Contents

• Event Basics ❓ What is PDF? ❓ Where is PDF? ❓ When is PDF? ❓
• Your Responsibilities ✅ Participate ✅ Self-Reliance ✅ What to Bring ✅ What NOT to Bring ✅ Consent ✅ Fire Safety ✅
• Burner Culture 🔥 The Ten Principles 🔥 The 11th Principle: Consent 🔥 Leave No Trace 🔥
• The Event ◽Entry Requirements ◽ Amenities ◽ Firewood ◽ The Gift Economy ◽ Vending ◽ Re-Entry Passes ◽ Ice Sales ◽ Gray Water ◽ Rangers & Sanctuary ◽ Off-Limit Areas ◽ Onsite Vehicles ◽ Sound Policy ◽ Nudity ◽ Pet Policy
• Safety Warnings ❗❗❗

Where is PdF?

PS 40.777480°, -76.022822°
Coal Creek Ranch, Tamaqua, PA

When is PdF?

2024 Event Dates: Thursday, May 23 – Monday, May 27

Anticipated 2025 Event Dates: Thursday, May 22 – Monday, May 26

2024 Gate Hours

• Thursday: 5 pm – midnight
• Friday: 9 am – midnight
• Saturday: 9 am – 6pm (Note: Gate closing 2 hours earlier this year)
• Sunday: Closed- Exit ONLY
• Monday: GO HOME!!!
  All Attendees MUST be off site by Noon!

Participate

You are responsible for participating. There are no spectators at PdF. You can participate in many ways, including by volunteering and jumping in, interacting, and sharing your art. Playa del Fuego is ENTIRELY run by volunteers. You are strongly encouraged to pick up some volunteer shifts during the event. Anyone can volunteer, even first-timers. By volunteering, you are helping the event run smoothly and you get to interact with many new and wonderful participants.

Self-Reliance

You are responsible for your basic needs (food, water, shelter), your safety, and your wellbeing the entire time of your stay at PdF. We call this Radical Self Reliance.

Be Prepared: Create a food plan. There are no food vendors. There is no drinkable/potable water available onsite. There are no kitchens. There are no electrical outlets. Come with a plan on how you will feed yourself, how you will stay hydrated, and how you will deal with food and water waste.

Be Prepared: Pack for the weather. This locale averages a high of 75 °F and a low of 53 °F. HOWEVER, there have been extremes ranging from 94 °F down to 38 °F recorded. Pay attention to the weather and pack for it.

Be Prepared: Create a trash plan. You are responsible for your trash at all times. There are no dumpsters, there are no trash cans.

Be Prepared: Create a gray water plan and a leave no trace plan.

Consent

You are responsible for getting express enthusiastic consent before entering a camp, going in for a hug, touching a person or their things, taking a person’s picture, or having sexual relations. (see 11th Principle Consent, below)

Fire Safety

It is your responsibility to Burn All the Things safely! Tent fires and fuel fires are a real threat. The complete Fire & Generator Policy is available on the website, and includes information for large scale burning art and flame effects, At a minimum, every burner should be aware of the following safety rules:

• All Fire Pits / Campfires / Burn Barrels must be 6 inches off the ground to prevent burn scars (burn scars are a trace!)
• All Fires and Generators must have (minimum) a 5 lb. ABC Fire extinguisher and 5 gallons of water on hand
• There should be a 15 ft minimum clearance from any tents
• No fire source should be under any canopy or structure
• No Fire Spinning without a safety
• No Fire Spinning within near combustibles
• Any fuels (including generator fuel) must be kept at a minimum of 15 ft from any fire source
• Generators must properly baffled for sound

The Ten Principles

Burning Man co-founder Larry Harvey wrote the Ten Principles in 2004 as guidelines for the newly-formed Regional Network. They were crafted not as a dictate of how people should be and act, but as a reflection of the community’s ethos and culture as it had organically developed since the event’s inception. PdF operates according to these principles:

Radical Inclusion – Anyone may be a part of Burning Man. We welcome and respect the stranger. No prerequisites exist for participation in our community.

