Utah

Utah has a very active, diverse and established Burning Man community. We have annual summer and winter burns, quarterly meetings and ongoing community involvement. Many group members camp together on the playa as well as in Utah all throughout the year. We cross-pollinate with neighboring regions as well, such as Las Vegas, Colorado, Idaho, New Mexico, Arizona, San Francisco, Los Angeles and Chicago. 

Each July on a local Utah playa, burners gather to celebrate our unique burner culture here in Utah. Not everyone has the opportunity to attend Burning Man in Black Rock City, but with our regional burn event, Element 11, more and more people will have the opportunity to experience the Burning Man culture. We invite you to come out, get involved and build, create, play & connect with us!

What is Element 11?

1. The eleventh element on the periodic table, sodium. The sixth most abundant element on earth. An identifying characteristic of Utah, given the Bonneville Salt Flats and the Great Salt Lake.
2. A volunteer-based non-profit organization with the mission to ignite a culture of creativity & self-expression! We provide a canvas for our community to play, dance, evolve, create & ignite.
3. A sanctioned regional Burning Man festival dedicated to the Ten Principles and ethos of Burning Man. The Element 11 Arts Festival (UT Regional Burn) is held the second weekend of July each year.
4. A community of radically self-expressive artists, creators, innovators, do-ers, & participants who see art in all forms, in all ways, and in all people.

We interact with people from people from all over the state, from the Greater Salt Lake area along the Wasatch Front, as well as from our Southern Utah communities of St. George and Moab.

Our first burning man inspired campout was in 1998, and our first official Utah Regional Burn was in 2001 at the Sun Tunnels and attended by Ranger Danger himself.  We have grown considerably since then in creative presence, infrastructure and attendance. We sold out at 1,200 participants in 2013 and anticipate reaching that number again this year and in the future.  

Element 11 is held at Stargazer Ranch in Northwestern Utah in Mid-July and Decompression is held in the beginning of October. We host quarterly community town hall meetings with the Element 11 Board of Directors and our Regional Contacts and encourage our community to attend to understand what is going on in the community and how to get involved at whatever level they choose. We hold a Volunteer Activation event every year in April to kick off the festival season and to get volunteers signed up and involved with specific teams. Our Pre-compression event in May is targeted specifically for art projects where artists present their ideas and the community contributes their "art bucks" to jump-start project funding.

Utah is found all over the playa, with camps at 10 o’clock and all the way to 3 o’clock, some of them being: Cosmic Recess, Temple of Boom, Velvet Soulmine, the Black Rock Brewery, Bat Country, Jellycamp, and many others. We are also blessed with a huge mutant vehicle presence. Chatterbox, the Solar Saucer, Jellyfish, Scorpion (“Fluffy”), and The Polar Bear, are only a few of the amazing art cars that come home every year from Utah. Art from Utah is everywhere and in every theme camp from Utah in numbers too large to mention.

We are proud to have participated in the CORE Project in 2011, 2012, & 2013, as well as the the Caravansary Souk experience in 2014!