A few people have posted on social media that the muddy man celebration in the northern Nevada desert is due to climate change.
Let’s practice factfulness.
1998: Burning Man documented recovery from the 1998 rain and mud:
The last task is to remove the ruts caused by driving on the wet playa and holes dug by participants. A local rancher was hired to run his tractor pulling a drag that effectively broke up the playa surface, filling and smoothing the ruts and holes. This new method worked very well.
….
The weather certainly made the clean up much more of a challenge in every way. Often, survival became the paramount effort and travel on the playa was reduced to walking in the mud.
https://burningman.org/about/history/brc-history/event-archives/1998-2/98_cleanup/
2014:
Take the rain. Monsoon rains poured down on Monday, the day when most people arrive at Black Rock City. The playa—aka the dry lake bed where Burning Man takes place—turned to mud, entrapping hundreds of vehicles. If you weren’t stuck in the mud, you were told to drive back to Reno.
Notes from Burning Man 2014 (sunset.com). Also see video of the 2014 rain and mud.
There are likely other years with rain and mud too.
More Than Half of Annual Rain Typically Falls in the later Summer
According to NOAA, over 50% of annual precipitation in Arizona and Nevada desert regions occurs during the summer monsoon season in the southwest, with much of that falling in late summer.
In other words, this is normal.
Playas/Dry Lake Beds
Burning Man is held on a playa or “dry lake bed”. A dry lake bed in the western U.S. is what the name suggests – it is a seasonal, shallow lake that periodically fills with water and mud, but is otherwise dry most of the year. The season for rain in many of these areas is, surprisingly, late summer.
