get in or out.  

As people finally emerged from their shelters, looking relieved, the sound of squelching filled the air. Playa mud is mean. It aspires to be quicksand, but it is not quite as cinematic or deep enough. It can only eat shoes and tires. The best way to get around on foot seemed to be bare feet protected by plastic bags.

What is the opposite of sticky? Slippery. The mud, angered by not being able to eat shoes, turned slick and big splashes could be heard. A flop in warm mud might sound like a pleasant spa experience until you realize there is not enough water in Nevada to get it off. And a flop can leave bruises. 

Playa mud also does not want you to drive. Either your wheel wells fill up with a chocolaty donut of collected mud or you will spin holes axle-deep. In either case you will be laughed at first and rescued much later.

This happens even in the summer when wet mud lurks under a dry, cracked surface, daring you to cross it. I took the dare one July and sat there for a long day until someone more experienced pulled me to solid land. Lesson learned, mud respected.   

Astute Burning Man historians will also remember the great rainstorm of 2014, though this year was different. This downpour lasted much longer and put a stop to everyone’s setup schedule as hundreds of postholes sat waiting for their posts.

Finally, the sun did shine and people rejoiced on their islands. They shared food and drink. Animals crawled up on shore, traded their fins for legs, stood upright and continued their journeys. The playa mud had exacted its price and let humans roam free to return to their off-playa lives.

Weeks after the great splashing, it had all become an embellished myth with wild exaggeration and heroic stories to be shared. Some will claim it was epic.

Dennis Hinkamp is a contributor to Writers on the Range, writersontherange.org, an independent nonprofit dedicated to spurring lively conversation about the West. He lives and writes in Utah.

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Split into basins by an imaginary border at Lees Ferry, Arizona, each state can share blame for the rapid depletion of reservoirs that once held over four years’ flow of the Colorado River. But now, Lake Powell and Lake Mead edge closer to empty. With water savings gone, the Lower Basin has been trying to cope, though the Upper Basin carries on business as usual. Meanwhile, 40 millions Americans depend on flows from this over-diverted river.

So far, leaders in the Upper Basin states of Colorado, New Mexico, Utah and Wyoming appear to be hoping that their counterparts will agree to use less water. This is hardly a useful strategy and seems a lot like a dangerous game of chicken.

The brunt of low flows has been borne by the Lower Basin states of Arizona, Nevada and California. Thanks to a series of agreements between 2007 and 2021, by the end of this year the three states will curtail their river use by more than 1 million acre-feet — 325 billion gallons. But it’s likely these cuts won’t change much.

Federal data released last month predict that Lake Mead, the largest reservoir in the nation and the Lower Basin’s water savings account, will continue to lose water for years to come. Lake Powell, the Upper Basin’s savings account, is also vulnerable. But that raises the obvious question: What are Colorado, Wyoming, Utah and New Mexico doing to limit their water use and conserve? The answer is not much.

In the Upper Basin’s four states there are no self-imposed curtailments of Colorado River allocations — no blockbuster, big-city conservation initiatives, no real signs that leaders are convinced that climate change is not only happening but also a major threat to the region.

More discouraging is that in 2016, the interstate collective of Upper Basin officials, known as the Upper Colorado River Commission, officially decided to take more water out of the river. That decision stands today.

Some of the largest projects on the Upper Basin’s wish list include the Lake Powell Pipeline, Green River Block Exchange, Wolf Creek Reservoir, and the Fontenelle Dam expansion. These proposed projects would drain billions of gallons from the system, reports the nonprofit Save the Colorado.

Does anyone think that extra water exists?

The Bureau of Reclamation, which manages the Colorado River’s infrastructure, released a report in mid-February that predicts Lake Mead will drop another 30 feet by the end of 2023 –– leaving the reservoir 160 feet lower than in the year 2000. It also predicts more cuts for Nevada’s and Arizona’s shares of the river, as well as for California.

In the Upper Basin, where the Colorado River begins, no cuts are proposed. And according to a new report from the Utah River’s Council, a nonprofit fiscal and water watchdog, most of the Upper Basin states continue to use more than their share of the river, even though drought and aridity have reduced river flows.

While the three Lower Basin states use more water than the drought-stricken Colorado can deliver annually, leaders in Arizona, Nevada and California share a spirit of sacrifice when it comes to limiting water use. From my experience running a nonprofit river-protection group, I know that collaboration toward these efforts represents a resolve to act.

