City Guide
How Black Rock City is built, how to read its streets, and what all the names mean — so the map makes sense before you ever hit the playa.
Meshtastic — find your people off-grid
There's no cell service on the playa. Meshtastic is an open-source, off-grid radio network: inexpensive LoRa devices form a self-healing mesh that relays text messages and GPS positions for miles — no internet, no towers. BRC Map talks to your radio directly, so you can see your people live on the map and chat with them when nothing else works.
New for 2026: you must flash the Burning Mesh firmware. The event mesh changed its radio settings this year. Firmware from previous years will not connect, even if your radio worked last time. If you set up your radio using our old instructions, redo step 1 below.
What you need
- A Meshtastic radio — e.g. a SenseCAP T1000-E, Heltec LoRa32 V3, LILYGO T-Beam, or T-Deck. Models with onboard GPS put you on the map automatically.
- A USB data cable (charge-only cables won't work) and a computer running Chrome or Firefox, to flash the firmware.
- The official Meshtastic app for iOS or Android.
1. Flash the Burning Mesh 2026 firmware
Burning Mesh runs the citywide mesh at Burning Man, and ships its own firmware with the event's radio settings and a public Everyone channel already built in. Flashing it is what puts you on the same network as everyone else on playa.
- Connect the radio to your computer with a USB data cable.
- Open burn.meshtastic.org in Chrome or Firefox.
- Select your device and the current Burning Mesh 2.8.x firmware, then Flash.
- If the radio isn't detected, check the cable carries data, then put the radio into bootloader / DFU mode.
- Factory reset after flashing if you upgraded from an older version, installed a UF2 on an nRF52 device, or the radio hasn't been updated in about a year. This activates Burning Man mode and clears stale settings.
United States only. This firmware uses frequencies that are legal in the US and may not be legal elsewhere. Don't flash it — or power on a radio running it — outside the United States.
2. Connect and name your radio
- Open the Meshtastic app and connect to the radio over Bluetooth. On the T1000-E and most radios without a screen the default PIN is
123456. - Under Settings → LoRa, check the firmware set: region United States, preset Short Turbo, frequency slot 33. Don't change these — the firmware locks in the event's radio configuration, and altering the preset or frequency slot takes you off the mesh.
- Under Settings → User, set a long name and a short name (up to four characters) so people recognise you, and save.
- Confirm Everyone is channel 0 and leave it there. It's public — anyone at the event can read it — but it's also what carries the node info and keys that direct messages depend on. Remove it and you can't DM anyone.
3. Add the BRC Map channel
Connect the app to your radio first — a channel QR is written straight to the connected device, and with nothing connected Meshtastic answers “Connection failed. Not connected to any device.” Then scan our QR below to add BRC Map as channel 1, alongside Everyone. Choose Add, never Replace — Replace would wipe the Everyone channel your firmware just installed. Our code carries no radio settings, so it can't disturb what the firmware set.
4. Turn on position sharing
The firmware sends automatic position broadcasts to the lowest-numbered channel that has position sharing enabled. So leave it off for Everyone on channel 0 and turn it on for BRC Map on channel 1 — your dot then rides our channel and shows up on the map for everyone else who has it.
- On iOS, open the BRC Map channel and enable Allow Position Requests, then pick Precise or Approximate location. A green arrow marks the channel receiving automatic broadcasts.
- If your radio has no GPS of its own, let the phone supply it — on iOS enable Share Location (and Always Allow for background updates); on Android set Meshtastic's location permission to Allow all the time and enable Provide phone location to mesh.
- Anyone holding a channel's key can see the positions shared on it. Share channel links and QR codes only with people you trust.
5. Connect it to BRC Map
- Open the map, tap the Mesh button (bottom-left), and choose Connect via Bluetooth or USB.
- Radios show in the People list and — once they have a fix — as green dots on the map (you're amber). Type in Mesh chat to message the mesh. It all keeps working with no internet, and your people stay on the map even after you reload.
On an iPhone? Apple doesn't let web apps reach a radio over Bluetooth or USB, so pair your radio in the official Meshtastic app instead — BRC Map's radio connection is for Chrome/Edge on desktop and Android. And bring power: GPS + Bluetooth drain a radio fast over a week, so pack a battery bank or a small solar panel.
Burning Mesh runs the network, not us — their quick start and camp channels guide are the authority on firmware and radio settings, including video walkthroughs and how to set up a private channel for your camp. They also run a Discord.
