The story of those whose vehicles got stuck in mud during Burning Man

Lori Earl walked alone across the desert outside of Black Rock City, Nevada.

In pigtails and a hat bedazzled with rhinestones spelling out “LOVE,” the British Columbian mom was headed for her 1985 Dodge Ram camper van, which had been stuck in the desert outside of Burning Man for all of Labor Day weekend. It would be nice if the mud had hardened to the point where she’d be able to drive out, but she wasn’t getting her hopes up.

“You can plan for chaos, but you can’t plan for this,” she told SFGATE. 

Earl’s vehicle was one of hundreds that became stranded after rare summer rains soaked the desert floor. She and her teenage daughter, Bella, ended up with front row seats for the disaster, but they were in a different situation than most who got stuck. While most everyone else was desperate to leave, Earl and her daughter were only just arriving. All they wanted was to get inside.

“We sat in our van for nine hours trying to figure out what to do,” Earl told SFGATE. “We were watching a mass exodus of people getting stuck in the mud trying to get out.”

Their ordeal began a week earlier with a drive from Cortes Island, a remote island off British Columbia that requires three car ferry crossings to reach Vancouver. The road trip from the island to Black Rock City should have taken 20 hours, but Earl’s van broke down three times, which stretched the journey into more than four days.

Earl had been to Burning Man once before and was determined for her daughter to experience it. After hours of waiting in line at the gate on Sept. 1, the pair could finally see the entrance. They were second in line to show their tickets when officials decided to close the gates.

“Gate Road is temporarily closed to all traffic into or out of [Black Rock City],” Burning Man officials posted on X that afternoon.

Earl held out hope that the gates might reopen. They had come this far, so what was a few more hours of waiting? She shot videos as Burning Man greeters walked giant strides around the ticketing area, mud accumulating on the bottom of their shoes. “It’s the return of Frankenfeet,” Earl says in a video.

Soon, the entrance swelled with vehicles whose owners were attempting to escape the mud. Earl and her daughter watched as one after the other became ensnared and orange safety cones surrounded them. As drivers attempted to navigate the muck, tow trucks circled, offering assistance for $500, Earl said.

“[Burners] would not be held back,” she narrates in another video. “They said we’re done. We’re out of here. We’re not taking the roads. We’re just making a run for it. No one’s going to stop us. That’s what they said. Oh, the desperation.” 

When Earl captures one vehicle on video as it manages to free itself from the mud, she’s ecstatic. “You did it! You did it! You did it! You did it!” she says. “You got this. You got this front wheel drive. Come again. We’ll miss you. Thanks for coming.” 

When the rain stopped, a bright double rainbow stretched across the sky, directly over Earl’s van, and she snapped a picture. It kept the hope alive, and several hours later, an opportunity arose.

“The greeters abandoned the gate and said, ‘Do what you want,’” Earl told SFGATE. She and her daughter decided they would charge ahead and attempt to enter Burning Man. They didn’t get far before their wheels became stuck in the mud.

“It was hard after going through so much,” Earl told SFGATE. “But we certainly weren’t going to sit in a camper van with a view of Black Rock City and stay there.”

They rifled through their van looking for the essentials and put them in two backpacks, placing their Burning Man tickets and car pass on the windshield. Earl’s daughter thought it would be a 10-minute walk, but Earl estimated it’d be closer to 30. It turned out to be 40.

“We schlepped across in the mud and talked about resilience and self-reliance and things that are at the very core of Burning Man,” she said.

Earl and her daughter reached their camp on Saturday and proceeded to have “an incredible experience,” Earl said. As they enjoyed the festival and camped with old friends, more rain fell, and more burners tried to escape despite warnings about getting stuck. Some four-wheel-drive and high clearance vehicles managed to leave, but many more got stymied by the mud. 

Andrew Glover and his partner were among the waylaid. When SFGATE found them in a low-lying area pretty far off Gate Road on Labor Day, they’d been stuck for more than 24 hours, and Glover was attempting to dig the front wheels of the vehicle out with a dinner plate. He was angry.

“We helped a few people get out. Then we got left here,” Glover told SFGATE. He had been watching as Burning Man rangers drove up and down the playa nearby, Glover said, but they only stopped once to ask the men if they needed water. “We said, ‘Hey, do you have a shovel?’ And they just laughed and drove off,” he said.

Glover had a hotel booked for later in the week and a flight to see family in England. But he also didn’t want to pay $1,000 for a tow truck (which was the offer he received). “We made a choice,” he told SFGATE. “Burning Man was saying nobody was leaving, but they were. Many people left. We left when it was dark, and accidentally ran into this.”

A handful of other vehicles also remained stuck that day: a Cruise America rental RV and its U-Haul trailer; a silver Nissan Altima with very little clearance; an Audi TT with four slashed tires; and several more vehicles caked in mud, surrounded by safety cones or covered in messages such as “You tried,” “Wash me” and “F—k yer muck.”

Back at Earl’s van, which was in the middle of the Gate Road alongside vehicles lined up to exit the festival, Earl was unsure of whether she’d be able to move. The desert floor had dried out a bit, but not completely. But when Burners on their way out saw Earl’s predicament, they left their cars and came to her assistance.

One man advised her to let some air out of her tires while another helped to maneuver some plywood into a better position. Other people gathered at the back of her van to push as Earl floored the gas pedal. It took about five tries, but eventually the camper van was able to power its way out of the muck. 

Instead of joining the line to exit, Earl pointed her van toward Black Rock City. She wasn’t about to miss the burning of the Man and the temple, even if it meant waiting in another hourslong line to get out and drive home. On the drive out, mother and daughter were filled with gratitude.  

“After four days stuck in the mud, having a group of strangers come together to heave our beast out of the muck was a joyous moment that we won’t forget,” Earl said.