If you’d like to say hi, see three X’s on red flying atop an RV, maybe you’ve found me.  Holler.

FLYING IN A SKYDIVING PLANE FUCKING RULES ! !! ! !! ! (but Im getting ahead of myself)

A brisk walk, (or as brisk as the noonward sun over the playa allows for race), brought us to Burning Sky where as luck would have it, a pull up tool was located

and before long, John was cinched, we made the roster

and climbed into the art car for the anxiety building 5 mile per hour scream to the black rock city spaceport.  The sound of the polymer wheels attached to the rear plywood door/loading ramp (which is always down) bumping all along the way particularly marks these rides in my memory.

Rigged up, safety briefed, the terrifying possibility of last year became this year’s trebuchet of excitement.  Standing still became less and less possible with the heart beating faster and faster and that slow numbing of the face that the anxiety tends to bring.  But then there is that moment of truth, the assembly of the flight group and that last look out onto the dusty runway, the last chance to chicken out, the guarantee of a big pussy tattoo across your shoulder blades.

pssh.  we’re in.  and there’s no turning back now.

It was a delight to mount the creaky ladder and see George in the cockpit of the plane.  Immediately I greeted him with, “George!  You are the person who scared the most shit out of me in 2009!!!”.

Hindsight being 20/20, this was a mistake to share in a plane full of sky divers…

The ignition of the turbo prop brought that oscillating vibration through the plane which has defined flying over BRC for me.  Its about this point where the total fear, panic and excitement just makes everything go numb.  Adrenaline is without question, the ultimate drug.  Why would you ever doubt Raoul Duke?

Few hundred meters down the playa, George pulls down and latches the canopy, gives as much throttle as the engine will allow and seconds later we are up with a cheer.

Knowing what to expect makes all the difference in the world.  There’s things, like, kissing a girl, not kissing the girl you should have kissed, firing a gun, driving 140mph on a California freeway, playing the first guitar chord out of the tube amp you just built, having your passport stamped, breaking a bone, you can only do these things for the first time once.  With experience, perspective changes and you can become slightly expert, if only in your own world.

With so much of the high speed panic out of the way, some little steps towards expert allowed for a breathe to enjoy the beauty up there, in slow motion.  And just about when Im realizing this, John jabs me on not freaking out and the jumper in front of me on the left there turns and ponders “What did George do that freaked you out so badly last year?”

Fuck me.  “The banking turn on the final, thats the most G’s Ive ever felt”

“You hear that George?  You gotta do a wingstand for this guy, he’s worried he wasnt going to get completely freaked out this year”.

Fuck me.

Now, by this point, the jump door is open, its fucking LOUD in that plane, all engine, all velocity, all the time with the ringing undercurrent of fear and survival.  Yet, over the din, there were two words critically communicated: Wing Stand.

Somewhere, ducky Josh, the other Misfit in the plane, has some video of what would come next, I sure dont have any pictures, sorry, too busy freaking the fuck out.  Because thats what happens when your pitch changes 90 degrees in one second and your face gets smooshed against the side window of the plane under the weight of your parachute and yer looking directly at the ground.  Yes, wingstand.  Thank you George.

There’s nothing that will quite compare to bumping along the air 12,000 feet above Black Rock City.  There isnt *anything* about this experience that isnt *entirely* unique.  It also only lasts for just a few moments.  The 18 minute steep climb, straight up is only met with a moments pause of level flight so the lucky can jump.  And then, as a passenger (who knows whats coming next) there’s that real moment of truth.  A moment to toy with extending on a time line where split seconds feel like minutes.

“Are all the jumpers out?”, the moment where I thought I knew what was coming next, but really had not half a fucking clue…

And there you go folks, the best photo I took of the flight.  Wingstand.  Full Freak out.  Tim Paige, Henri Huet, Larry Burrows and Eddie Adams all going up a notch ’cause I clearly can’t shoot shit under duress…

Around 3,000 feet I half got my shit together.  Eighteen minutes to jump altitude, two and a half minutes to wheels back on the playa.  George provided, once again, the ride of a lifetime.  Challenge now is topping it again…

Man’s gonna burn in (!!!) thirty days.