Join the BRC Map mesh
Scan this to add the shared BRC Map channel to a radio already running the Burning Mesh firmware — or spin up a private channel just for your crew. Choose Add, not Replace. Everyone on the same channel shows up on each other's map.
Loading channel setup…
A city shaped like a clock
Black Rock City is laid out as a giant clock face on the open desert, a plan first drawn by Rod Garrett in 1999. The Man stands at the center. Radial avenues run outward like clock hands, named for clock positions — 2:00, 7:30, 9:45. Crossing them are concentric ring streets, lettered from the Esplanade out to K.
The city occupies roughly the 2:00 to 10:00 arc — about two-thirds of a circle — opening toward the deep playa. An address is simply where a time street meets a letter street: “7:30 & E” is where the 7:30 radial crosses E. That’s exactly how BRC Map turns an address into a pin.
The Man
Dead center of the city — the midpoint of the 6:00–12:00 axis. Every address is measured from here.
Center Camp
At 6:00, toward the entrance. The Café is the city’s social heart.
The Temple
On the 12:00 axis, north of the Man in the deep playa. Built to be burned on Sunday.
The Esplanade
The innermost ring street — the grand promenade facing the open playa.
The Trash Fence
A ~9-mile pentagon enclosing the whole event. Everything inside is Leave No Trace.
Deep Playa
The open desert past the Man toward 12:00, where the wandering art lives.
Rod's Ring Road
The road that circles Center Camp at 6:00 is Rod's Ring Road, named for Rod Garrett (1936–2011), Black Rock City's site architect. Garrett attended his first burn in 1995 and became the city's chief designer in 1997.
He's the hand behind almost everything the city's shape rests on: the radial clockwork plan, the Esplanade and the 2:00–10:00 arc, the great tensometric Center Camp Café canopy, and the Man bases from 2001 to 2011. The ring road around Center Camp carries his name.
Garrett died in August 2011; as the Man burned that year, a box holding his ashes sat beside it. The geometry you navigate today — and this map — is still his.
2026 streets
The letters stay the same year to year, but each year’s theme renames them. For 2026’s Axis Mundi — the cross-cultural idea of a “center of the world” — the ring streets carry these names. Addresses still use the letter; the map shows the name.
The Golden Spike
Every year the city is born from a single point. Weeks before the event, the Department of Public Works drives a “golden spike” into the empty playa in a ceremony where founders and crew take turns on the sledgehammer. It marks the exact center of the city — the spot directly beneath the Man’s feet — and serves as the survey origin for everything else.
From that one coordinate the survey crew lays ~80,000 points: the streets, the plazas, the fence. A point becomes a line to the Temple, then an arc, then the full clockwork.
BRC Map is built the same way: every address is computed from that single center point. The 2026 golden spike has been set, so the map is snapped to this year’s real survey.
Getting in: Gate Road
The only way to drive into Black Rock City is Gate Road. From Gerlach you head out Highway 447, fork onto County Road 34, and reach the “8-Mile” entrance that opens onto Gate Road. (The 3-Mile and 12-Mile playa entrances don’t lead to the event.)
Inbound you pass, in order: the Box Office / Will Call just outside the gate, then the Gate itself (tickets scanned, vehicle searched), then the Greeters a couple miles on, who hand you a printed city map, the Leave-No-Trace rundown, and — if you’re lucky — a hug. Gate Road delivers you toward the 6:00 / Center Camp side of the city.
L2K — the ring of light
L2K is short for “Lights 2000.” Invented by Tim Black and first lit in 1999, it’s a ~600-foot-diameter ring of about 2,000 computer-controlled LED pods buried in the playa encircling the Man — famously “the only computer network ever designed to be buried in the desert.”
The “2000” is the light count, not a year. On burn night the ring becomes sacred ground; participants can send pulses of light racing around it from across the circle. It’s returned almost every year since.
Beyond the playa
Three Burning Man Project properties near Gerlach get mixed up constantly. They’re different places:
The Ranch (Black Rock Station)
DPW baseThe year-round storage and production facility north of Gerlach — where the Man is built and the Department of Public Works is based. This is what burners usually mean by “the Ranch.”
The 360
makers ranchA separate ~360-acre, off-grid property at the desert’s edge — workshop and storage space for theme camps, art projects, and mutant vehicles.
2026 at a glance
- Theme
- Axis Mundi
- Event dates
- Aug 30 – Sep 7, 2026
- The Man burns
- Sat, Sep 5 (expected)
- The Temple burns
- Sun, Sep 6 (expected)
Burn nights are derived from the usual schedule (the Man on the Saturday before Labor Day) until Burning Man publishes the official daily lineup.