“Welcome to Lake Lahontan Ski Resort, an interactive art installation that brings Radical Inclusion to snow sports!”

Despite the obvious lack of snow in The Black Rock Desert there’s an ambitious dude who is attempting to bring skiing to Burning Man. Dylan H. aka Major Trouble is the founder of the BRC Snow Club which is a theme camp at Burning Man that hosts Après Ski parties for where you can grab a beverage and get into a snowball fight.

Dylan is looking to take the ski experience on The Playa to the next level by constructing a Lake Lahontan Ski Resort, a 14 foot tall, 62 foot long dry ski slope that breaks down into 4 segment and can be transported to the yearly gathering in northwestern Nevada.

The project to bring radically inclusive (w)interactivity to Burning Man 2023 is currently live on Kickstarter with a crowd funding goal of $35,000. Watch the video and check out the project HERE:

HERE’S THE PITCH:

Skiing, snowboarding, and sledding in the desert?!

Welcome to Lake Lahontan Ski Resort, an interactive art installation that brings Radical Inclusion to snow sports! Through Communal Effort and Participation, we invite all burners to enjoy our ski slope in Black Rock City this year!

What is BRC Snow Club?

On Playa, BRC Snow Club is a Burning Man theme camp that hosts daily Après Ski parties, provides a shady space to escape the sun, hosts snowball fights, and is a place to connect and make new friends, all while surrounded by snow-themed decor and interactivity. Off Playa, we are a community of over 1,100 burners and like-minded humans across the globe! Our members host events, share resources, provide community support, and of course ski and snowboard together!

What are we building?

Lake Lahontan Ski Resort – so named after the ancient lakebed upon which it sits – is a 14 foot tall, 62 foot long dry ski slope. Construction consists of a ring lock scaffold superstructure topped with reinforced plywood panels covered in an innovative dry ski material. It consists of four key segments:

The drop-in platform and upper ramp
The flat middle section with removable kicker and jib feature
The lower slope
And the flat runout and stopping zone.

In 2022, we took several samples of different dry ski mats to the burn, left them in the sun and dust, and encouraged visitors to play with them so we could better understand how they would hold up under the harsh conditions of the Playa. After carefully inspecting the samples, we decided on this particular surface: a plastic polymer with a typical lifespan of 7 years. Skiers can achieve about 80% of the speed of real snow while using standard equipment. The mats also produce a sound similar to that of icy snow, giving you auditory feedback to match! Most importantly, these dry ski mats DO NOT REQUIRE LUBRICATION, making them the perfect choice for our hill in the desert!

A close-up of the dry ski mats we’ll be using

What is our timeline?

Like all things Burning Man, we are on a tight schedule to place orders, finalize the design, build, and test the slope before transporting it to the burn. Our goal is to begin construction on the frame in early June, and have the entire slope completed and ready for testing by late July. That may sound like a good deal of time, but that realistically leaves us fewer than 10 working weekends to design and build the entire project!