Three men over 50 died at Burning Man this year, tripling the average number of deaths in connection with the annual festival that brings tens of thousands of people to build a temporary utopian community in the brutal conditions of the Nevada desert.
The increase in fatalities comes as news reports have highlighted that the average age of Burning Man attendees is increasing, with fewer participants in their 20s, and more in their 40s and 50s.
“Although we average one death a year at the festival, we have had two so far this year within the confines of the festival and I have received information regarding a third who died in transit to a hospital in Reno,” the Pershing county sheriff, Jerry Allen, told the Reno Gazette-Journal.
The festival, which has attracted upwards of 70,000 people in recent years, ended on 7 September. Founded in San Francisco in 1986 as a genuinely countercultural event, in which local artists built effigies and then set them on fire, Burning Man has increasingly become a jet-setting destination for the global tech elite.
Data from the annual Black Rock City census found that the estimated number of Burning Man participants in their 20s dropped from about 30% of total attendees in 2014, to only 10% in 2025, while the percentage of attendees in their 40s and 50s rose.
The first person who died this year was a man in his “mid-50s”, the second was 51, and third was 60, according to the Washoe county medical examiner’s office and the San Francisco Chronicle.
“We are saddened to have learned that a Burning Man participant who experienced a serious medical emergency in Black Rock City during the early hours of Friday September 4 and immediately received on-site lifesaving measures later passed away after being transported to Reno for medical care,” a spokesperson for the Burning Man organization said on Tuesday.
Local authorities confirmed that there were no signs of foul play with the three deaths, two of which occurred directly at the festival held in the Black Rock playa, an arid stretch of federally managed land about 120 miles from Reno.
Last year, a 37-year old man was found dead in a pool of blood on the final day of the festival, in what authorities said they were investigating as a homicide. The case, which was the festival’s first known homicide in nearly four decades, remains unsolved, the Reno Gazette-Journal reported.
The Pershing county sheriff’s office said this year’s first death was reported in the early evening of 3 September, at Rampart, the temporary hospital in the festival’s Black Rock City. A man had been found on the street within the festival and had been given CPR for several minutes before a doctor pronounced him deceased, the sheriff’s office said.
The second death occurred in an ambulance in the early hours of 4 September, as a 51-year-old man was being transported away from Burning Man to receive more serious medical care, according to the Washoe County regional medical examiner’s office.
The third death was reported in the afternoon of 5 September, when a man was reported to have been found deceased in his trailer he was sharing with his significant other, according to the Pershing county sheriff’s office.
More information on the deaths will be available in approximately six to eight weeks, after autopsies and toxicology reports are completed, the Pershing county sheriff’s office said in a statement.