Gifting – Burning Man is devoted to acts of gift giving. The value of a gift is unconditional. Gifting does not contemplate a return or an exchange for something of equal value.

Decommodification – In order to preserve the spirit of gifting, our community seeks to create social environments that are unmediated by commercial sponsorships, transactions, or advertising. We stand ready to protect our culture from such exploitation. We resist the substitution of consumption for participatory experience.

Radical Self-reliance – Burning Man encourages the individual to discover, exercise, and rely on his or her inner resources.

Radical Self-expression – Radical self-expression arises from the unique gifts of the individual. No one other than the individual or a collaborating group can determine its content. It is offered as a gift to others. In this spirit, the giver should respect the rights and liberties of the recipient.

Communal Effort – Our community values creative cooperation and collaboration. We strive to produce, promote, and protect social networks, public spaces, works of art, and methods of communication that support such interaction.

Civic Responsibility – We value civil society. Community members who organize events should assume responsibility for public welfare and endeavor to communicate civic responsibilities to participants. They must also assume responsibility for conducting events in accordance with local, state, and federal laws.

Leaving No Trace – Our community respects the environment. We are committed to\ leaving no physical trace of our activities wherever we gather. We clean up after ourselves and endeavor, whenever possible, to leave such places in a better state than when we found them.

Participation – Our community is committed to a radically participatory ethic. We believe that transformative change, whether in the individual or in society, can occur only through the medium of deeply personal participation. We achieve being through doing. Everyone is invited to work. Everyone is invited to play. We make the world real through actions that open the heart.

Immediacy – Immediate experience is, in many ways, the most important touchstone of value in our culture. We seek to overcome barriers that stand between us and a recognition of our inner selves, the reality of those around us, participation in society, and contact with a natural world exceeding human powers. No idea can substitute for this experience.

from the burningman.org website

The 11th Principle: Consent

What do we mean by consent? Consent is an affirmative, unambiguous, and conscious decision by each participant to engage in a mutually agreed-upon activity. The consent has to be ongoing throughout any encounter, and enthusiastic consent is best! While consent is generally spoken about in terms of sexual activity, it extends beyond this at PDF – we apply the same guidelines to taking pictures of others, hugging, entering a camp’s private space, &c.

Easy Consent Guide:

• NO means NO.
• NO means NO the first time, every time, and completely.
• No cajoling, no “c’mon please”, no emotional blackmail. NO means NO!
• On the other hand: YES means YES. Enthusiastic YES is best!
• SILENCE = NO. MAYBE = NO. NOT YET = NO.
• Only YES = YES.
• Consent IS binary! Consent can be revoked at any time, even if you have touched that person in that same way before. Consent can be revoked after saying YES. You do not have the right to touch anyone without an enthusiastic YES! This goes for hugs, handshakes, sexual activity, and shiny costumes!

Please note: the cultural norm at a burn is to HUG hello, not shake hands. Please ask for consent before going in for the hug; if you don’t want a hug – speak up!

Leave No Trace

Practicing a Leave No Trace Ethic is simple: leave the place you visit the same or better than you found it; leave no trace of your having been there.

No Public Trash Cans, No Dumpsters, Pack It In – Pack It Out!

Playa del Fuego practices Pack-it-In / Pack-it-Out. What you bring with you, you take home with you. There are no public trash cans at this event. There are no dumpsters.

At all times, at all places on the site, you are responsible for the trash you create. Don’t ask someone if they have a trash can. They don’t.

NO dumpsters are provided at the end of the event: please create a plan to take your garbage with you when you leave.

