Curiouser and Curiouser: Burning Man 2024 Tickets Available NOW?

Curiouser and Curiouser: Burning Man 2024

The first time I went to Burning Man I remember driving in the pitch dark night for hours from my home in Reno out into the Great Basin desert. No cars on the road just the occasional owl, cow, coyote. The evening was warm and at one point I pulled over to pee on the side of the road and pick some sage in bloom which I put on the dash of my Toyota truck. I followed the directions and pulled off the highway onto the Black Rock Desert which was periodically punctuated by flag poles. I followed the dirt track on the empty dry lake bed feeling like I was floating in a sea of black until I saw in the distance a neon green blur. At some point, I wrote a check for $35 and a flag was placed on the antenna of my car. And I kept going eventually arriving at Burning Man –it was the Man that was the neon green glow.  

• Read more about early Burning Man here.

That was 1992. I returned in 1995 and again and again. In 2001, friends decided last minute to join us and drove in with me on Thursday of Burn week at midday and bought tickets for $200. 

Until 2011, anyone could drive up to the gate and buy a ticket. It was cheaper if you bought it earlier, sending your check in by mail,  but the event didn’t sell out until 2011 after which it became almost impossible to get a ticket– leaving art project builders and key personnel for theme camps ticketless.

• Read more about the middle years of Burning Man and its journey.
• Read more about Burning Man’s solution to culture crash with the development of “The 10 Principles of Burning Man.”

This was a serious problem, and the Burning Man Org scrambled to solve it. One solution was selling tickets directly to theme camps and artists to make sure they could do what they do to make Black Rock City so special. Theme camps competed to offer more and more interactivity requiring higher “dues” to cover the costs of these “gifts.” 

And tickets to attend the event have climbed too: while people say once you arrive on playa, the only item you need to buy is ice, getting to the playa can cost a small fortune with tickets running $575, a vehicle pass coming in at $150,  and camp dues ranging from sliding scale to a thousand or more dollars with most around $500 which may give you a place on a power grid for your e-bike, AC unit, and to charge your phone plus showers, some meals, a bar, shade for your tent or spot for your RV, Starlink, plus other amenities. Note: amenities NO ONE had until recently… but that people in First Camp and builders and center camp cafe and people who did a lot of heavy lifting for the event had access to for years.

Curiouser and curiouser– how come tickets went from being unattainable to available at this late date? What do you think? Has Burning Man jumped the shark? 

It’s crazy how much it’s changed from my first Burn to my 22nd in so many ways (read the links above for more details). People don’t have to be as self-reliant — there’s even a saying “The Playa Provides.” But at what cost? 

I suspect it’s the high cost and complicated nature of getting tickets and attending Burning Man coupled with last year’s “Mudapocalypse” and 2022’s intense heat combined with other factors that has found us in this unusual place where Burning Man tickets are available to anyone who wants to buy one to attend Burning Man 2024: “Curiouser and Curiouser.” 

“The 2024 Burning Man theme celebrates puzzles without answers, embraces the irrational and the absurd, and invites the unknown over for tea. Because it’s in those timeless moments of not knowing, when we’re consumed entirely by curiosity, that we experience our most profound learning, growth, and creativity. All great journeys of discovery begin with a question; without that spark of curiosity no movement is possible. Staring into the void of unreason, we experience the wonderfulness of wonder, and the staggering awesomeness of awe. Which leads inexorably to the asking of better questions. Which is, after all, what makes us better than the robots.”

“The magic of wonder is its power to startle us out of sleep-mode and back into the immediacy of being. Studies say that the average human on an average day is running on autopilot about half the time while they think about something else (possibly cat videos). Even on our best days it’s easy to just believe what we think we believe and stay inside the painted lines. The education system fills us up with all the answers to all the questions on the standardized exams, and we steadily lose the ability to imagine anything that’s not on the test. Sometimes we need to fall down a rabbit hole or step through a drawing-room mirror to encounter the freakiness that was right there all along, just a tornado-ride away in Oz or three wishes over in Faerie. Just past the torii gate on the spirit side, or a short rocket ride over to Antichthon, the Counter-Earth on the far side of the sun where everything is its opposite and nothing is impossible.

“We take our title, of course, from Lewis Carroll’s Alice, who keeps her wits about her with remarkable aplomb as she explores a topsy-turvy world immune to the laws of common sense. Not just another folkloric fantasy realm of magicians and dragons, or a video game with the magic of extra lives, but something profoundly weird, a place where time comes unhinged and causality spins around in circles until it gets dizzy and falls giggling to the ground. A place, one might argue, more like our own Black Rock City than any fairy tale.” 

Can you just show up at the Gate like in the old days? Not likely. But you can go here and buy yours today!

The Man burns in 23 days!

See you in the dust!

Black Rock Yearbook photo of Gwendolyn Alley and her son Reed Sheridan at Burning Man in 2022