Bexx:

There’s something about removing the spectacle, removing the ability for you to wander off on your own, like you can so easily do at Black Rock City. When the costumes are removed, and it’s really just putting on your favorite comfy pair of snow pants, there is no brain power going into, “Where do I need to go to ensure that I’m not going to miss it?”

Why we do this crazy thing that we do? There’s no end of FrostBurn stories. And to quote a friend, one of the first friends I met at my first FrostBurn, “It is the stupidest thing you will ever do on purpose.”

Stuart:

The way the media has it, people apparently are still stuck in the mud from Burning Man 2023, including a few celebrities. Talk about a story having legs, or fins or whatever it is. This just, it just won’t quit. But if you were there, or you know someone who was there, you know it was a different story.

For so many people, the weather event was actually a good thing, that it brought people together in new old ways and gave them a chance to exercise their self-reliance, their communal effort, all those cultural practices that got us where we are today.

I’m Stuart Mangrum. This is Burning Man LIVE, and I want to talk about the weather because I’m recording this in January of 2024, four months after the so-called debacle. And looking at the weather out there in North America right now, it’s really hard to believe anyone thought that this year’s Burning Man was anything but a little case of the sprinkles. I mean, it’s raining buckets in San Francisco right now where our trusty engineer and story editor Vav-Michael-Vav is I think canoeing into work from Berkeley. There’s a huge cold snap happening back east and the midwest and the south. It’s even unseasonably cold down here in Baja, California.

Anyway, all this winter weather made me wonder: what is the coldest, the most teeth-chattering, frostiest, brrrr-iest of all the over 100 sanctioned Burning Man events around the world? And why would anyone intentionally go to Ice Cube Man or anything that sounds like you could die of exposure just going to the porta-potties at night?

But it turns out there are actually a whole lot of Burners who embrace that sort of, I don’t know, extreme winter sports approach to burning, going for the Radical Self-reliance win in a true survival setting. Now, there have been unofficial winter burns all over the place: Wisconsin, Vermont, Quebec, even allegedly way down under in Antarctica, at the bottom of the planet.

Anyway, going back to the list of official Burning Man regional events, and it’s a long list, there are a few in there that sound pretty frosty indeed. There’s… how about Freezer Burn up in the prairies of Alberta, but it turns out they hold that one in June, so not exactly a Donner Party. New Hampshire Burners used to host a little winter Burn they called Borealis in mid-January, but sadly, 2022 was the last year for that one.

So, through a rigorous scientific process we landed for this show on FrostBurn. It’s a 300-person event held in the wild Appalachian Mountains of West Virginia in, definitely in mid-winter, in February.

Now, I’ll be the first one to admit I’m not the perfect match for this story. I grew up in L.A. I didn’t actually touch snow until I was 16 years old. And other than, you know, Air Force Survival School, I’ve pretty scrupulously avoided any weather that could freeze my beer. So for this one, I turned to Burning Man LIVE’s resident expert in cold weather shenanigans to help me figure this all out: our producer kbot, and she connected us with one of the board members of FrostBurn… Bexx.

I’m here with my friend kbot, in the dead of winter. It’s January in the Northern Hemisphere, January of 2024. The news is all about ice storms and people experiencing terrifying subzero temperatures. Here in my own home in Baja, California, we had a cold snap where definitely daytime highs got below 70 and overnights below 50 Fahrenheit. No, excuse me, below is 60 Fahrenheit.

kbot:

Oh, cry me a river, Stuart!

Stuart:

It never gets below 50 here! But tell it to my neighbors who, you know, it dips below 30 Celsius and they’re all wearing down vests and sweaters. And I’m getting acclimatized to this.

But, weather has been on our minds since Black Rock City, right? People still can’t shut up about how a little bit of rain nearly destroyed some lives, some celebrity lives. We all know that it was just a little rain.

But talking about the rain makes me think about the larger Burning Man world. There are people who put up with so much more than a little rain and they do it on purpose. It’s kind of like the Polar Bear Club, right? these people who love to go diving in subzero waters just to go swimming on Christmas Day. There are some events that intentionally take place in the winter. kbot who are we talking to today?

kbot:

We are talking to Bexx from FrostBurn. It happens in West Virginia. They put on a Regional on top of the snow, in all kinds of weather; it can rain and snow, it can hail, it can probably sunshine – weather mayhem! And being a Canadian myself who has encountered a little bit of weather over my entire lifetime, I’m impressed. I’m very, very impressed that you’re able to do something like this, with several hundred people once a year. So, hello, Bexx.