How many times can you watch someone pack a parachute before it gets old?  I dont really know, I’ll let you know when this shit gets old.  There’s just that thing about being around people overdosing on adrenaline that I dont think EVER gets old.

Be it bands coming off a stage, athletes leaving a field or near misses with real danger, manufactured or otherwsie, when you’ve got enough speed beaming out of you, if someone stands close enough, a spectator can catch some of that infectious goodness.

Its these times in life when it pays to be a scavenger, I’ll gladly scoop up them scraps, thank you.  We can’t all be raptors, all the time.

I had sprinted over to the Waldorf Mystoria looking for John in hopes of scoring a poker chip to fly only to find him walking down three o’clock trailing a parachute, fighting the occasional gust inflating the rig hanging off of both his shoulders.

Both hands flew off the handlebars into the air and my heart sank down to the pant cuff bunched up behind my knees.  Fuck.

You just jumped?

His eyes were crazed with that look you can only have after getting into a skydiving plane twenty five minutes ago.

Yeah, but Im going right back up again, here’s your chip.

Yes!!!  Some of my friends are impossibly righteous.  John is one of them.  It’s a short list but damn, is it a good one.

The morning was calm and balmy in the high eighties, we both knew there was a short window before the playa heated up bringing the venting wind and white that can make flying there terrifying/impossible.  No time was wasted getting a parachute flattened, rolled, cinched and stowed so we could both run back to burning sky and get our names on the next flight roster.

The layout of this year’s Mystical Mysfits camp was particularly amazing, but more on that later.  It did lend itself especially well for packing a parachute.  I suppose there is not a lot of irony to be discovered in the fact that the guy packing a parachute in there also designed the camp.  hmm.

The one interesting thing about someone packing a parachute, its not the most common thing for the average person to see.  Sometimes it can draw a small crowd but perhaps with the seasoned galactic freaks at burning man, it takes a little bit more to phase people…

So there’s that thing about burning man: radical self reliance.  Before the first time you go, someone tells you about radical self reliance and you wind up packing at least twice as much shit mostly filled with items not you nor anyone else will ever need.  By the third time you go, you usually get it down to packing twice as much stuff as you actually do need.  The fourth time you go you take exactly what you need and only go home with half a box of power bars, four gallons of water, a handful of batteries and the spare bicycle tube you didnt use or gift.

By the fifth time you go, you start getting creative with the radical part and develop that skill to truly impress some people with having some esoteric tool that someone desperately needs.  None of this explains why my neighbor this year had all his tig welding gear but it does lead to the fact that after you pack and unpack for ten years, there are still some things that you’d never ever think to bring in duplicate.

Often, with adrenaline overdose hands and the recent memory of free fall to the earth combined with the anticipation of doing it all over again in the immediate future you can go ahead and just rip the pull up cord in half trying to get your rig secured.  Or at least John can, at least once.  Well, good thing ten years of radical self reliance taught you to bring an extra pull up tool for all your rigging needs…

Which brings us to law number one of skydiving: its harder to keep your rig closed than it is to get it to open.

FUCK!

Ok, someone at burning sky is gonna have an extra, lets go.

So half packed, we walked to burning sky where in fact someone did have a pull up tool, John did get his chute packed, we did get on the roster, the plane did take off, there are the best pictures ever and you gotta wait for the second half of this story to see them.  psssh.

There is a man.  He burns in one hundred and sixty two days.

The Black Rock City Intergalactic Spaceport is located on the edge of town, and from the ground, makes for a staggering look back on the Thursday madness (yes, there’s a mountain range behind that wall of white, yes, we were about to get in a plane and fly through it):

Quickly meandering through the Black Rock Travel Agency,

we eventually found George, our pilot, right outside the coyote cafe.

Under normal circumstances, one might think twice about a shirtless pilot baking under the high desert, high noon purgatory, but out here there is an alternate translation which seems to filter just about everything.

Before walking out to the runway, we all rigged up, the FAA requires all passengers in a plane with an open door to wear a parachute.

All the observers were given a safety briefing by that guy in the mirrored glasses, thong and assless chaps.  Best safety briefing ever.  Awesome.