Leave No Trace Tips:

• Bring cans instead of bottles! Beer and soda cans can be squashed down for a smaller trash pack out, and can be recycled at Green Your Burn Friday/Saturday/Sunday 11am-noon and 5-6pm.
• Pack an empty 5 gal bucket to bring in, make all your trash fit in it by discarding as much packaging as possible beforehand, and compacting cans etc, so on the way out, and you are covered!
• Plan Ahead and Prepare. If you are bringing an EZ Up type structure, have a plan for it becoming a mangled mess (consider bolt cutters). Plan room in your car for trash to go home.
• Reduce Packaging before you arrive. This is the key, really. Don’t bring the trash in the first place.
• Rethink Your Food Portions, you’ll probably need less than you think
• MOOP Sweeps of your camp all weekend long, and a final MOOP sweep before you go.
• Do Not Use the Playa as Your Toilet aka no shitting in open camping and no shitting in Whiskey and Whores! Porta Potties are provided for shitting! Porta Potties are NOT trash cans; take your beer cans with you!
• Add a ziplock type bag to your pocket or bag to collect trash you see as wander
• Be Aware of Very Small Items No Trace really does mean NO trace. Be conscious of spare nails or smaller trash particles like cigarette butts and peanut shells.
• Do Not Pour Leftover fuel or genny gas on the Playa (duh)
• Minimize Fire Impacts Avoid creating a burn scar by using a raised fire pit, or use fire shields to protect the ground.
• Bring Contractor Bags Collect your trash and save your car from mud and wet tents!
• If you have uncrushable bottles, you can stuff a crazy amount of other smaller trash inside them, minimizing the volume of trash you will need to haul out.
• Pockets, Bags, and Carabiners are Great! When you visit a camp, take your trash with you

Entry Requirements

Every adult (18+) who enters the event must have a ticket assigned to them via tickets.playadelfuego.org and a valid ID. Minors do not need ID, but minors age 13-17 do need a ticket (see Tickets for Minors for full details).

Amenities a.k.a. porta-potties

NOTE: there are no showers, there is no onsite water.

There are no flushing toilets, but plenty of porta-potties.

IF IT DOES NOT COME FROM THE BODY, DO NOT PUT IT IN THE POTTY!

Single-ply TP is the only exception.

No beer cans, no tampons, no baby wipes! These things clog the hose used to clean them.

Bring small zip-lock bags for your wipes, pads, or tampons, and take it out with you!

Did we mention NO BEER CANS?

Take your MOOPy mess back to your own camp to dispose of.

Firewood

Firewood is included in your ticket price, and you are welcome to have a fire in your camp in a fire pit or burn barrel*. The fire pit/barrel must be elevated so you do not leave a burn scar on the ground. This is part of Leave No Trace. Also, you must have water or fire extinguisher on hand for safety. All fires must be attended to at all times. No exceptions.

NOTE: It is illegal to carry firewood across state lines due to the emerald ash borer quarantine. Please do not bring firewood to PDF and please do not take it home unless you live in Pennsylvania.

UN-USED FIREWOOD MUST BE RETURNED TO THE MAIN PILE.

On Monday’s pack-out, all unused firewood must be returned to the main pile. This is a Leave No Trace event! Extra firewood not in the main pile is MOOP. Put it where it belongs! Also, there is an ash dump
for hot ash in the large permanent fire pit in front of the red house BUT WE ENCOURAGE PARTICIPANTS TO PACK EVERYTHING OUT, so if possible pack out your ash.

*provided there is no open fire ban due to drought. Currently, there is no such ban in place, nor any expected.

The Gifting Economy

Gifting Economy is part of the 10 Principles and means that everything being offered by a camp is free.

Gifts can be anything from a hug or a helping hand, to some batteries for your air bed pump, or a theme camp bar giving away drinks. BRING A CUP to take from camp to camp with you – Camps DO NOT provide cups! (A plastic mug on a carabiner works great!)

Gifts are given without the expectation of anything in return. Bartering is discouraged!

A Gifting Economy does not mean all property is free property. Ask before you touch or take anything. If it doesn’t belong to you, it doesn’t belong to you! A pair of boots outside a tent is NOT a ground score! Please be respectful of people and their things. Consent includes touching or using other people’s stuff.