Bexx:

Hello, kbot and Hi, Stuart, thanks for having me. And it does get pretty cold down there.

Stuart:

Tell us more!

kbot:

How cold?

Stuart:

How cold is it?

Bexx:

You know, I think important to this podcast for me is not scaring too many people off, because we are looking to grow our community down there in West Virginia. And I will say that the coldest FrostBurn I’ve ever experienced was in 2015. We did live through a blizzard. There was about three feet of snow that accumulated during the event, and it was certainly subzero temperatures with a wind chill I think of like -17, with sustained 60 mile per hour winds. That was pretty challenging, as you might imagine.

It was due to be one of the bigger years for us. At that time, it was our first year on a new property down in West Virginia as opposed to in Pennsylvania. And after that experience, with about half of the people who showed up on Thursday having their structures destroyed and blown away by the winds by the following morning on Friday, lots of people did not come back for subsequent years.

But I will say that since then it has been considerably easier. And that was my first FrostBurn, so that kind of set the bar.

kbot:

How did you get involved in this in the first place and how long has FrostBurn been happening?

Bexx:

Frostburn has been happening since 2008. It’s a very long standing official Regional Burning Man event. We are sanctioned by the BORG. It has bounced around to a couple different locations, but did find its home in West Virginia. And as I mentioned, I went for the first time in 2015 for that blizzard year. I had gone to my first Burn, Transformus, the previous summer, and folks there who are still my best friends told me, “You have to go to FrostBurn. It’s so amazing. You’ll meet the best Burners. They’re so extreme.”

So we went, knowing very little, just me and three other friends, baby Burners, and I was completely hooked. After that it was, How can I get involved? I started picking up team leadership opportunities, and joined the board towards the end of 2017 for our first, for my first year on the board, in February of 2018. And I’ve been there ever since.

kbot:

So why does it have to happen in the winter?

Bexx:

Well, that’s what makes FrostBurn FrostBurn.

kbot:

True.

Stuart:

Yeah, but I mean, don’t you have a summer in West Virginia?

Bexx:

We do, actually. Transformus has since moved to the same location on Marvin’s Mountaintop. It is absolutely gorgeous there. We love it. Vast expanses of land as far as the eye can see. However, I will say that the mountain does bring certain challenges. The wind tends to come down from the top of the mountain ,and hits you right on the plateau, right where we’re all placed. And the camps that are on one end of the mountain really bear the brunt of the wind.

kbot:

So you’re saying that you guys deliberately do the most punishing Burn imaginable for fun?

Bexx:

Oh, yes. I mean, have you met Burners?

kbot:

Well, yeah, but I just, I had to ask. You know, maybe there was a special reason why you did that.

Bexx:

To say that we did? Uh, in all seriousness, it presents completely new opportunities and a different set of circumstances than you would get during fair weather. I spoke to you briefly the other day, kbot, and one of the things that became so apparent to me during that call was that FrostBurn has about 5% spectacle, as opposed to the 100% spectacle that is Burning Man.

The spectacle itself is weather. And we’re really there for community engagement and connection, for long term relationship-building with one another. And at this point it is the only event that my theme camp does annually. We all go and spend our time with other theme camps and consider ourselves polycamperous, members of my camp, or go visit other friends during regionals throughout the summer in our own respective vehicles and so on and so forth.

Simply because the friends that you make at FrostBurn are the ones that you want to go visit throughout the rest of the year.

Stuart:

Wow. Shared struggle. You know, in my earliest days out in the Black Rock Desert, it was still very much considered a survival experience. And it sounds like if anybody needs a Survival Guide, FrostBurn participants do. How do you get people ready for this kind of an experience out there? And what kind of advice do you give to newbies who might not know entirely what to expect?

Bexx:

It’s interesting that you would say that, because on the one hand, the answer is yes, of course, people who are going for the first time you’d think that they would need more advice. But at the same time, the kinds of Burners that you’re getting, or just participants, I should say, that are attending this event are coming because they are up for the challenge, and they are very much the antithesis of Sparklepony. Sparkleponies do not survive at FrostBurn. And if someone does show up that is willfully ill-prepared, people will help you, but we will also tell you, like, “Hey, you can actually leave this event and you can go into Morgantown and you can get the gear that you need to come back and do this better.”

