Greetings MOOP maniacs and line sweepers extraordinaire! It’s the moment you’ve been waiting for all year. The 2013 DPW Playa Restoration All-Star team is proud to present the very first glimpse at this year’s Burning Man MOOP Map.
The MOOP Map is a graphical representation of what we discover as we comb the Burning Man site for Matter Out Of Place. Find out more about how it works here, or read on to see the first day’s MOOP score!
Spirits were high on Monday morning, as 90 eager Line Sweepers took their first steps into the city grid. The weather was warm, winds calm, playa smooth from a recent rainstorm. Stretching out across three city blocks from John Frum to Laissez Faire, the line marched forth to moop an impressive 76 city blocks in a single day.
The job of mooping every inch of Black Rock City may be a monotonous one, but it’s incredibly important. Burning Man is the world’s largest Leave No Trace event. If we don’t fulfill our agreement with the Bureau of Land Management and restore the desert surface to a relatively pristine state, we can lose our permit to gather here in the Black Rock Desert. The Resto All-Stars are the last line of defense, here to erase any remaining traces so our city can flourish again next year.
Want to support the Resto team? There’s one simple way to do it: Leave No Trace. Moop your camp, control your cigarette butts, don’t let wood chips hit the dust. The more you do to stop MOOP from happening, the more you ensure that Playa Restoration will be completed successfully, so Burning Man can happen next year.
As the day’s heat faded on the breeze, Restoration team leaders gathered at the Black Rock Saloon for the “MOOP Map coloring party” — a daily meeting to discuss the day’s findings, check the data and begin the process of documenting what we found, and how clean each block was when we arrived.
This tireless team starts each day with a 7:30 meeting, puts in a full workday on the desert, then continues filling in the MOOP map until dinner at 6. It’s a labor of love, and you would be surprised at the passion the Resto All-Stars muster for this, Black Rock City’s biggest community art project.
Without further ado, I am proud to share our findings with you. Here is the first look at the 2013 MOOP Map, a work in progress that will continue to evolve as we learn more about how well Burning Man 2013 fulfilled its mission to Leave No Trace. Click the image to see it bigger.
REMEMBER: This is a work in progress, not the final map. Obviously.
MOOP Map Legend:
GREEN: GO! GO! GO! The Line Sweep moves quickly because it’s clean. Minimal time and effort spent in this location.
YELLOW: Caution! The Line Sweep moves at a stop-and-go pace. Moderate time and effort spent in this location.
RED: Full stop. The Line Sweepers are on their hands and knees. A ton of MOOP. Extensive time and effort in this location.
Wondering what the black dots are? Those are the locations where we found larger items left behind on the playa last week: trash bags, abandoned tents, scaffolding, anything bigger than a bread box. All those items have been removed, but we do record their GPS points.
That’s all for today, sports fans! Tune in again for the next thrilling installment, as the Line Sweeps round the 10:00 corner and head toward their destiny: ESPLANADE. What MOOP awaits them, lurking in the dust just around the bend? Come back soon to find out.
See more photos from Playa Restoration 2013 on Flickr.
I’d love to create the 2013 HD moop maps as I have the past few years (overlaying the moop map with the high res satellite image) but I haven’t been able to track down a 2013 satellite image of the event site. Did this not happen this year?
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Fiver, I love those maps and sure hope a satellite image is out there somewhere.
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Is there anyway to submit photos of our camp from when we left. We took images of our camp after we spent an entire day on our hands and knees and there is a big black and red dot on our camp. It’s really embarrassing. We are looking for our pics now but missing something that big in a part of our camp we didn’t use. Sigh, this just ruined my day.
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Hey Travis, if your camp hasn’t been scored green/yellow/red yet, don’t sweat it. If you did that level of mooping, your score will probably reflect your efforts. The black spot is just one spot where anybody could have dropped a trash bag; the amount of MOOP on the ground is what will determine your score.
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Hey,
AMAZING all the work you guys do!! If there is a red dot, how can we find out what it was…especially if we know we did not leave any big items on our land…
THANKS!!
LOVE ALL YOU DO!
