We Leave No Trace

Welcome to the MOOP edition! 

It won’t be long now before we're all home and enjoying the comforts of Camp 9 which some folks started calling the “Cruise Ship” camp at the last burn for all the right reasons. For all who have been before and for those who will be staying here for the first time I wanted to share some pointers and reminders to make everyone’s life easier, especially after the couple of gap years of not being able to build Black Rock city. 

We are all very privileged to experience and live in the unique environment of the black rock playa, (For those who want to learn more about how special the playa is I added some info at the end of this page. It is our joint responsibility to preserve this incredible place and ensure we can return year after year by leaving no trace. 

Burning Man has the strictest inspection criteria set by the BLM of any event on federally managed lands and time after time we pass the inspection and can return. This only happens because of all of you taking care of our environment and making sure no trace of our presence is left behind.

To read about the 2019 restoration, see the high resolution MOOP map and learn the top 17 sources of MOOP, follow this link:

 MOOP Map 2019: Leaving No Trace – Our Great Disappearing City (In High Resolution) | Burning Man Journal. (Unfortunately, on the MOOP map we got one red spot on the OC9 camp which we think was from water being dumped on the playa when someone was leaving)

To prepare for arriving, the survival guide provides a lot of great info on LNT that can be found here. https://survival.burningman.org/leave-no-trace/

A good pointer when packing is to think about how easily the things you bring can turn into Matter Out Of Place.  Everything you bring has the potential to become MOOP and be left behind in the desert. The less you bring with you without spoiling your time in the desert the less can be left behind at the end of the burn.   Remove all the packaging you don’t need. Make sure you can anchor down anything you put up in the camp, so it doesn’t sail away in a dust storm. Remember to bring the right tools to extract all the tent stakes / rebar from the ground when leaving. A pair of mole grips works well for rebar, grip the rebar and use a lever against mole grip to work the rebar out. A claw hammer is usually good enough for tent stakes. Don’t forget to bring enough trash bags to take everything away with you at the end and leave no trace.

One big MOOP culprit is all the small stuff. Wood shavings, plastic splinters food crumbs, food wrappers, cigarette butts, tobacco etc. When building assembling or making it is always a good idea to do it over a tarp or mat so all the detritus can be swept up and bagged.  Take a MOOP bag with you when on playa for all your MOOP and thing else you find others have dropped. The earth guardians on esplanade have plenty of these to gift to you. For smokers a tin to put all the smoking MOOP in works well.

Another big source of MOOP is fluid leaks. This can be from vehicles or people. Please check your vehicles before leaving for leaks and make sure that you have containers to catch any drips or leaks of fuel, oil or water, grey water or black water when you are on the playa. Same goes for the bodily fluids. If you have generators make sure you have another container to put your fuel cans in that will catch all the fuel if the fuel container leaks. Water leaks onto the playa cause a problem as the dust will turn into a paste and leave an irregular surface.  When it dries this starts to allow dust dunes to start forming and becomes a definite trace of our being there. This all must be remediated before we leave so better not to let it happen in the first place. Don’t dump water from coolers straight onto the playa. If you are thinking of a swamp cooler for your tent make sure you have a tarp or container to catch any drips so nothing leaks onto the desert. 

GLITTER IS EVIL as it’s almost impossible to clean up and gets everywhere.  Feathers are SLIGHTLY less evil but once they get loose can take forever to catch. Everyone should look fabulous in their own unique and expressive way but give a thought to what will get left behind. 

What did the Romans ever do for us? 

We have recycling facilities at the camp where we will take any plastic bottles / water containers #1 to #7 inclusive, glass bottles, aluminum or aluminium cans. Cans and plastic bottles must be crushed to save space this reduces the number of trips required to move the recycling and reduces our carbon footprint.

There will be a MOOP station which has a set of recycling bins, a trash bin for MOOP from the Playa and all the tools needed to MOOP the camp. Please put all recycling in there. There are larger bags at the back of the kitchen please don’t use those as those on the MOOP shifts will sort the recycling before it goes in the larger bags for transport.

Ice bags this year are being recycled at the igloo stations and we will have a bag to collect those at the MOOP station or you can take your old bags back when you get new ice. 

To reduce the amount of water used for washing up everyone should use compostable plates and cutlery / silverware. The camp will dispose all of these with the food waste after each meal. One thing to look out for when buying these items is to buy compostable and not biodegradable. There are legal requirements for products to be compostable and not for biodegradable. Biodegradable products can still contain non compostable materials like raw plastic that breaks down into microplastics but then are still there for long periods of time which we don't want in our compost or to grow food with. They also take much longer to biodegrade and don't really have a limit on what other types of products are in the materials.

