Burning Man: A riotous festival for all abilities

RJ Hamster

2 years ago

Friday, September 2, 2022

In today’s newsletter, we ride into the desert with Burners of all abilities, retrace a lost expedition through the Northwest Passage, search for legendary islands… and paint creatures using light and time.

PHOTOGRAPHS BY MORGAN LIEBERMAN

This week, in the hot and dusty wilds of northern Nevada, the riotous Burning Man festival roars back into action following a pandemic hiatus. The artful celebration honors “radical inclusion,” but its harsh desert environment can be punishing for people. That won’t keep hundreds of “Burners” with physical disabilities (like Dani Moore, photographed above in a “mutant vehicle” designed to accommodate her wheelchair) from participating, thanks to the support of communities such as Mobility Camp, which helps mobility impaired (as well as able-bodied) people make the most of their time on the playa.

One Burning Man tradition photographer Morgan Lieberman documented was the nightly lamp-lighting ceremony (pictured below, a Mobility Camp member prepares for the event). “Seeing Mobility Campers partake in something that one would assume is only for the able-bodied was a perfect reminder that people with disabilities should be fully embraced. Radical inclusion is the reminder that we can all collectively exist and participate together, because our real strength is in numbers and when we look out for one another.”

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PHOTOGRAPH BY DAVID GRUBER

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PHOTO OF THE DAY

PHOTOGRAPH BY @RENAN_OZTURK

Retracing a historic expedition: 177 years ago, Sir John Franklin and his two British Royal Navy ships, the H.M.S. Erebus and the H.M.S. Terror, set sail with the goal of being the first to find a route through the Northwest Passage, a fabled seaway connecting the Atlantic and Pacific oceans. The expedition was never seen again after they set off from Greenland in July 1845.

Climber Mark Synnott and his team are attempting to recreate Franklin’s route through the icy waters of the Canadian Arctic Archipelago (above, their sailboat is trapped by ice, just as Franklin’s was), meeting with Inuit along the way who will share oral histories about what befell Franklin and his men, as well as first-person testimonies about life in a fast-melting Arctic.

WHAT HAPPENED TO FRANKLIN?

IN THE SPOTLIGHT

IMAGE COURTESY OF STOCKBYM/ALAMY

Finding Atlantis: Plato first wrote about the great island of Atlantis (an artist’s illustrated imagining, above) in his fourth-century B.C. dialogue, Critias. Later writers, including Sir Francis Bacon, William Blake, and American politician Ignatius Donnelly kept Atlantis in the public’s consciousness—but was it ever real? Many historians and archaeologists believe that a historical catastrophe—an earthquake, tsunami, or vast flood—may have inspired the story. It’s one of six mystery islands Nat Geo’s History Magazine explores in a new report.

LEGENDARY ISLES

IN A FEW WORDS

This one area, the first day we were in the field, it was just an overwhelming amount of fossils—fossils just falling out of the rock.

Chris Griffin, a paleontologist at Yale University

Follow Griffin as he helps unearth Africa’s oldest known dinosaur

LAST GLIMPSE

PHOTOGRAPH BY DARREN PEARSON

A beaming menagerie: Photographer Darren Pearson is a painter, but he doesn’t work with acrylics or oils. Instead, he paints with light and time. Using a multicolored flashlight he designed himself, he draws creatures (like the octopus above) into existence in front of his camera. By the time the shutter snaps shut—sometimes after only 30 seconds—a glowing figure appears on the frame.

MORE BRILLIANT BEASTS

Today’s newsletter was curated and edited by Jen Tse, Amy McKeever, Anne Kim-Dannibale, Heather Kim, Sydney Combs, Allie Yang, Janey Adams, and Alissa Swango. We’d love to hear from you at david.beard@natgeo.com. Thanks for reading!

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