By Friday I was beginning to see the end in sight and I started wishing it hadn't gone by so quickly. All I could do is renew my efforts to take it all in, and that day I walked something like 7 miles. All day the weather was beautiful, the temperature having dropped a little during the week and the winds were more subdued. I appreciated everything a little more knowing this would be the last day the community would be fully intact. I made my daily pilgrimage to the Man at sunset, among other things trying to have a pre arranged meeting with another friend. I never saw him. The shadows lengthened and the sunlight turned golden as the sun approached the mountain tops.

 A group of naked people uniformly dyed reddish purple, the 'beet peeple', were slinkily ambling as a group down the steps of the Man as if pantomiming groping their way through darkness. Someone in a noisy paraglider swung his green canopy uncomfortably close to the Man, tightly circling around it. A large explosion happened about 30 feet away and I swung my camera around in time to catch the dust puffing up. The shot like bang hurt my ears for a little while.

 At the Man I again watched the sunlight softly fade and the daytime colors gather far along the distant eastern horizon as the shadow of the western mountains reached us. There was always celebratory whooping and renewed drumming at this point. Turning back to the Man, a group of Lamplighters were standing solemnly facing the blue edged Man, their lamp holding sticks held like staffs in such a way as to frame the Man nicely. It was a great image begging to be captured.
Later the sunset lighting on the mountains persisted as night again wrapped its magic cloak around the city. At one time three paragliders were airborne at once, noisily buzzing by a hundred feet or so up. As the sun reached the actual distant horizon behind the mountains a little later someone started a fire in a burn platform to the south east which gave off very dense black smoke, drawing an uneven dark curtain over the region. Skydivers dropping behind this smoke looked disconcertingly like they were diving into a smoky cauldron! Friday I got my first look at the crescent Moon of that month, over the upper scaffolding at Pinkeys. The nights were generally moonless and one was obliged to keep a light on all the time to avoid being struck by lightless bicycles with clueless or impaired drivers.

 I walked well into the night, trying to let this or that fantastic thing make enough of an impression to recall afterwards. Some of the leviathans of last year were back, such as the giant shark and whale art cars and a modified 'Draco' which still spouted flame. The trend toward 'party floats' had continued, and some of them were amazingly elaborate, often with stools around a central table generally on a modified trailer. One never saw broken down art cars, their mechanical condition apparently being well attended to.

 People congregated in many centers of dance, partying, and ritual. Near the Man I found myself next to a scene from the depths of time presented in a glowing psychedelic red, blue and golden palette. The colorful pyramid base of the Man served as a bizarre electric hued caricature of things one could imagine taking place in a dozen civilizations known and unknown across the depths of human history. The narrow straight green beam would have been taken for nothing but magic for all but a tiny speck of Human history.
There were many high tech devices used as decoration and to assist in conveying experiences, but in the end it was fire, drumming, dancing and singing that expressed the spirit of the event to me. Dancing and fire were intimately mingled in many arranged and spontaneous performances, one could sense a conscious effort to recapture pre Christian spectacles of ancient times. It appeared to me as a widespread sense of groping for a sense of renewal of ancient style rituals and long slumbering gods in serious but happy gatherings.
  A little later, again nearly alone in the darkness, I stood out there listening to the complex interplay of the many sources of music rippling into the night. The drumming was nearly merged into a thunderous background suggesting distant thunderstorms, a massive number of distorted roaring motorcycle engines, and enormous industrial machines chugging and pounding, all surfacing and being submerged in turn by the vast churning cacophony of Black Rock City echoing between the mountains. Far the south the horizon hugging glow of Reno could be seen but the local light sources dominated the night skies and drowned out the dimmer stars
Distant fiery eruptions flared and faded, with the colors of the fire and other light sources enhanced by varying thicknesses of wind driven dust. The wind would occasionally pick up at night, driving ghostly buffalo herd like puffs along the ground with snakelike streamers rippling like patterns on a flag in their wake, dissolving and re gathering against other flowing walls of air. Once as a broken wall of dust reached head height it looked like a time lapse movie of wind driven clouds, glowing a purplish hue from the lights.
  There were times the Man itself was but a vague gray glow indirectly passing through the dense dust as 'white out' conditions took place in that direction, and others when the neon tubing dimly appeared surrounded by a deeply saturated blue light shining through the more transparent sections of the walls of dust rolling past. The 'Eyes of God' were afloat tonight on a pair of large generally invisible tethered balloons, eerily hovering over the glimmering city. These pale blue eyes could be seen to occasionally blink closed in a series of overlapping glow wire drawings lit in close sequence, like the method used to make the bicycle borne 'galloping horse' glow wire animation which delighted night wanderers in past years.
Heading back to Center Camp, I passed the monolithic 'Castle at the keyhole' on the Playa side of the Esplanade, marveling at the well focused sound system which while clearly heard inside the stone textured castle walls was inaudible a small distance away. On its way through the man a green 5 watt laser beam passed through carefully placed openings in this structure, which among other things sported an elaborate rotating sculpture at the top.
Near Center Camp the spotlights along the center opening, visible across the playa, could be seen lighting up a circular patch of the undersides of some fairly high clouds when looking straight up!
 Wandering through the city vaguely toward my home base I came upon the magnificent inflated Buddha seen last year, no longer on the 'Esplanade' but more accessible. I climbed up to a small platform at the front of the statue and found the smoke from a nearby trash barrel was drifting directly to that spot so I beat a hasty retreat. As I walked away a pair of women had better luck on that platform, lingering there waving to the dense foot traffic below. Without warning both of them pulled their clothes off and stood proudly before the crowd! Since they were being very public I presumed they wouldn't mind so I captured images of a little of their prominent revelry, although I chose a good frame with their faces hidden and a touch of blur as a professional courtesy. It has been years since the novelty of seeing naked people has worn off so far as my Burning Man photography goes, although I did ask and receive permission to obtain photos of people on occasion. I didn't even go out of my way to see the traditional 'Critical Tits' mass bike ride this year.