Walking up on this view, after lagging behind the group, the first wave of anxiety really managed to dig itself in deep.  That 175 yards is among the longest distances I can remember walking in a very very, very very long time.

Enter the Pac 750XL.  Designed for carrying really heavy cargo into runways on the side of mountains that have really high pitch approaches.  Its a supercharged turbo prop engine built for maximum torque, maximum payload and maximum terror.

Lets get down to the fear.  I hate flying.  Actually, I passionately hate flying.  When I climbed up the mediocre aluminum home depot ladder into this plane, it took just about all the strength I had to lift my leg up each step.  Neil Armstrong has nothing on me…  I was bonkers excited to challenge myself but nearly paralyzed with anxiety trying to get it in my head that I was actually doing this shit.

George would eventually strap me into that copilot’s seat which became the scene of the wildest emotional rollercoaster I have ever been on.  Eternally grateful that John had offered me the ticket, providing me with the experience of a lifetime.  Looking out the window at the talc fine playa dust coating intake valves and aerlons, eternally fearful that this would be the last thing I would ever do.  Somehow I got to the point where I figure that would be ok.  And it was in that moment that the engine turned over.

Now that was certainly a new sound.  A familiar sound for sure, but one that had never had any personal meaning to me at all.  Taking off in a tiny plane, for my first time: a vibrating, jarring, leap of faith.  Then the throttle leaned forward and I flashed: flight canceled yesterday.  Flight held a few times this morning.  All from white out wind.  Fuck, what am I doing.  Taxiing down the bouncy runway, more throttle, more anxiety.  That was a brand new sound.  That was a brand new vibration.  This sure as shit is a new level of anxiety.  A Pac750xl at full throttle with the side door open was terror redefined for me.  Maybe I could pull this lever, put my arm through that loop, jump on the shoulders of that guy, climb over the head of the next and use both feet to push into the abdomen of the jumper sitting in the door to propel myself out of the plane before we get to the end of the runway.

And then we were in the air.  Air so windy and turbulent, so pissed off man had devised a way to use it for lift that all it could do in return was push the plane up, down, left and right, all at the same time.  Mostly, I was horrified, but this instantly became the new standard for Awesome in my life.  A standard that already had the bar raised to a ridiculously high point.

As the horizon broadened, the dust got smaller and smaller and the pounding of my heart found a rhythm beating against the whine of an engine screaming RPM’s, there was something new, rather, something I had forgotten about years ago: freedom.

The flight plan we had that afternoon was pretty interesting, we did a steep cork screw climb to a few thousand feet and then a leveled out to 11,000 feet over the city, around 15,000 above sea level.  This is the first time I had ever been in a turbo prop, but Im under the distinct impression that not every plane could do the climb that we did, certainly not as fast at that pitch- that engine has brutish torque to climb.

I’ll never forget the moment I took this photo.  The localized turbulence up to this point was brutal but things calmed down enough for my shaking, sweaty, cold hands to hold my M calmly enough to my face to snap this picture, lower it and pause for what felt like a lifetime looking at the road we’ve all sat on for hours waiting to get in, the city we had built at the end of it, and really, truly appreciate how lucky I was to be up here, above it all checking out some shit that only a small handful of people get to see each year from this perspective.

After a forceful, full throttle climb to jump altitude, the engine pulled back, the plane leveled out and the jumpers began to stir inside the cabin.

It was an interesting feeling, watching my buddy get up to jump out of the plane that we were both in.  In many ways, he was the tiny piece of security I had in there and in a few seconds, Id be all alone to deal with the plane headed to the ground, but hell, how hard could that be?  The worst was behind us for sure…

In the midst of this thought I leaned over to snap this picture, unquestionably the most personally important single frame of film I have exposed in the last five years.  We have had more fun inside that pentagon than should ever be possible and here I was above it, for the express purpose of making this image, with the guy who had originally brought me out to this place years prior.  Critical amount of fun.

The poor guy in the foreground on the left, yeah, he cant hear out of his right ear anymore.  More on this later…

With a wave and a gust of wind, jumpers were out.  I was digging the new found cruising of that last thirty seven leveled out seconds so the sky divers could jump.  And then, over the roar of the propeller, the blast of the wind screaming through the cabin, George leaned over to yell at me:

“Are all the jumpers out?”

