Last week, an estimated 2,000 San Diegan’s made the trek to the Black Rock Desert in Nevada for the Burning Man art, music, and everything festival. The week-long event sold out of tickets for the first time this year at somewhere beyond 2010’s count of 51,454 attendees, reportedly due to limitations imposed by the Bureau of Land Management, who regulates the flat desert playa outside Gerlach, Nevada.

As part of the Circle of Regional Effigies installation, over twenty communities built monuments representing their cities. A team of about twenty volunteers built San Diego’s effigy, Quemaduras del Sol (“sunburn") – a twenty foot tall sun on a rotating pedestal which played sounds recorded at local beaches.

Read more about Quemaduras del Sol here.

I spent a few hours volunteering at the effigy last Wednesday with my buddy Ed. We drank lots of Pabst Blue Ribbon, met some Australians, and were fed beef jerky infused vodka by passersby. The following day, Quemaduras del Sol burnt to the ground along with the other effigies in what I was told was the largest non-forest controlled burn ever to be overseen by the BLM.

This is what it looked like.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nuHoMyXX-v0&feature=share