Vending

Vending of any kind is not allowed, with the exception of pre-authorized ice sales and reentry passes at Camp Re-Charge.

Vending includes the promotion of other events, products, or services.

Gifting does not equal bartering, nor are you entitled to anything.

It’s only a gift when offered freely; taking something because you want it is still theft at PDF. Ask permission before taking or touching anything or anyone.

Re-Entry Passes

As an experiment in temporary community, leaving during the event with plans to return is highly discouraged. Participants should plan to bring everything they need and plan to stay for the duration. Ins and outs not only disrupt the continuity of experience for the participant, but they also create significantly more work for the gate, greeting, and parking. Additionally, the landowners expressed preferences for PdF to minimize in/out traffic, if possible.

With all that in mind, re-entry passes will be available for purchase online at playadelfuego.org prior to the burn, and they will be available for purchase onsite from Jim at Camp Recharge. Jim has been the PdF purchasing coordinator for several burns and is able to process your credit/debit card payments using PdF’s Paypal account. Re-entry passes and wristbands will be required to re-enter the event once having left. Please be radically self-reliant and plan to not leave.

In the event of an emergency, Re-Entry Passes will be granted at no charge. See prices and sale times below.

Ice Sales

Ice will also be available for sale prior to the burn on the website. It is also available onsite via credit/debit card with Jim from Camp Recharge at certain times. There will be NO CASH SALES ONSITE.

2024 Pre-Sale Reentry Pass & Ice Sales

Where: peacock.firepony.org during or after Round 2 Ticket Sales for pick-up during the event

Price: (payment thru Paypal)

• Ice: $3 per 7lb bag
• Reentry Pass: $20 per car per reentry

Online Sales Close: Monday, May 20th

2023 Onsite Reentry Pass & Ice Sales

Where: Ice Truck

Price: (credit or debit only- NO CASH SALES)

• Ice: $3 per 7lb bag
• Reentry Pass: $20 per car per reentry

Onsite Ice Pickup Times:

• Friday 11am–noon & 5–6pm
• Saturday 11am–noon & 5–6pm
• Sunday 11am–noon & 5–6pm

Gray Water Policy

Please Note: The Tamaqua site has no water. You are responsible for bringing enough water for the duration of the event and for packing out the water you can’t disperse when you leave.

Water leaves a trace and should be used thoughtfully. Each participant should have a plan on how to disperse the water properly in place, and haul out what you can’t disperse.

What is Gray Water? Gray water is water that has been used for cooking, washing, dishwashing, or bathing and contains soap, detergent, food scraps, or food residue.

Why is it a problem? While gray water is a lot less harmful to the environment than wastewater from toilet facilities (which is called black water), gray water is still technically sewage and can run-off or leach through the soil to enter waterways and aquifers, resulting in algal blooms or other water quality issues. It is part of your responsibility to properly dispose of your gray water. Be kind to the environment – do not dump anything that would cause harm! Foodstuff and oil should never be disposed of on the ground.

A Gray Water Plan will make water management easy, and a good plan had two components: disperse and pack out.

• Disperse: In general, small amounts of “light” gray water such as shower water that used biodegradable soap can be sprinkled around on the ground so as not to make a puddle. For dishwater that used biodegradable soap, best practice is to use a fine strainer to remove fine food particulates and add a drop of bleach to sanitize before sprinkling about. By using biodegradable soaps for both yourself and your dishes means that the majority of your water waste will be dispersed.
• Pack out: All other gray water and greasy messes must be packed out. Packing in an empty 5-gallon bucket with lid is an easy way to have space to carry out any gray water that can’t be properly dispersed.

Rangers, First Aid & Sanctuary

PdF is truly a community and we are here to help you navigate your burn! Amazing volunteers step up and put in long hours to help you when you need it most!