The Lower Basin states, for example, are working to fund a water-recycling facility near Los Angeles. The plant would reduce California’s reliance on the Colorado River and give Nevada and Arizona some of that river water in return for their joint funding. Collaborations like this need to start happening in the Upper Basin, but where are the examples?

Water managers in both basins tell folks they are doing their best to deal with the river’s decline, but only the Lower Basin’s actions can be quantified. It’s time for the Upper Basin to blink in this game of chicken and ensure equitable and prudent uses of the river. The lines dividing the states are invisible, but bathtub rings on Lake Powell and Lake Mead are all too visible.

Kyle Roerink is a contributor to Writers on the Range, writersontherange.org, a nonprofit dedicated to spurring lively conversation about the West. He is the executive director of the Great Basin Water Network, a nonprofit that defends water supplies from undue political and corporate influence in the nation’s two driest states, Nevada and Utah.

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On the southernmost tip of Utah, things got worse. There was no avocado toast left at the Kanab Creek Bakery. At the news, vegans and foodies looked visibly wan. The staff feigned patience. I settled for coffee that oddly came from being roasted at the extreme north end of the state, in Logan, Utah.    

This felt like what travel has become these days – lots of tourists, strained services, and everywhere, Help Wanted signs. And weekdays didn’t seem mainly for retired people. We got to Chaco Canyon National Park on a Tuesday afternoon, and the campground there was sold out.

Fall used to be shoulder, or at least elbow season; kids were back in school, people commuting to work, some campgrounds closed, and some attractions boarded up. In the few all-season campgrounds, you had your pick of sites. The pandemic problematic abnormal has changed that, and now there are rearrangements of everything everywhere.  

Tanja, who spells it that way, let us in the Circleville, Utah, RV Park and Kountry Store for free. “It’s my campground and I can do what I want,” she said before making her rounds on her ATV.

The Cottonwood RV Park in Bluff, Utah, was not free and ready to close for the season. It’s near the Navaho Nation and many people were wearing masks. Nancy, the manager, tells us from a safe distance that she personally knew 40 people who died of Covid 19 in the in the last two years. She also gave us directions to the semi-secret petroglyph panels in Bears Ears National Monument; the same panels that the Friends of Cedar Mesa group would not mention.

Other things seemed normal. By the sounds of the accents on the sidewalks complaining about Utah coffee and liquor laws, European, Asian and Florida tourists appear to be back. Canadians were also back in their massive RVs, taking all our prime campsites and feasting on the cheap American electrical hook-ups at the RV resorts.

A lot of people bought a lot of decked-out adventure vans and pricey travel trailers during the pandemic, probably so they could have their own bathrooms. Whether they will be a passing pandemic fancy remains to be seen, but more people were taking to the back roads.

Travelers through the rural West could still find quirky or sacred things of more recent history than petroglyphs. I wanted us to visit the former mining town of Tonopah, Nevada, not least because it was the terminus of the country song “Willin’” — “Tucson to Tucumcari, Tehachapi to Tonopah” is one of its memorable lines.

Wandering among headstones, we realized that the current pandemic’s death toll had historic echoes of loss. Unlike most cemeteries, the one in Tonopah lists not just the year but also the cause of death. Historical society volunteers told us that although the tintype epitaphs are relatively new, they were reasonably accurate, based on death certificate records and the way death was described in the early twentieth century.

Cemeteries often tell fascinating stories; this one seemed to specialize in blunt facts about sudden deaths: A father died in a mine fire. His daughter, born two months later, died after one day. I can’t imagine the grief of the widow and mother.

I don’t believe in ghosts, just the bits of untold stories that leave you wanting more information. In another graveyard epitaph, “Life became a burden” was the only explanation for a woman’s death, the wording a euphemism for suicide a century or so ago. She was 30 and had come to the remote town from France. What was she doing in Tonopah and how did life become so brutal? Only ghosts know the true tale of these lives so quickly lived, just as quickly gone.

We moved on to another small town, wanderers through the West and its ever-repeating history.

Dennis Hinkamp is a contributor to Writers on the Range, writersontherange.org, an independent nonprofit dedicated to spurring lively conversation about the West. He lives and works in Logan, Utah.

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