Every summer at the end of August, thousands of people from around the world make their pilgrimage to Burning Man, the signal counterculture festival of our epoch. Some come for a spiritual awakening, some merely to party and indulge, others to gawk at the spectacle. What started as a small summer-solstice gathering on San Francisco’s Baker Beach in 1986 has been refashioned as a major event drawing more than 75,000 festival-goers to the Black Rock Desert, a remote plateau desert two hours north of Reno, Nevada.