Are all the jumpers out.  Reflections from this echo still reappear in a dream every now and again.  Not knowing what the fuck I was about to get into, I foolishly replied, “yes”.

There were critical pieces of information I did not know before I got on that plane, critical pieces of information I thankfully did not know.

That plane has gotta go up and down as many times as possible on the fuel it has available to allow for the maximum amount of jump flights.  This means its flight times have to be as short as possible.  There are some moments in life when “as short as possible” means, well, kinda short, quick even.  Then there are other moments where it just means as short as fucking possible.  This was most certainly of the later variety.  I was scared shitless getting into the plane, terrified getting to altitude but I was just about to be reborn.  And reborn hard.

Yes, all the jumpers are out.

The pilot nodded, leaned forward and cranked the door down with the hand crank attached to the wire which ran along the pulley to the side door.

He had seen me freaking out the whole time, he gave me this look, smiled and then cautioned, “hold on”.  In that moment I remember looking at the blue sky out the side window and then instantly, and I mean *instantly* seeing the ground.  This happened concurrent with what felt like twice the normal gravity pushing me back into my seat.  All bets were off and now Im screaming like a girl and there is NO chance of any more photos ’cause Im just not nearly as hardcore as I would have liked to had thought.

There isnt much room in these planes, everyone has to sit legs spread, the parachute of the guy in front of you is resting on your chest the whole time.  Eighteen seconds into the descent, the guy I mentioned earlier, well, he had the unfortunate pleasure of winning the unlucky lottery and got my freak out conducted, at certain death volume, a packed parachute width from his right ear.  Clearly, something needed to happen:  He turns around as best as he can and relays the following information:

Hey!  Im a pilot!  Everything is cool!  This is totally normal.  We’ll be on the ground in a minute.  Just try to look out the window, focus on the horizon, everything will be fine!

Ok, right.  Totally.  Im being irrational.  Chill your meltdown, listen to this guy.  He’s a pilot.  Everything is normal.  Do as he says, just turn around, look at the horizon and everything is gonna be fine.  Yes, that’s excellent advice.  Turn around, look at the horizon, everything will be cool.

So I fight the gravity, lean forward so I can turn around, look out the front window of the plane and there it is.  Brown.  Earth.  The fantastic detail of the black rock desert screaming up closer and closer through the blur of the propeller out the front windshield.  No blue.  No sky.  It was in that moment that I put together that the pilot had put the plane in a full throttle nose dive to the ground.  The absolute last thing I think anyone wants to see, looking out the window of an airplane is NO SKY.  So there we were, in a nose dive losing 3,600 feet per minute

which ended in a thirty degree, probably-dont-need-to-ever-feel-this-amount-of negative-g-force, banking turn to line the plane up with the runway approaching the city.  The horizon should never cut through your frame at this angle when you are holding a camera parallel to your feet…

It took 18 minutes for us to climb at full throttle eleven thousand feet.  We lost that eleven thousand feet of elevation in THREE minutes.  Three minutes to the ground, we beat every single one of the sky divers back to the ground.  Eighteen minutes up, three minutes down.  Holy hell, best ride ever.  Ever.

Once on the ground safely, the adrenaline high lasted for close to 72 hours.  Ive done some exceptionally cool shit in my life and this experience was the most mind bending thing ever.  I suppose you can get into a skydiving plane just about anywhere and experience something similar, but flying over Burning Man, what a bunch of madness, neatly packaged, cautiously rationed, secretly gifted and rabidly received.  Im a lucky, lucky, lucky motherfucker.

I thought it was odd, on the way out to the plane that George didnt have that shirt on.  Had I seen what he chose to wear to work that day, I might not have made it onto the airstrip.

So that was 2009.  I walked away from that plane with my temporary passport and before I got back through the point of entry, I was plotting how to get back in the air again for 2010.

Little did I know then, walking away from one of the all time best experiences of my entire life, that the best was yet to come.

Thursday morning popped up and I met John over at Burning Sky to check the weather and see about our flight.  This comes after a morning of pacing around my camp, my neighbors camp, the camp across the street and the camp next to them, extolling my calmness while chewing my fingers down to the cuticle…  After they announced the second weather hold, we headed back to Mystical Misfits, I hadnt spent much time over there yet and was clearly missing out on some fun.

