Viking-themed B.C. performers made mud dragons at Burning Man quagmire

Hjeron O'Sidhe has been leading a group of Viking-themed performance artists to the Burning Man festival in Nevada for 13 years running, and he wasn't about to let the rain and mud this year dampen their good time.

British Columbia resident O'Sidhe and almost 100 other performers Canadians, Australians, Americans, Norwegians and others make up the group known as known as MythMaker.

They travelled in a convoy to the Nevada desert, including O'Sidhe's bus that doubles as a stage, adorned as a dragon-headed Viking ship.

There has been rain in the past, but O'Sidhe said they weren't necessarily prepared for the weather this year that turned the festival grounds known as Black Rock City into a muddy mess.

"We weren't concerned because the forecast said don't worry about it, and then we got here and it rained a little bit and then the forecast changed,'' he said. "When it rains out here, everything shuts down.''

O'Sidhe and his performers were among tens of thousands of festival attendees stuck after heavy rain Friday turned the area into a sea of mud.

Mick Brown of Vancouver has been going to Burning Man for five years. As he washed mud from his tent and clothes at a car wash in Oregon on Tuesday, hetold CBC's Gloria Macarenko that typically people who go to Burning Man, also known as "burners," try to leave the site as it was when they arrived.

"This year I don't think that's going to happen because of the mud," he said. "There was a lot of mud."

He described the ground in the area as a fine talcum powder-like dust, and when it gets wet, he said it feels like sticky, slippery clay.

"It builds up on the soles of your shoes."

Brown was one of thousands who left the areaon Monday.

WATCH | Traffic pours out of the Burning Man site

Stream of vehicles leaves Burning Man in exodus from muddy desert

12 months ago

Duration 0:43

With the roads leading out of the Burning Man site reopened after a delay of several days, attendees began to pour out in a bumper-to-bumper stream of vehicles, leaving behind the site of the Nevada desert festival that had transformed into a mire due to unexpected bouts of heavy rainfall.

O'Sidhe said their camp grounds turned into a plain of muddy puddles, pockmarked "like the freaking moon.''

He sent everyone out in their bare feet for a "mud stomp dance party.''

"Like we're making wine, we're just going to flatten the whole thing so when it dries, we'll have our performance space,'' he said.

As they stomped around in the mud, they noticed its consistency was "like a snowman,'' and the group started sculpting with it, decorating the grounds around their camp with "mud dragons.''

"This just turned into this big, fun play-in-the-mud party instead of just like hiding your damp, wet tent while it was raining,'' he said. "It was just like, 'let's crank the tunes and play in the mud.'''

O'Sidhe said he approaches the event as an adventure rather than a vacation, knowing each year he and thousands of others are descending upon the desert to live communally as if they were "training for the apocalypse.''

The annual gathering, which launched on a San Francisco beach in 1986, attracts nearly 80,000 artists, musicians and activists for a week-long mix of wilderness camping and avant-garde performances.

There are the "true Burners,'' O'Sidhe said, and others known as "sparkle ponies,'' celebrities and Instagram models who show up in fancy boots in air-conditioned RVs.

"They're kind of tourists,'' he said.

Each year, he said, he interviews everyone joining the journey, warning them their first Burning Man "is going to suck.''

"They look at me all funny, like I'm supposed to have this pitch of this utopia,'' he said. "You're not going to a party, you're going on an adventure, like, you're going to throw the ring in Mount Doom and Frodo didn't have a good time.''

He's had tires blow out, people melt down, gossip and drama, which the group does its best to minimize.

But the conditions in the camp are a test of resilience that's all part of the fun and the adventure of it all, he said.

"That's the magic of Burning Man, that's the transformational process out here,'' he said. "We're going out to the uninhabitable desert where nothing lives and humans shouldn't be and we're building things beyond our means and ability. It's stupid. It's dumb. It's really fun and it's gonna suck and if you can't handle it sucking, you should not go to Burning Man.''