Greetings you wonderful freaks! Just getting to all of the lists from this awesome event and the site cleanup. I have not stopped since last Sunday. THANK YOU ALL SO MUCH! We are again deeply humbled by this communities outpouring of time, energy, and ART.
WOW.

Here's what's happened and what is happening.
Fire: The chief at CCFD decided to pull the plug at the last minute/11th hour and it screwed us and you out of fire performance for the weekend. They dont understand us and they are wary of us and we have some work to do on a local level. We are VERY sorry to the entire fire community for this. IT WILL NOT HAPPEN AGAIN. We believe that this is residual fallout from 'The War' with BLM that has now ended, but, that not all parties got the word that the armistice has been signed. Rest assured, that we WILL correct this for the '08 event. it is our second top priority actually after finding a new front gate manager to replace our wonderful Cindy who is in England.

Delamar Dry Lake: Yes, there is another playa up in Lincoln county and inside the Ely district offices of the BLM. AND there is no Lincoln County Fire Department to deal with so it looks like a great spot. I've personally been out on it and it truly is wonderful. Now here's the problems with this site. 1. It adds 3 hours to the So Cal peeps drive time (100 miles north of LV). 2. It is VERY remote and there are NO services of any kind for many miles in any direction. 3. We as an org and as a community are not IMHO ready for this site, yet. We need to work out communications for medical and emergency's. We need to get ice, power, fuel, and water delivered reliably to the site in bulk. And finally, we need more volunteers to actually work the event because the dozen or so key people that are producing Dark Skies right now cannot do this in such a remote setting. We need MORE PEOPLE. WE NEED YOU. Delamar is no panacea, and we will still be in cost recovery with the BLM on that site as well so our costs will actually go UP in moving to Delamar and that will add to the already increasing ticket prices that we/you will be experiencing in order to pay for cost recovery in the first place. So yea, Delamar Lake rocks, but IMHO we are not ready for it right now. And I will be consulting with our local BLM offices (who are actually helping us now) in this regards in detail in the coming weeks. The last thing we want to do is go out to Delamar and have something bad happen that we're not ready for and then the whole event gets yanked, when we could have stayed at Roach Lake for another year or two and refine this operation further and get more pro in doing this.
Consider for a moment that Burning Man has been at this for 15 years, we are in our third year.
We're going to lose Roach Lake to the new airport in a few years either way. My thoughts are that we should continue to hone our skills on Roach and then move up to Delamar for good. but my guts tell me that we're not ready for that level of responsibility, yet.

The bottom line is and has been that no one else except BM is doing this and that now that we are 'on the radar' with the BLM we have to do things a certain way. 100% by the book. We're learning, they are learning, and you are learning. Welcome to doing it. With your help and support we are on our way to becoming one of the premiere fire events in the world. We can do it, and we will do it. These are merely growing pains. Thank you for being patient and listening. And THANK YOU again for coming last weekend! In spite of the fire ban we still had an awesome event and everyone from the staff to all of the participants should be very VERY proud that we had no major incidents or citations issued. It just gets better.