In previous years, in the month leading up to FrostBurn, I used to do like a “30 days of FrostBurn” where I would give out winter tips on our FrostBurn page about things like wind, managing wind, managing snow, managing things that freeze. That’s probably the most challenging part: the mud, the wind, and the things that freeze. Things that you don’t expect to freeze, like your contacts, inside their contacts case overnight. So like sleeping with them in your bra or in your sleeping bag with you so that they stay in liquid so you can put them in in the morning, which is dreadfully painful, I might add, being so cold and putting something like that into your eye. It’s really just that the people who are up for the challenge are doing that research on their own. They are like the poster child for Radical Self-reliance.

Stuart:

Okay, so costuming is basically dry suits?

Bexx:

Costuming is… I can demonstrate that actually. Here. Okay, here we go.

Stuart:

Bexx puts on a lovely fur hat.

Bexx:

This is a podcast, so, right, for the people that are listening for audio, I have now donned my warmest jacket. It is very furry. So has kbot. And I am in my ultimate yeti hat and this is about as far as you get with the exception of things like face paint, or some people will try to do makeup, but if it is snowing or sleeting or whatever, it better be waterproof because it will be all over your face and just a few minutes.

kbot:

How much time do you spend outside versus time that you spend inside your warm structures?

Bexx:

I would say that you bounce around to various different people’s warm structures. Anywhere on a given year. We have somewhere between 11 and 25 theme camps, and the goal there is curating warm, inviting spaces for community to gather. This was a challenge during COVID times, obviously for us, but people do hang out outside. Some theme camps spend a lot of energy trying to figure out: How can we create comfortable outdoor spaces for people to gather?

For instance, there’s a camp that always brings ping pong, and they light it up really nice so you can play at any time of the day or night. It gets very competitive around midnight. They also have darts, and a bar that you can easily walk into from the outside ping pong area. Shout out to Burly 10 Pint Men.

There are other camps who will create really beautiful fires with benches to hang out at, and some camps kind of do the opposite. If you were a first time Burner, it might be pretty intimidating for you trying to figure out, “Well, where do I belong here?” because everything is closed off. It is very different than Burning Man, where everything is open, it’s very clear when something is happening inside.

At FrostBurn, we’re weathering against the storm. And so you have massive yurts who are open all at all times of the evening. And there might be an awesome cuddle puddle party going on in there, and it might be so warm. And they’ve spent hours and hours creating these beautiful yurts for you to come inside and experience their art, to be in the warmth. They’ve created coat racks for you, places to put your wet shoes. But you wouldn’t know, if you weren’t in the know, that it’s okay to open up that door and step inside and say, “Is anybody home? Can I come in?”

And then there are the camps that are kind of in the middle, right? You can wear your shoes inside, but it is going to be muddy and it isn’t necessarily as, like, comfortable as that no shoes camp.

kbot:

What about saunas? So you have a sauna?

Bexx:

We do. We actually have one. It lives there permanently. We have a very unique relationship with the land owner down there on Marvin’s Mountaintop, and so a few years ago, one of the board of directors who lives nearby asked permission to build an A-frame steam house sauna thing called Habitat for Insanity. They do go to Burning Man every year. And that lives there permanently. And they do a lot of not only events on the porch outside, like snow cones, funny enough, very popular, but they do lectures inside. Anybody can come in and give like a talk about a topic. And they have a little sign up sheet so you can be in there for the sauna learning about something really cool.

Stuart:

Well, we have a lot of fans of the show in Finland. They’re going to be very excited. You may be deluged with Finns looking for a good sauna.

Bexx:

Come on in. We love it when the Canadians used to come down every year. They used to uh… They didn’t bring any infrastructure, but rather they would build a igloo. And one year they were like, “We can’t come because it didn’t snow.” But I think it was in 2016, they built a massive igloo and they put a fire bar inside!

Stuart:

Okay, I’m having a hard time imagining this, but that sounds great.

Bexx:

It was great.

Stuart:

Okay. So it’s a city of igloos, yurts, insulated tents, a big A-frame sauna and some hearty people standing around outside playing darts.