RANGERS are not cops and they are not your mom, but they wear a lot of khaki! They are here to help you and are trained to resolve conflict via the FLAME method: Find Out, Listen, Analyze, Mediate, Explain. Burns can be intense, is your minor disagreement escalating? Is there a creeper bothering you? Neighbors having a domestic? Got a friend who’s super altered and out of control? RANGERS are your friend! Simply look for someone with a radio (they can call one) or if no one is around, just start calling loudly for a RANGER, and someone will get one for you.

FIRST AID is a self-serve Band Aid station with a few other good Samaritan supplies, available at the Participation Station, but please plan to bring your own kit. For urgent medical issues, Rangers and Sanctuary can page on-call medical personnel for assessment and referral to outside resources.

SANCTUARY is to help you with emotional issues. Not feeling well, but it’s not medical? Are you triggered? Anxious? Simply overwhelmed at all the stimuli and need a quiet space? SANCTUARY is here for you, gentle burner. You are safe here.

Off-Limit Areas

All permanent buildings (hunting lodge and garage) and any existing structures are completely off-limits to all participants.

Any area outside the event boundary, as marked by signs and patrolled by the landowners, is strictly off-limits. The surrounding land has tall cliffs and deep ravines that could be very dangerous. If you are caught trespassing on the land outside the event, you will be evicted.

Onsite Vehicles- RVs

PDF has space for a limited amount of RVs and camper vans in RV Town.

To get your RV placed in the RV area, fill out a placement request form.

2024 RV Onsite Parking Application deadline: Friday, April 26th CLOSED

All participant vehicles not pre-approved for onsite parking are parked in a lot outside of the event. Camping/sleeping in this lot is not permitted.

Note: To park with your placed theme camp, please include that request with your theme
camp application, not as a request to be in RV Town.

• Vehicles parked on-site must remain in place for the entire event! You may not leave and re-enter, even with a re-entry pass.
• An RV is not permanently placed until given the greenlight to do so by the parking coordinator. (Meaning, don’t set up ANYTHING until one of us personally says its ok)
• Early entry volunteers must adhere to these rules as well.
• All onsite vehicles must display their parking pass at all times.
• Space is LIMITED for RV Camping, We have to pack the RV’s in as tightly as possible and this means if you park permanently in a place not approved by the parking coordinator: WE CAN NOT GET THE MAX PEOPLE PARKED IN RV CAMPING!!!

Sound Policy

Tl;dr: 10am – midnight max 80db at 100 ft; Midnight – 10am max 70db at 50, no subwoofers

Amplified, projected, or otherwise man-made noise or music shall be permitted between the hours of 10 am and 12 am (midnight).

Beginning at 12:01 am, all subwoofers (any device capable of emitting sound below 100HZ) shall be turned off and the sound shall be no louder than 70db(A) at a distance of 50’ from the source of the sound, or at the Access Area boundary, if the boundary is closer than 50’ to the source.

Sound shall be no louder than 80db(A) at other times, when measured at 100’. with a national commercially accepted Sound Level Meter or SLM (Type S2A).

Nudity

Nudity is welcome at PDF! However, if you can be seen from a road, you should be properly attired for a public setting. Meaning there should be nothing about your attire that allows others to see parts of your body the law does not normally allow to be displayed in public.

Tl:dr If you can see the “outside world” make sure your “bits” are covered.

Pet Policy

Pets are not allowed at PdF. And, with all the potential noise, lights, and shenanigans, your pet probably doesn’t want to be there anyway.

Trained service animals are allowed. The only animals brought onsite should be service animals. This does not include emotional support animals.

Ticks

There are likely to be ticks in the area that carry Lyme and other tick-borne diseases.

Lyme disease is carried specifically by deer ticks, and the site is currently used by a hunting club and designed to attract deer.

All participants are encouraged to practice Radical Self Reliance and get educated on ticks and Lyme disease before arriving at the event.

Frequent tick checks and tick repellent are strongly suggested.