Burning Man 2023 ends with fire and complete silence

As Burning Man’s sacred temple went down in flames Tuesday night signaling the end of this year’s tumultuous festival, a small crowd of diehard burners howled, sobbed and cheered.

“It’s been really amazing and an emotional roller coaster,” said Jamey Mossengren, a four-time Burner also know as the Unicycling Unicorn. “We had to embrace the suck.”

At the previous night’s burning of the Man, someone stole Mossengren’s unicycle, which was a tough blow, since he uses it for his job as a performer in Salt Lake City.

But Tuesday night he was focused on the temple, the Burning Man structure where each year participants place photographs, shrines and memorabilia of lost loves, deceased friends and family and anyone or anything else they would like to let go of.

All of the sadness of the madcap desert spectacle is concentrated in the temple, which this year resembled an upside-down desert rose with ornate floral and Eastern European patterns cut into the wood. By many accounts, it was the the most moving temple ever created, complete with private grieving chambers and a communal space at the center where people could support each other.

The temple burn was not well attended, as tens of thousands of Burners fled the festival early after unprecedented rains turned the desert into a mud pit. But the intimate crowd that remained to watch the destruction of the festival’s spiritual center was rewarded with a kind of catharsis that’s hard to describe in words.

Much of the hourlong event was observed in complete silence, with occasional whoosh sounds of drones flying over, or a fire snort from one of the surrounding art cars. People sobbed. People hugged. People yelled out, “I love you,” and said goodbye to another year of mayhem and togetherness and beauty in the desert.

As the last of the flaming wooden posts crashed to the ground, the crowd began to disperse across the trashed desertscape, taking slow steps back toward their actual lives.