Everything else is up to you to pack in and pack out on your own. Any bar snacks, open drinks that you gifted that are not consumed at the end of the burn please take them home with you.

What did we ever do for the Romans?

Camp Chore Shift sign up forms have been sent out; MOOP shifts are three times per day 1 morning shift at 10am and two afternoon shifts at 2pm and 4pm. We will do a quick orientation on Sunday at the mandatory camp meeting to point out the MOOP station and MOOP board. During the week someone on the MOOP team should be around for each shift to highlight important stuff for that shift to focus on at the start of each shift. There will also be a daily MOOP message on the MOOP board with the same important information for each shift because Playa time. That’s all folks for now. 

See you all in the dust,

Jez Greenwood

Camp 9 MOOP Manager

Learn More About The Black Rock Playa

For those of you who are interested in learning more about this magical place, its formation and the ecosystem the Friends of Black Rock – High Rock website is a great site to browse through. Home - Friends of Black Rock High Rock (blackrockdesert.org). The following information is taken from there and a few other sources.

The Black Rock Desert-High Rock Canyon Emigrant Trails National Conservation Area Act of 2000 gave special designation to 1.2 million acres of public lands managed by the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) in northwestern Nevada often referred to as Black Rock Country. The Act designated 799,000 acres as a National Conservation Area (NCA) and 752,000 acres as 10 wilderness areas and is the largest NCA in the 48 contiguous states.

Nevada is part of what geologists call the Basin and Range Province, which extends from northern Mexico to southern Oregon and Idaho.  Dominated by long, arid valleys separated by north-south mountain ranges, this rugged area is formed by uplifted and downfallen blocks of the Earth’s crust with faults lying along both sides of the valleys.

With 314 mountain ranges, Nevada is the most mountainous state in the United States. Five of these ranges are to be found in Black Rock-High Rock Country; many others are within sight. The stresses on the crust across the entire area between the Sierra Nevada and the Wasatch Range in Utah. This whole area is being stretched thin from east to west. This stretching broke the crust into fault blocks which tilted and slipped to form a series of basins and ranges. Sediments eroded from the top of the ranges have fi­lled the basins below. The NCA is part of this Basin and Range region. These faults have been conduits for relatively recent volcanic activity within the NCA. In addition, hot mantle rocks close to the surface heat groundwater which gives the region its many hot springs.

Lake Lahontan once fi­lled the Black Rock Desert and most of the basins of northwest Nevada. The horizontal terraces that you can see on the lower slopes of the mountains surrounding the Playa are the old shorelines of this ancient lake. This huge lake was deepest during the last Ice Age around 14,000 years ago. The highest shoreline is 514 feet above the current playa surface. With no outlet, Lake Lahontan slowly dried up when the climate no longer provided it with enough water to maintain the lake.

Today, the white playa silt hides the ancient gravel surface of the Lahontan lakebed. The playa surface covers over 100,000 acres and the playa sediments are over 10,000 feet deep at the thickest point.

Desert playas are dynamic, harsh ecological systems that are exposed to lengthy aridity, strong winds, and occasional inundation by salty, turbid, alkaline water during periods of high precipitation

.

The intermittent Quinn River floods the East Arm of the playa seasonally with a small amount of water and fi­ne sediments. In the dry season, the water simply evaporates into the atmosphere again. The evaporation leaves behind dissolved mineral salts, making the playa surface unsuitable for most plants. As the playa dries, cracks form on the surface because the playa is composed of ­fine silt and clay minerals. When they are waterlogged, clay minerals expand, and when they dry out, they contract to form the familiar cracked pattern seen on the lakebed.

Lake Lahontan deposited these ­fine sediments slowly and evenly on the floor of the lake, creating the extremely flat surface that you see today. The coarser eroded materials were deposited quickly in the alluvial fans close to the mountains from which they eroded.

The dunes and hummocks that surround the barren Black Rock Desert playa are habitat for kit foxes, antelope, ground squirrels, kangaroo rats, horned lizards, badgers, and rattlesnakes.

If you visit the area when the playa is flooded, you may be able to find fairy shrimp or tadpole shrimp in the flood water. When the playa is flooded, dormant eggs hatch, and these invertebrates grow rapidly to over three inches in length, mate, and then die as the playa dries. Their eggs live in the surface layer of the playa waiting for the next flooding.

The potential impact of human activity on the playa is of concern to agencies charged with management of this resource. Since 2006, for example, playa lakes have been smaller every year. Studies began in 2006 to assess physical processes operating on the playa surface, and to identify aquatic life, in hopes of gaining insights into how both are affected by camping and vehicle travel.