We've all seen the stories and heard the tales. SO...HOW much rain ACTUALLY FELL on the Black Rock Desert area in northwestern Nevada during Burning Man event? Six inches? A foot? The ANSWER may surprise you. Quote du jour..... "Being trapped at Burning Man seems almost as bad as being trapped in a conversation with someone who went to Burning Man..."
You're one of the smarter people I know. I feel like I should subtract a few IQ points for knowing what it is myself. I'm told that they USED to use a VeeBubbaya engine block to get the fun started back in the day....
It wasn't really the amount of rain that was the issue, but instead the non-pervious clay-ish playa surface the rain fell on to, or drained from surrounding areas. The resulting mud depth was much greater than the initial rain. Though it appeared to be an excellent way to separate the real 'burner' traditionalists, who stayed to enjoy the party (this wasn't the first year it rained hard), from the there-to-be-seen celebrities and tech elite and media classes who fled -- or tried to flee and felt trapped -- and left their garbage behind. Did anyone there even have a rain gauge? I've heard only guesses from weather radar. 70,000 people at one particular party event doesn't say much of anything about the 330 million who didn't go.
Las Vegas got more rain than that, twice this year. I would say more people were inconvenienced there. But to a lesser degree. Because of infrastructure and what not. Most interesting thing about desert rainfall is not that it is low (it is). Year to year variability is very high. Ten annual inches +/- a little would be very different desert than any that exist. Desert plays exist, and have low-permeability clay soils, because one in a while there is enough rain to move that clay down from nearby higher lands. Black Rock's 2 inches was not even enough to do that. None of the things that make deserts 'work' are trivial to me, but I am perhaps an odd one.