I wandered back to my camp shortly after midnight passing many things which demanded attention.

 A glassblowing camp featured a man and woman separately working with soft red hot glass, repeatedly placing into and out of an incandescent oven a glass man with outstretched arms, keeping it soft enough to shape and add extremities to.

 Finally upon reaching my tent I settled in, the air just cold enough to need my sleeping bag folded over me. As I slept Michael wandered between his own destinations, using his bicycle to cover lots of ground. The darkness was, as always, accompanied by the bright and gaudy slowly moving art cars, some fairly massive. He was to see the immediate aftermath of the first death at Black Rock City.
At about 3 AM Saturday near the Temple of Honor 21 year old Katherine Lampman was hitching a ride on the camp "I'm OK, You're OK Corral" art car, a two story high mobile night club which towed a trailer filled with occupied couches and giant speakers. Katherine was a tall vivacious woman with long dark hair, and being at the event was the triumphant culmination of a personal adventure to make it there. She enjoyed dancing and did so often at Burning Man and was a second year student at the Academy of Art College in San Francisco. She painted in oils and was a photographer and wanted to attempt to capture the softly lit monumental Temple in the night.
 Katherine had climbed down from the second story to the lower right platform of the lower 'bar' float, and while the car was slowly moving she jumped off to the flat playa, landing badly and turning her ankle. She fell in the path of the wheels of the large trailer with the couches and speakers, and the driver, who thankfully was sober, felt the steering wheel 'thump' as her body was crushed under the wheels.
People screamed at him to stop the car, people pouring out of the stopped vehicle and others from the vicinity converging on the commotion. At the Temple itself a woman frantically run up to those nearby and yelled "We need an art car, we need some form of transportation for somebody!" Somebody else yelled "She's not breathing!" Someone grabbed a bicycle and sped to the nearest Rangers, who used their radios to summon the paramedics. An ambulance appeared surprisingly quickly, and she was carried inside while a paramedic was applying CPR. They had a helicopter waiting for her but she died before getting there.
Katherine Lampman thus became the first person to unequivocally die at the event, although people had perished over the years after receiving burns or severe injuries at the festival. The traditional official claim by the Organization that nobody had died during Burning Man was technically true because people had been rushed off the event and died elsewhere. Such arguable qualification of the hard truth that people had gotten killed there has occasionally brought to my mind in my cynical moments the claims made for many years that nobody had died at Disneyland.
Even with the tragic events of that day, no more people died then the average for the number and duration of human habitation. Several people would through random chance probably die during a week in a town of 30,500, admittedly most of old age related causes. Over the years I believe your odds for coming back alive from Black Rock City seem better than those for any American city, depending of course on the voluntary risks you take.
Interestingly, when Mike asked BRC Rangers about the incident they gave him the 'silent treatment', saying they wouldn't have any comments on such things. To their credit the Black Rock Gazette reported this sad news in their beautiful exodus edition, as well as that of a plane crash which happened about the time I woke up, at 12:11 PM.
 A small plane crashed about 100 yards short of the Black Rock City airstrip injuring all four aboard.The pilot hobbled from the plane despite an injured back. Late Saturday, at 7:01 PM another small plane crashed after stalling during a right turn while landing, after which Pilot Barry Jacobs died of his injuries. Both crashes involved Beechcraft BE-35 airplanes.
Since I had spent a lot of time exploring already, I spent three hours Saturday taking care of things like making sure I had two fully charged camcorder batteries for the night of the Burn. I usually had three on hand but I decided two would be enough, as it turned out correctly. There was the inevitable wandering to see the Man for the last time in Daylight. Already in the early afternoon it was roped off and given more guards while work went on with layer after layer of fireworks and various pyrotechnics being installed. There was a lot of room for burnables inside that pedestal and the sheer volume which would be involved suggested a very hot fire was ahead. The concentric patterned simulated rock garden was rolled up and carried away, and the surroundings generally cleared out up to the ring of lights.

Since it was so easy to do, I again decided to sit in the first row from near sunset onwards and after attempting to think ahead a bit I placed myself where I thought the view might be best, to the west of but closer to the southern main road than last year. I thought that would be the closest safe place to where the smoke might end up being, and as it turned out my judgment was barely correct. I would be sitting there just over two hours to assure the best possible view, and no matter how early I was there would be a few dedicated individuals who knew just where they wanted to be.
A large group of BRC Rangers walked from the Center Camp area to the Man as a loosely converging group, stepping within the circle of lights and fanning out to form the buffer zone with the crowd to come. Each ranger, as in previous years, 'adopted' a 20 to 30 foot section of the innermost layer of the gathering crowd.
Sunset took place and the clouds put on a modest show just as I felt the need to stay put to preserve my location as groups of people arrived and sat down around and behind me. Colorful isolated clouds caught the last coral red rays of the hidden Sun, and the dark Earth Shadow crept up behind the Man on its angular dust colored pedestal. Over the week its original red orange and gray painted horizontal stripes had become a subtle remnant under the accumulated dust.

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