Back when I first got to San Francisco in the mid-90s, full of youthful idealism, the first thing I did was seek out the San Francisco Cacophony Society and their best-known offspring, the Burning Man festival and the nascent subculture that surrounded it. Well, no, the first thing I did was spend 3 years of my late 20s cocooned at the Green Tortoise Adventure Travel office & youth hostel, where I lived and worked, venturing out only to cavort in the surrounding North Beach neighborhood with the poets and the blues musicians. But after three years of that—straight out to explore what San Francisco’s modern counterculture had to offer, without delay.

But well prior to that, in September 1997, a bunch of us Tortoise employees borrowed a bus from them—great perk of working for an adventure tour operator—and went out for a long weekend at that year’s Burning Man Festival, at that time a gathering of about 8,000 people held, for that year only, not actually in the Black Rock Desert, but at nearby Hualapai Flats.

There is a lot that could be said of that weekend, and this handful of photos, picked mostly for their novelty at a time when not everybody and their grandmother made the annual trek out to Black Rock City in remote northwestern Nevada, don’t even beging to cover it. There were the camels someone had trucked out to the desert. There was the Man sculpture, at that time not towering inaccessibly high over the playa (a Spanish-derived word for a desert formed by a dry lakebed) on an elevated pedestal designed to hold hundreds of people without them ever getting near it, but standing on a couple of hay bales. There was my harsh discovery, documented but not explained in one of the below photographs, that in the dry, hot desert environment, a single glass of alcohol can affect your body much more strongly. There was the morning I woke up far from my camp with my eyes burned from alkaline playa dust and experienced the world as a blind person for 8 hours, reliant entirely on strangers I never saw to help collect my stuff and get me safely home. It was an eventful 4 days. There was the stop to skinny dip in gorgeous Pyramid Lake on the way home.

The below photo gallery was one of the very first things I ever designed for the web, after I’d only been learning to build for the web for a year or so, at a time when GIFs seemed to be the right choice of image format and screens were so small that I worried that the below tiny, low-resolution images would be too big for some screens. I threw it together for my friend Gene, a writer then working as a journalist and considering an article covering Burning Man the following year, as an introduction. I did end up accompanying him out to the desert the following year, a whole other story which was happily immortalized in a magazine cover story in which I prominently appeared, also happily, under an assumed name.

Below is a single-page compilation, but in most other ways an unmodified repost, of the original 12 page website I made to entice Gene into coming out.

The Burning Man festival would, unbeknownst to me at that time, over the following however many years prosper by sucking the life away of the San Francisco underground art scene from which it came and carrying it far away, like an aphid sucking a host plant dry to sustain itself. But my not-far-past-college-age self came back inspired and energized, as, I noted for a great many years after I’d become disenchanted with it myself, many people still did.

I attended Burning Man for the next few years, having last been out there in 2002. In my meteoric soujourn exploring San Francisco’s “underground art” scene for a couple of years around 2000, though there were a lot of laughs, I sadly failed to make many friendships of substance (something that probably reflects as much upon me as upon the people I met, and which a wiser person might have recognized as a portent of things to come in San Francisco and bailed) and subsequently grew tired of all that work and planning just to go wander around a desert art festival by myself. Great memories, though, and I wouldn’t trade some of those experiences for anything. And I got a lot of great pictures.

—Mike, December 2023