Oops just seeing this! Ok so the news of the rain was a bit overblown. The thing about Burning Man is you have to load in with EVERYTHING you need. We even brought a bathroom! Not hard, just some planning. And so does everyone else. So this is a group of basically survivalists who have thought of everything. And at my particular wonderful camp, we had RNs, scientists, and 30+ year Burners who know what the fuck is up.
So we were really never in any straits of dire nature. There was one day the streets were too muddy to service the portopotties which wasn't great, but it was fine, there are lots of RVs/winnebagos/etc and plenty of people with their own bathrooms, which to be clear is almost never necessary but was very helpful this time! And then they were serviced the next morning.
Burning Man was great. Like, so great. Impossible to describe. The vastness of the city is also impossible to overstate. It's a completely bike-driven city - thousands of people riding everywhere at all times, which I had no idea of and was SOOOO excited about. That lede was totally buried in the directive "you'll want a bike to get around." And so large - like 75,000 people - that it can take 45m to bike from one place to another! Thousands of camps with different things they do, hundreds of art projects deep in the desert, it's truly possible to be alone even in such a populous place, because it just goes on and on and on.
The thing that the news really missed is that everyone who was there WANTED to be there, and was prepared for some degree. There is a shocking amount of "city" infrastructure, as well, because this is not this event's first rodeo! It was still very much Burning Man, which is a wonderful enormous incredible art party with people from all over the world. I heard SO MANY LANGUAGES. Oh and there was a lesbian orgy dome at a camp called Camp Beaverton (us portlanders cracked up at that name) which was "ABC": All But Cis men and it was both emotionally incredible that that existed and also uh, rad. So.
Here's a picture of the first rainy day over the real observatory that we built in my camp to host telescopes looking at the sun, Saturn, Jupiter, and the moon. For real.