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Photo: Mike Q Victor, CC BY-SA 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons
Mathematical center of Black Rock City. First created in 1986 by Burning Man founder Larry Harvey, this is the central art piece and symbol of the Burning Man event: a 50-foot(15 meters)-tall anthropomorphic wooden statue with a triangle-shaped head, mounted on a pedestal or stand that changes with each year's theme. The Man is lit by neon at night, and due to its location can be seen from most of Black Rock City. Usually you can climb up onto the pedestal and get a good view of the rest of the City from there, but ask the Black Rock Rangers at the Man before climbing up. Despite its name, the Man is purposefully androgynous, or, rather, sexless.
Burning Man is a week-long large-scale desert event focused on "community, art, self-expression, and self-reliance" held annually in the Western United States. The event's name comes from its ceremony on the second to last night of the event: the symbolic burning of a large wooden effigy, built every year for the event and referred to as the Man, the Saturday evening before Labor Day. Since 1990, the event has been at Black Rock City in northwestern Nevada, a temporary city erected in the Black Rock Desert about 100 miles (160 km) north-northeast of Reno. According to Burning Man co-founder Larry Harvey in 2004, the event is guided by ten stated principles: radical inclusion, gifting, decommodification, radical self-reliance, radical self-expression, communal effort, civic responsibility, leaving no trace, participation, and immediacy.
© OpenStreetMap contributors
Somewhat past the Man on the main road from Center Camp. Since 2001, artist David Best has created monumental structures on the Playa in the form of 3- or 4-story temples. Although the design, name, and nominal purpose changes each year, the Temple is usually dedicated to lost friends and relatives. The Temple is a beautiful and meditative place to spend a few minutes during the day or night.