Backing up just a bit, John is, I suppose one could finally say, a dear old friend.  I met him on my first job in the movies plugging in lights when I was 20 or 21 and this guy is absolutely the reason I first attended Burning Man in 2006.  As my good fortune would have it, John is a sky diver and jumping at Burning Man is as much of the ritual for him as is going in the first place.  You can scroll back through my blog to find a bit more history on this fine character in my circus.  Last year I shot him packing up his chute after a jump.  This year, there was a different story to tell.

There are a few different ways to jump at Burning Man, I think that if you have a plane or can talk a pilot into getting you in the air, nobody is really going to stop you however most people jump through Burning Sky.  Its a fairly well organized camp and they charter a plane and pilot for a few days for the express purpose of skydiving at Burning Man.  I am not a skydiver, so have never gone through the process, but from what I understand, you buy jump tickets during the winter in packages of five.  I also think you need a significant number of jumps under your belt before they’ll sell you a ticket at all.  John was not planning to use all his tickets jumping and that’s where things would get Juicy Junior, real Juicy (in a black suited kind of way).  Burning Sky might not let you jump with no experience, but if you get a ticket from a jumper they will let you fly in an observer seat providing you land with the plane.  And thats where I was this morning, holding a poker chip that would finally get me on a plane to see this madness in the center of the ghost of Lake Lahontan from about 11,000 feet.

Back at Mystical Misfits, I got a good look of what the camp has grown into.  Now two flatbeds worth of scaffolding large, slowly hauled up from the bowels of LA County, they were a sight to see in 2009 and easily the biggest camp on the block.

The big addition to the camp this year was a swing.  Safest swing in Black Rock City.

There was much discussion that morning about truss welds, the joys of rigging, trust and ultimately, hope.

We killed about an hour enjoying the view, trying to find more coffee and eating some bar-b-que sausage creation before heading back to check on the weather.

The scene back at burning sky was exactly as we left it, a bunch of bored skydivers and two anxious people, rocking on their heels, looking at the sky, hoping to trade white for blue.  We had made the decision to get on the plane if there was a plane to get on, and twenty mintues after checking in, a walkie squawked and we lucked out with word that there was a clear enough opening to fly.  With that announcement, there was madness in the camp as everyone scrambled to get their rigs together and hop the ride that would drop us at the airport.

Next thing I know Ive been handed a parachute, walked the plank into the back of the burning sky art car and am trying to balance the adrenaline surge and quell the freak out of the summer.  After months of waiting, this was actually happening…

increased heart rate.  check.  sweaty palms.  check.  tunnelvision.  check.  and this was just the van…

The best part of the mad dash into this van so we could make it into the air before the weather changed was the breakneck five miles per hour speed which hurled us towards the airport.  There are few things that I know of that can stretch time quite like driving in a car really, really, really, really slow.  Just what the doctor ordered…

End of the road and a long walk back.  Welcome to Nevada’s own wretched hive of scum and villany.

The first time I went to Burning Man, I had the good fortune to magically and randomly camp next to some truly amazing people.  Every year that I return, its always a high priority of mine to reconnect with this small group of people I first met in 2006.  When I caught up with David

and Susan

they almost instantly asked if I had met their neighbor yet.  Yeah, check it out, she’s taking apart her car or something.  Huh?

at its core, burning man is an arts festival and from my view of things, this element is really lost on many people who have never attended.  There is always something really cool to see there but I guess as with anything, there is also a lot of shit to sort through in order to find it…  I approached Drake’s camp with some well earned black rock city skepticism, but as it turned out, this was definitely the coolest project I saw this year.

meet Drake Logan:

Drake had put her car on a U-haul trailer in San Francisco, pulled it over the Sierras and parked it on a tarp in Nevada for the sole purpose of disassembling the vehicle down to as many independent nuts, bolts and assorted metal and plastic pieces as possible.  All for the sake of loading every single part into the U-haul, bringing it back to the bay and assembling it into some kind of sculpture.  Instantly, I was captivated by such a seemingly maniacal prospect.