Bexx:

And geodesic domes, which is my camp. It’s a series of domes.

Stuart:

Tell us about your camp, and your crew.

Bexx:

So my camp’s called PHART Camp, P H A R T, you guys, get your minds out of the gutter. We are Philadelphia Art Camp. We like the arts of any kind; culinary arts, musical arts, visual arts, acting, whatever. Whatever our members that year are interested in showcasing. We build domes and we bring a floor structure, so that our camp is sitting out of the mud in the same shape as the dome. So for those people that do the domes out there at Burning Man, everyone knows they’re usually decagon. So we have decagon floors that fit inside of them. And it kind of looks like a land-bound version of the International Space Station. Everything is interconnected on the inside. So once you’re in and have your shoes off and your coat off, you can kind of go anywhere in between the two domes.

For most of our campers who do not have access to four-season tents, the kind of tents that people like to use at Burning Man, that don’t have any of the openings or mesh, it’s all enclosed canvas, which is very helpful at Burning Man. They’re very heavy. They are hard to maneuver, difficult to store, and a pain in the butt to get dry after these events, but damn do they work. So, they’re expensive. A lot of our members can’t afford them. So what we do is we do communal sleeping, which really adds to that element of camaraderie. And so about half of our camp sleeps together in these like teepee style tents that we keep warm for them. And it’s all intrinsically connected with the geodesic domes.

kbot:

How many nights is the event if you’re all sleeping together in the same nest? I’m just curious.

Bexx:

FrostBurn officially is from, it’s a Thursday to Monday event ,every year over Presidents Day weekend. We never shift the date. That being said, because structures and art can experience challenges going up, because of the weather, some people do show up the weekend prior for pre-builds. That’s the Friday or Saturday prior. Some folks will set their stuff up and if they’re local to Pittsburg they might leave and go home if they trust their structures to stay standing in sustained winds with no one watching. I’m on the board so at that point I’m there for the rest of the week. And so my camp likes to go down the week…some of us go down the weekend before and set up and then actually just stay throughout the week and do placement and various other things to get the event ready.

Stuart:

And how many people are you expecting this year?

Bexx:

Our ticket sales have been up; more presales than ever before at this point, and we’re over 300 now.

Stuart:

Wow.

Bexx:

So about 300 crazy people every year. But they are the best kind of crazy people.

Stuart:

Did you say sleet earlier? So there’s more than just blizzards. What are some of the varieties of strange weather one might get around Presidents Day weekend in the mountains of West Virginia?

Bexx:

Yeah, I think a better name for our event might actually just be Weather Burn. We get all the weather. In a given weekend you might set up in 45 degrees and raining, and it creating 18 inches of mud that you have to slog your way through, only to completely freeze over and have it be a perfectly clear night that’s 17 degrees with a wide open sky, where you can just see forever. As people who are interested in acoustics like I am know that also means that sound carries very much when it is clear and cold and we’re all… Our camps are very close together because people do not want to walk nearly as far as they would during a summer Burn.

But yeah, we get it all. In 2017, it was strangely warm the entire time. Unexpectedly. A lot of people had already packed and had gotten there by the time we realized that it was going to be in the 60s all weekend, and sunny. That was the year that we had a hot air balloon show up, and barely anybody wore their FrostBurn clothes. Most people were running around in boots and underwear.

kbot:

Perfect. It sounds like Black Rock City 2023.

Stuart:

I’m still trying to understand the basics of survival here. What about porta-potties? Because I know you’re talking about things that freeze. I think if I had a pee bottle in my tent, that would be something that froze overnight, right?

Bexx:

Well, the good news about a small burn is that you’re never too far from a porto. And the other good news about it being very cold, is that shit freezes. And we all know that that is the worst part of Black Rock City: it is definitely not frozen, and shit stinks. So we have very beautifully maintained porta potties, and people are wonderful about putting the seat down because there is nothing worse than sitting down on a seat covered in snow. I will say, however, that at one point during most years, at least one porto does get knocked over in the winds. And that is sad.

kbot:

Does the blue liquid in the portos freeze, too? Or is it magically…?

Bexx:

It does not!

Stuart:

Yeah, what is that stuff anyway?

