Black Rock City is not a city at all for 51 weeks of the year — it is an empty, cracked-mud lake bed, the Black Rock Desert, 170 km north of Reno in the sagebrush high country of Nevada. For one week at the end of August, it becomes the seventh-largest city in the state: 80,000 people arrive in RVs, buses and art cars; lay out a half-moon street grid; erect theme camps, giant wooden temples, mutant vehicles and a forty-foot effigy of a man; spend a week on "radical self-expression", gift economy, dust storms and all-night dancing; burn the Man and the Temple; and then disappear, leaving behind nothing at all. This is Burning Man.
There is nothing quite like it. The setting is part of the appeal — a vast flat playa ringed by distant mountains, blindingly white in the sun, blanketed at night by stars you can reach out and touch, punctuated by sudden dust devils and extraordinary sunrises. The experience is harsh: temperatures swing from 40 °C in the day to near freezing after midnight, dust gets into absolutely everything, and the desert will strip you of any illusion that you are in control. The event runs on radical self-reliance: you bring everything you need for the week — food, water (around 6 litres a day), shelter, costumes — and you leave with every scrap of trash ("leave no trace"). There is nothing to buy on the playa except ice and coffee. Everything else runs on gifting.
If you are not going to Burning Man, there is genuinely no reason to be in Black Rock City. Outside of the event, the playa is federal land administered by the BLM and used by land-speed racers (Richard Noble broke the sound barrier here in 1997), rocket hobbyists and the occasional wandering traveller. The closest town is tiny Gerlach, 11 km south.