People talk a lot of shit about what they want to do with their art projects and if I had overheard this on a Sunday morning in early August at Ritual, I would have walked out onto Valencia laughing to myself and probably would have told jokes to my camp mates about some burner pipe dream I heard about at hipster central.

But when I first heard about this project, the car was more than half taken apart and the tables were entirely turned.  I was pretty awestruck at the gravity of what was going on.  Its hard enough getting yourself and what you need to burning man, this was really taking things to the next level.

When you work with, or hang around artists for any amount of time, it becomes easy enough to identify the arc of any creative process.  A lot of time is spent thinking about how or why some action is going to occur.  A lot of time is spent preparing for that action once it is determined what that action actually is.  And then, at some user defined point, that action is executed and for me, that’s always the most exciting time to be around or in the creative process.  The thinking, planning and finishing all have their own mood but the doing is where I can usually catch the crest of that wave of energy, get up on it and ride it to the heart of the matter.

And that’s exactly where Drake was when I walked into her camp: completely excited, bursting with wholly positive energy, beaming that “YES, Im DOING this” light and everyone that got near her felt it.

After shooting for a short while Drake asked me if I had an opinion on the best way to get the top of the engine block case off.  It was then I realized the absolute best part of this project: Drake’s not a mechanic.  Awesome.  It was enough to drag a car out there to take it apart, but to go through that without expert knowledge on how to do it?  Amazing.

During the time I was hanging around, lots of people passed through and most were asked if they knew about cars or had any advice on the logical order to proceed with the task at hand, whatever it was at the moment.  This really blew my mind and totally transformed this project into something way way way cooler than what it had initially appeared to be.

Another thing not often understood about the festival is that it is truly a “leave no trace” event.  Once youve gone out there you realize how misused that phrase is.  There is no trash disposal at burning man.  what you bring in, you bring out, down to every little bit of trash you generate.

Its one thing to camp under those circumstances, but to fully strip an automobile and collect every single piece of material?  Ever break auto glass into a million pieces?  Ever change the oil on your car in your driveway?  Ever think about how many pieces of things are in a car?  crazy.

You can view a trailer of the documentary video Julia Robertson has shot of Drake’s work.

Drake’s show runs today, 2 November through 26 December at the Float Center in Oakland CA.  The opening party is scheduled for this coming Saturday, 7 November at 6 pm.  If you are in the Bay Area, might be worth stopping in to see how this evolved.

Burning Man 2007 skydive

Since then Ive watched it too many times.  Today I popped it up again and quite randomly found the guy in purple hanging loose right as the plane got airborne oddly familiar.  Turns out that I was out on the playa that afternoon taking pictures of peeps for a coffee table book project Im working on and purple hang loose guy landed right in front of me.

Tom was from Rotterdam, if memory serves correct.  Im pretty sure he’s officially the first Dutch guy I had ever met at Burning Man.

As we chatted, pooh bear appointed David showed up in an art car and stopped to offer Tom a ride either back to his camp or possibly just around…

Before long, cruising in an art car got to be way cooler than standing in front of my summicron and they were both gone, just as fast as they showed up, one from the sky, one from the department of mutant vehicles, with just a few frames to document the moment.

A moment all but forgotten about until I started watching videos of people jumping out of planes.  Ive shot about 500 people on two continents for this project so far and this serves as the first time I have randomly recognized a stranger I shot out there in the ether.  Color me pleased with being able to offer everyone an epilogue to the youtube clip.

Life sized person.

Over his shoulder while he packed his ‘chute, one of the dancers from the camp next door climbed up on the three stories of scaffold to twirl through the air.  John had the good fortune to build his township of a camp right next door to a commune of dancers mostly from the North West.

Ive photographed a few sky divers right after they’ve landed but this was the first time I ever watched, with full attention, someone pack a parachute.  I’m still really amazed at how simple the mechanics of the pack are.  As John put it that afternoon, “you dont worry about the chute not opening, you worry about it staying closed”.  Good times were had that afternoon which was three years in the making.  This roll of film got blasted off in the first five or six minutes of that communion and while it must seem somewhat pedestrian overall, it was a bit of a milestone moment for me that might make a burner or two crack a smile.