Bexx:

I’m not sure. I’m not an expert on that.

kbot:

Drop an answer in the comments if you know what that blue liquid happens to be, because we are curious.

So, safety must be of concern. I’ve been to a couple of winter events where people are enjoying themselves, and we had someone fall asleep in a car, and we had to go get them, and we had someone get lost, and we had to go find them. It’s fine when you’re in a forest in the middle of summer and someone wanders off, you assume they will wander back. But when it’s this cold, you have to have a buddy system, no? Like, people can’t just walk away.

Bexx:

Absolutely. Yeah. FrostBurners are smart people, generally speaking, um, radically self-reliant to the highest degree and generally speaking not being too risky. And so I’d say it is few and far between that we have any, if at all, incidents at FrostBurn. We have a medical team, we do have Rangers. We have the core teams that you would expect at any regional Burning Man event, to ensure the safety of our participants.

But, it is true. I mean, we do have rules that you cannot sleep in your car with the heat running. It is true that snow can back up in an exhaust, and cause carbon monoxide problems. So that is a number one rule.

We also do put out lots of PSAs that if you are going to be running a camping heater, or any sort of propane related heating apparatus in your personal tent, that you absolutely 100% must have a carbon monoxide fire detector combo in your tent with you at all times. That goes for your kitchen, that goes for your geodesic dome living room space, that goes for your tent. That is absolutely a concern.

Frostbite doesn’t really happen very much, at least not that I’ve heard of. More so it comes from like the mud, and like the years where it actually isn’t that cold. But for whatever reason, your boots get wet, and you’re walking around in those same boots for multiple days and it’s uncomfortable, but it’s not uncomfortable enough that you’re like aware that it’s bad for your toes. And so, in the past there may have been an incident or two of the sort like this, but you’d be surprised. There haven’t been very many issues, if at all. Like I mentioned.

Stuart:

And you have a medical team on board in case they do it, right? So…

Bexx:

We do. Yeah. Every once in a while someone is in an altered state of mind and goes for a walk, it’s a beautiful place, and ends up cold, or maybe falling asleep somewhere they shouldn’t. But the good news is that it is a small event and everybody’s got their eyes out for their neighbor, and nothing of a negative sort has ever occurred when something has happened.

Stuart:

If I were to go into a bar at FrostBurn is there any kind of signature cocktail associated with the event? I mean, like Pickle Backs are in Black Rock City or…? Don’t say Fireball.

Bexx:

No. I think every year someone tries to push Malört on me again. Why?

Stuart:

Oh, Malört. Is there anything more evil in this world passing for an alcoholic beverage? Yeah. Does it taste more like bandaids or more like pencil erasers to you?

Bexx:

Or like that blue stuff in the porta potty.

Stuart:

Which is not Blue Curacao, my friends, this is not a Blue Hawaii.

Bexx:

We were so blessed to have a camp come last year, they changed their theme from year to year, but last year we had Stumbleweed come. They were a Western themed camp. They’ll be back this year. Shout out to you guys. They had Negronis on tap, which were amazing. The word definitely got around about that.

But, I think every camp kind of has their own shtick, much like Burning Man. And they do change. We have some repeat camps that come back year after year and do the same thing as you’d come to expect. But a lot of people do like to switch it up, and so for that reason, I actually don’t think that there is a signature FrostBurn drink.

Stuart:

Fair enough. So, Bexx, I’m curious about you. How did you get involved in the Burning Man world in the first place?

Bexx:

I went to my first Burn in 2014, in July, and I ended up there because I was at a party and I was talking to somebody who was spinning fire at this party.  And was… had never seen that before and was so inquisitive about it. And we got to talking and they turned to me and they said, “You’re such a Burner and you don’t even know it.”

I was like, “I don’t know what that means, but I’m really excited to find out.” And they said, “You have to go to Transformus.” And I looked up everything I absolutely could about this event, and I realized that, oh, this is a Burning Man event. This is this thing that I saw on TV. There was this like HBO special or something that had came out about Black Rock City. And I was like, okay, I absolutely have to get there because years ago when I was a kid, I remember thinking like, “This is the coolest thing I’ve ever seen.”

So I went, I did not know that you could just go as an individual camper. I thought you had to be part of a theme camp. And so my first Burn I organized a two-person theme camp with my partner and I, that was called PHART Camp. And we went, and met friends who recruited us to FrostBurn. And I’d say the rest is history, except that I don’t think I would be as ingrained in the community if I hadn’t gone to graduate school and ended up writing my Master’s thesis about Burning Man.

