Alan and I made the journey to return Burning Man this year. We were prepared for a low key year in open camping, but it turned out wonderfully! We happened upon Rob in deep playa the first day, leading to a bunch of plans and connections right off the bat. We hung out at VICE and made many friends whom we’d see throughout the week. And I ran my fastest 50K and wasn’t dead afterward.

Another strange year leading up to the burn

This year has been another strange one. Since I planned to take off work most of this year, I looked forward to spending more time and energy on Burning Man. It’s been years since I went all out on my electronics and lights projects that I loved. But tickets didn’t sell out for the first time in a decade. Inflation. Layoffs. Last year’s mudpocalypse. I didn’t hear from many friends who planned a return. And somehow my year got busy. Getting the house and garage in order went sideways with Yizhen moving away, brother Ricky and Max moving in and storing Mary’s things. I shifted a lot of energy to running since I obviously needed to do the Burning Man Ultramarathon and wanted it to go well. And I wanted to travel and go backpacking, since if I couldn’t make it happen the year I was not working, it would probably never happen.

Aside from ramping up my running starting when I secured Burning Man tickets back on April 17, I didn’t do any preparation at all until I got back from a month in Japan and Vietnam August 15. I had 9 days to catch up on my house responsibilities, write as many journals as I could about that trip and get ready for Burning Man. And funnily enough, Alan would be out of town and couldn’t help basically that whole time. I was admittedly relying on the fact I had gone many times before and trusted my list.

Shelter

My main concern was whether I would bring the yurt again. I love the yurt, but it’s a lot to deal with. It uses about $50 in tape each year and is very difficult to set up with just two people. It does have space for up to five people to sleep, but this year it was just going to be Alan and me. It also happened to be buried in the back of my garage and would have required a lot of work to free, as much as I don’t like to admit it. So when I asked Brad about possibly using his Shift Pod and he said yes, I took him up on it.

The one he has is a Shift Pod Mini, which is not really designed for but definitely fits two people. On the plus side, it doesn’t take up much space, so transport and setup is super easy. I hoped to hang out with Brad sometime in the week prior, but we couldn’t make time, and I ended up just picking it up from him while I was in San Francisco. At least we had time for a hug!

Then I tested setting it up Friday, the day before we would leave. I needed to determine what sleeping arrangements would be, and what other structures I would need.

I figured the most comfortable would be a tall indoor use blowup mattress. The only one that would fit is a twin size, so I tried that out. It did fit, but upon testing I did not think Alan and I could comfortably sleep on it without falling off.

Next I wanted to try a full size camping blowup mattress I have been storing for years. I knew it had a leak I would need to find and fix, and had little time. But I did it.

Next I tried a full size camping air mattress I have been storing for years with a hole in it. It was time to identify the hole and patch it, so I could test that next in the shift pod.

Hole identified, I sealed it with a patch kit that may or may not have been from this mattress, and clamped it overnight.

Only once I put that in the tent, it was clear that solution would be unworkable. There was barely space to stand in the tent without standing on the mattress. And there would be no space for our stuff, which I knew would be a big problem. I fell back to a plan of using two small blowup mattresses I use for backpacking. They take up less space, and can more easily be set aside when not in use. So that’s what we did, and it worked out just fine!

Power

The next thing to figure out was the solar setup. With only two people, our power needs would be somewhat low. But we wanted to try using a rice cooker, 300 watts, for all of our cooking needs this year. Then we wouldn’t need to bring the bulky propane cook stove, though I still brought a small backpacking stove as a backup. I also wanted to have rope lights illuminating things at night. But I wouldn’t bring my big speakers. I calculated I would still need the solar panels and couldn’t get away with a single charge of my 200 amp hour 12 volt lithium iron phosphate battery.

I dragged the solar panels from my back yard to the front, still on their 2x4 mounts I used two years ago. I cleaned them up and plugged them into the solar controller and hooked it to my battery. And nothing happened. I was expecting the battery voltage would be low, but I hoped it wasn’t going to be so low nothing would work.

I brought the solar panels down to the front to wash them off, and placed on the car to start charging the lithium battery.

I found via a voltmeter the battery was at 9.92 volts. I knew this was bad but wasn’t sure how bad.

The lithium iron phosphate battery I bought for Burning Man 2022 and used just that year was now at a critically low voltage of 9.92V. Anything below 10 volts is potentially damaging for the battery.

Upon researching, I found:

The minimum 12V LiFePO4 battery voltage damage is 10V. Discharging below the 10V minimum causes permanent and irreversible battery damage.

Uh oh. All I could do was connect my battery charger and hope for the best. And thankfully, after some hours, the battery voltage had increased substantially. Only time would tell if it worked just as well out in the field.

All the rest

I spent the rest of Friday — and honestly, much of Saturday, even though we were supposed to leave Saturday morning — getting the bikes repaired and tested, packing, and making cookies!

I was disappointed to find the off-the-shelf LED stick I bought from Amazon to use in 2022 had completely stopped working after just that one use. Ideally I would have done my own programmed LEDs like in the past, but I had no time. I decided to keep the stick mounted to my bike simply to use as a mast to attach other LEDs to, which I would have to figure out on playa.

The rest of the bike prep went fine. Alan’s bike, which is actually an old bike abandoned by another camp mate from a past year, still seemed functional enough despite my expectation last time would be that bike’s last year. I got the brakes working and moved on to the next thing.

I rotated and remounted a piece of the basket to hold it off the brake cables, which needed all the help they could get.

The Burning Man Ultramarathon that I run most years asks runners to bring a race snack to share. In the past I have run out of time and creativity and bought a package of something from the store on our way out. This time, I made chocolate chip cookies at home. I made a lot so I would have snacks throughout the week. They were delicious, but strangely it took us all week to eat them all. Partly, we just had way too much food again.

Instead of buying a snack for the Burning Man Ultramarathon, I decided to bake cookies this year.

I ended up ditching a lot of things I would normally bring, figuring I didn’t need to be as prepared as I usually am because it was just going to be Alan and me. I didn’t need to have all the tools one could possibly imagine needing for a small community out in the rugged wilderness. That was freeing, and weird. My list thus got smaller, but it was still a lot.

It took till Saturday evening to get everything packed and loaded into the car, but we got there. The load overall was much smaller than in years past, and I wasn’t going to be scraping dangerously close to the ground this time!

The fully loaded Jeep was much less overloaded than last time, thankfully.

The fully loaded Jeep was much less overloaded than last time, thankfully.

Entries in this series

1. Preparing for a simpler Burning Man (August 23)
2. Off to a great start in open camping (August 24-26)
3. Faster Burning Man Ultramarathon than predicted, than ever! (August 27)
4. A fabulous end to Burning Man 2024 (August 28-September 2)