August 26-29, 2025 This is the third time Bikepacking Northern Nevada goes to Burning Man. But I still don’t call myself a Burner. Maybe I’m getting closer to being an Earth Guardian. Maybe.

Although I left the Reno Bike Project a couple of years ago I still enjoy volunteering for the Burning Man pop-up store held annually the week before Burning Man begins. This is the largest fundraiser for RBP and serves our mission of recycling bikes, Human Playa Vehicles, that otherwise would be destined for Nevada landfill. As I like to say, bikes are not trash. Over the ten years I managed the community bike shop our BM sales grew from about 500 bikes to 1500 bikes. Approximately 300 bikes fit in a shipping container, so figure 5 fewer conex boxes had to be shipped across the ocean and transported to Reno. Do these sound like big numbers or small numbers? This may be just a drop in the bucket, but one drop at a time will eventually fill the bucket. It is a year long process to produce that many recycled bikes but RBP has the system down so that it can efficiently. The Burn never ends.

Now that I am retired from RBP I am free to attend BM. Since I was recruited by EG to give bike tours I have a job and a routine in Black Rock City. I have a camp and a group that I work with. I camp with Damien Cooper of Friends of Black Rock High Rock and his group of friends. I have now biked into BM three times and have a system. But every year has been a little different. 

You can read about 2023 and 2024. You can let the pictures tell the story. 2023 was the great flood at the end of the Burn. I was leaving as the first drops fell. 2024 was reasonably good weather, a bit hot, a bit dusty and really loud!

This year had its own challenges. Thunderstorms brought huge wind events to the playa as camps were getting established. Camps were flattened once or twice as people were arriving in the city. I arrived on Tuesday and even the Earth Guardians were a little behind in setup. I arrived in time for camp coffee, which is a great social. I still feel like an outsider. The Earth Guardians are an OG Burning Man camp. They work with the public on LNT principles. The biggest efforts are with fuel storage, preventing liquid spills on the playa, and MOOP, matter out of place. Getting in the habit of picking up every bit of trash you see is something Burners talk about that carries over long past their time on playa. EG always has some new recruits. For some it is one and done, others have come back for decades.

Those thunderstorms that flattened camps also forced closures of the entrance gate. BM takes public safety very seriously so there can be widescale disruptions to the normal flow of things that can seem like a major inconvenience but really BM is doing their best to keep everyone safe. For example there is the concern over people trying to bike in to the city. Yes, that is me. Biking in on my fat bike, fully loaded for touring in the desert. It took BM gate staff over hour to figure out what to do with a guy on a bike. I was photographed, my drivers license was photographed and I was questioned until finally one staff member put it plainly, the bicycle is his primary form of transportation, as if he were on a motorcycle, let him through. What if I were on a horse?

My main mission was to lead bicycle sunrise and sunset tours for Earth Guardians. My second commitment was to give a talk on bikepacking in Black Rock Country. The third was to make myself available to the camp. This came about when the volunteer to MC the talk series did not show up one day. That was great, I was planning on attending the talks as it was so introducing the guests was not a problem.

My first tour had one participant. No problem, one-on-one is easier and you can tailor the tour to what they want. The weather was heavy over the playa. Maybe I should have canceled the tour. But I felt an obligation to the participant so gave her the reins to turn us around when she felt the weather was too much. Sure enough, we got caught in the wind and rain. We hid out in a shack that was housing a artist who was still working on their sculpture. We were soaked and chilled but safe. We watched the wind rip away at the kinetic sculpture that wasn’t quite expecting this level of storm.

Then we watched the puddles of water on the playa grow. To the uninitiated, the playa mud is impassible when wet, even walking is difficult. We had to abandon our bikes. I hiked back to camp barefoot in the mud. I cleaned up the best I could and slept in my tent knowing I was hiking back out in the morning to unstuck my bike.

But the worst of the storms were over. BRC took Wednesday to recover and as I like to say it seemed like BM started in earnest on Thursday. While I was slipping and sliding in the mud, the entrance gate road went through a series of closures, so some people were in their vehicles 10-20 hours trying to get in and out of BRC.

Noah Silverman and I had discussed the possibility of promoting a metric century, 100k, bike ride through the city. I had drawn out a couple of loops that could be repeated to ride the 62.14 miles but when I went to ride them the western 1/3 of BRC had flooded streets. I scrapped that idea. Maybe next year.

A highlight for me was going on the sunrise geology bike ride with Chas Rogers. Even though the topics of the tour are on repeat I always get something from the refresher. Chas is a geologist out of Medford, Oregon who specializes in petrified wood and analyzes samples to determine tree species of habitats long passed.

Then of course there is the big art. This year I found myself attracted to the animal sculptures. Last year my favorite was the Jackalope. This year it was the Mammoth.

Then it was time for me to leave after my Friday sunrise tour. Again I was stopped by the gate staff and held until a supervisor showed up. The supervisor wanted to know what range I would get on my battery? I answered I get about 50 miles to the burrito. Confused, they repeated the question. I explained it wasn’t an e-bike, it’s a Me-bike. I had to explain it one more time, plus that I knew where and how I was going. I get that they are just doing their job for my safety but maybe next year Burning Man can inform their staff that people tour in and out of Burning Man by bicycle.

You meet some of the nicest, strangest, nicest people at Burning Man.