This year’s Burning Man festival is over and more than 18,000-20,000 Burners will be heading home via Reno-Tahoe International Airport over the course of about five days.
This is one of the busiest times of the year for this airport, which usually handles about 7,000 departing passengers a day, and it’s one of the dirtiest and dustiest as Burners leave the playa covered in a fine dust and packing out all their garbage.
To make sure all that playa dust doesn’t muck up the airport’s bagagge handling and security systems, the airport and the airlines require everyone to put everything in a plastic bags.
These photos come courtesy Reno-Tahoe International Airport. I asked for photos of the piles of garbage burners may be leaving behind, but so far they say those trash bins are “too yucky.”