Stuart:

Oh, wait, wait, wait. I gotta hear more about that.

Bexx:

If you’re interested in taking a look, it is on the Burning Man Academics page under my official name, Rebecca Rosenblum. Basically the study looked at Regional Burns, and what can we learn about this Burning Man thing by listening to what it sounds like as opposed to what it looks like? This is something that we all know as Burners that sound is such an integral part of your Burning Man experience.

It’s a signifier of where you are in Burning Man at times. It is a placeholder for the calendar for where you are in time. It is a marker of the time of day based on the sounds that you are hearing around you or not hearing around you, and can often tell you where you are. It can tell you about the value systems that are occurring around you, just by listening to the topics of conversation or the way in which people are talking to each other.

I was just fascinated by all of these completely different kinds of noises that I had never heard before, at my first event. And so when I went to graduate school and I learned, oh, you can kind of focus on anything, and I’m a musician, and so it seemed like the thing to focus on for me. And there hadn’t been at that time, very much study done about the acousticamology of festivals or Burning Man events. And so I researched what was going on at that time and built off of another two scholars’ studies, Stephen Moore and Scott Smallwood, and kind of went from there.

Stuart:

So let me get this straight. You’ve been to a number of Regional events. Have you been to the Black Rock City event?

Bexx:

I have. I was so, so lucky to be able to go the last two years. I played with the Black Rock Philharmonic out there, and stayed with a camp called Scrambles who are amazing—definitely a Scram fan at this point. And it was just, it’s just been the best, such a dream, to be able to go to the other side of the country to do that ,when previously all my experience had been on the East.

kbot:

Yeah I hear that the conductor of the Philharmonic goes to FrostBurn. Is that correct? Eric?

Bexx:

Oh, yeah, absolutely. Yeah. Red Hat and I are, ah, we go back.

Stuart:

What instrument do you play?

Bexx:

I play the cello in the Philharmonic, but I’m also a vocalist, percussionist; I do a variety of different things.

Stuart:

And Red Hat plays… is he the fire tuba?

Bexx:

Yes, that’s actually, we actually met because of my thesis. A picture of him ended up in my thesis as one of the sounds that you might encounter at a Burn. and that’s kind of how we hit it off.

Stuart:

Shout out to Tubatron, if you’re listening. See you’re not the only one. You’ve inspired a movement.

Bexx:

But yeah, we’re really excited. Everyone’s pretty much deep into their own personal planning loops, at this point, you know, checking their hoses to make sure that they’re working okay, that there aren’t any gas leaks going on;

trying to plan their meal plans, what are they going to be serving up? How can they do their infrastructure better this year; taking in all the considerations of everything you learned from last year?

So it’s a busy time for us, but tickets are still available. If people hear this and are interested in coming, I can’t — I’m biased, but I can’t recommend it enough.

kbot:

What are you excited about for this year?

Bexx:

My camp is going to be the largest it’s ever been. That’s presenting some unique challenges for us. We are one of those camps, that is, it is an internal camp. We don’t have that outdoor arrangement, typically. No fires, no fire pit. Because we’ve almost doubled in size, we have to add an additional geodesic dome, an additional internal tent, and just planning for all of that additional infrastructure and trying to ensure that we’re all comfortable. That 20-some people are comfortable hanging out inside these spaces and that all of these spaces are going to be safe and survive in that weather is a unique challenge that I thought might have been exhausting for me after the Burning Man that I just had, but in the last week or so has started to become a very exhilarating idea.

Given the ticket sales that we’ve seen so far, I think a lot of camps are experiencing that similar growth to what my own camp is experiencing, and so my excitement about seeing my own camp grow is intensified. Thinking about the possibilities that this is happening in all of the other camps as well, and getting to meet all of these new people who could potentially become lifelong friends, like the past ten years or so have already done for me.

kbot:

How do you build and burn an effigy in that weather?

Bexx:

One year it didn’t go. One year it didn’t… It wouldn’t catch fire. In 2015 year, it didn’t matter how much fuel you put into that thing, it would not go. So sometimes it does not happen. That isn’t atypical. There are a lot of Regional Burns where there have been fire bans that I’ve been to, and sometimes an effigy isn’t necessarily the thing that makes it special. But, in every other instance, an effigy has happened. The effigy changes from year to year. It’s usually in the theme of a snowman. Sometimes it is vertical and is very much like three stacked neat little spheres as you’d come to expect a little kid would make, but made out of wood instead of snow. Other years, they are very beautifully intricate, these gorgeous geometric patterns that, when they’re lit of flame, open up in three different tiers and then spin around.

And then three years ago, the effigy builders decided to make it look like a pig roasting over a spit. But it was a snowman with a pig nose, and it took somewhere between four and eight people to push it around so that it would actually be a rotisserie snowman over a giant bonfire. That one took quite a long time to burn, as you might imagine, getting that equal amount of beautiful char on every side. But it usually doesn’t explode in the way that Black Rock City has come to expect.

kbot:

So much fun.

Bexx:

There’s something about removing the spectacle, removing the ability for you to wander off on your own and stare at art all night, and not say a single word out loud like you can so easily do at Black Rock City. When the costumes are removed, and it’s really just putting on your favorite comfy pair of boots and the same damn pair of snow pants there’s no brain power going into ‘What do I wear? How do I get ready for the evening?’ There is no brain power put into like where do I need to go to ensure that I’m not going to miss it? And moreso, placed on what are all of the other Principles that get so much less focus at other events? And how does that affect the community that is blossoming there?

I think you just kind of have to experience that to know why we do this crazy thing that we do. But I will say that you have people that either love it or hate it. The people that love it will not miss it. They go back year after year. They really get it and they will try to push it on everybody else that they meet. There’s no end of FrostBurn stories. And to quote a friend, probably the one of the first friends I met at my first FrostBurn, “It is the stupidest thing you will ever do on purpose.”

Stuart:

That sounds like a dare.

kbot:

I bet it shapes your community though. I know we’re winding up, but I just have to ask: When you share an experience that is so focused on, as you say, the rest of the Principles, it must mean that the relationships that are built out of that experience are also unique and evolving in interesting ways.

Bexx:

For sure. I mean, when is the last time you sat down at a burn and talked to the same group of people for more than an hour?

Stuart:

I know the answer to that. 2023. I mean so many people reported out from Black Rock City 2023 that that was the best part about it, that they spent more time with their campmates, with their neighboring camps, just getting deeper in with the people around them.

Bexx:

If you liked that part of Burning Man, come to FrostBurn. You’ll come back every year.

Stuart:

But definitely don’t just wear socks. You’re going to need boots.

Bexx:

Definitely bring all the socks. That is probably the number one thing I will tell you. There are a number of cold weather tips that I would be happy to write up and provide for you all for anybody listening who’s interested in coming for their first time.

Stuart:

Okay, bring all the socks and sleep with your contacts in your bra. It’s a good start. So for those of you who are not scared away by the tales of weather woe, FrostBurn 2024 is happening over Presidents Day Weekend on Marvin’s Mountaintop in West Virginia. Tickets will be available right up until, I believe, up until the middle of February or so at FrostBurn.org.

Bexx:

And you can get them at Gate. We never sell out.

Stuart:

Go figure. That’s FrostBurn.org Our guest has been Bexx Rosenblum. Thank you, Bexx, for joining us now.

Bexx:

You’re so welcome Stuart and kbot. Thanks for having me. It’s been a pleasure.

Stuart:

Burning Man LIVE is a 100% nonprofit production of the Not for Profit Burning Man Project, brought to you as a gift from the Philosophical Center. You can download it or stream it for free from all the usual podcast places, now including the YouTubes as well as Apple, Spotify, Google, yada, yada, yada. Or for an even more decommodified experience, you can get it straight from the source at burningman.org/podcast, where you can also find all the show notes, transcripts, all that other good stuff.

And while you’re there, if you’re in the mood, slip over sideways to donate.burningman.org and put a little love into the kitty there to support the show and our other year round cultural work in the Burnerverse.

Thanks to everyone who made this episode possible. That would be kbot, Vav-Michael-Vav, Tyler Burger, and the whole podcast morning zoo crew. I’m your host, host from the most on the Baja coast, Stuart Mangrum.

Thanks Larry, and thanks to all of you.

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