XX
Pele
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The Hun,
please be aware camp kimono on 3 and f left behind a couch and a coffee table. We wanted to take it with us but we were stacked to the gills with other moop that had been left behind. I think some how this should be documented for further years in the city as they did moop, but someone else came by and picked it up estentally covering their asses. I don’t know how this could be done. Maybe DPW doing rounds in the city and looking at camps who have left and taking notes? It sat there for a day and a half so I know they weren’t coming back.
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Thanks The Hun,
It was a lot of work Our biggest concern is that we did not have a magnet. I have been watching ever sense because we love our spot and hope to earn it again.
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HEY YA’LL: BIG THANKS FOR YOUR TIRELESS EFFORTS! IMPRESSIVE.
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Why oh why isn’t this high res placement map published BEFORE the event? Or is it and I just don’t know about it? I explored a lot but looking at this map shows me there were many camps I would’ve liked to swing by just to say Hi and ask them what their deal was. :P
I mean I know camps are published in list order in other places, but as a visual learner, this map is *SO MUCH MORE USEFUL*
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Also, thanks The Hun and all of the Resto crew. You’re my heroes!
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Love your work and your hearts. Thank you for all your efforts in keeping it real.
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Papatua, I was thinking exactly the same thing!! Who do we have to blow to get the 2014 map before the event?!?! :)
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Pele Bunny, if you are part of a theme camp, then Placement representatives will eventually have that info — but please be patient, we are still working hard out here and it will take a long time to get all the data together!
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Tattoogoddess of blood bath and beyond: NEAT. Love when that happens /sarcasm
I’m glad somebody came and picked it up. The deal is, if it is not left behind, we don’t record it (obviously) — but you can report that to the Placement team if you want to.
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Thanks everybody!!!
And about that hi res map: It comes out pretty dang close to when Burning Man starts. At that point, I’d guess the entire staff of BRC is running around like headless chickens, which is probably why the map doesn’t appear on the Internet.
That, plus things change constantly, so it is not even 100% accurate.
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We have the same issue as Travis. We mooped to the nth degree, and are proud of our 5 year green history. But I see a black dot on our plot’o land at 3:00 and Eslanade. Thank goodness we took pictures! I’m surprised that several of us have similar concerns that others left stuff on our plots.I hope it all comes out in the end. Thanks to the Playa Restoration Team for your amazing work! Huzzah!
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Way to go team. !
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How would one go about finding out what was left at/near their camp? When we left our camp site it was completely clear, but now I see a big black and red dot at/near where our camp was.
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Awesome job as always, restoration crew. This aspect of the event is highly unique and important.
One thing that struck me about the map is that it appears the vast majority of the city is taken up by placed camps. Is that correct? That’s neither good nor bad, in my opinion, just interesting and something I hadn’t noticed before.
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Status Red, read the previous comments for a bit more info on that.
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JV, that is certainly what it looks like, and the map is pretty accurate so your assessment is likely to be correct. I personally have about the same amount of information as you do on it :)
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LOVE. LOVE.LOVE uuu!!!
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Thank you so much guys!!! You are fully awesome and I am sending each and everyone of you a big hug!
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Great big thanks to the crew even if we all moop and make sure that nothing is left we really appreciate the work you guys are doing. Great big hug to all of you
Till next year lot of love… ;o)
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Speaking as someone who ran a busy theme camp for many years, the resto crew can generally tell if you left a mess versus if some douchecanoes dumped their trash on your spot on their way out. They know it happens every year, and can happen to the best of us. Keep your photos at the ready, but don’t lose any sleep over it yet.
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Thank you all so much for your incredible effort. :) I’m happy to see green where our camp was. We checked and double checked to make sure we were spotless. I did notice a red dot and know exactly what it was. We were ready to head out and went to say goodby to some neighbors. When we came back someone had left a bike on the road in front of my truck?? As we finished tidying up no one ever came back for it. I stopped some rangers that were passing by and they said people dump those all the time. Unfortunately I had no place to put it so I propped it against the street sign. :( This made me sad. BUT our area was green :)!
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I’m really happy and excited to read about so many people from camps putting in a lot of effort on their part to want to come up green and prove that they know what they are doing and show it! It makes walking around on Playa all day with a moop bucket and moop stick, staring at the ground in front of you for hours trying to discern if a small piece of TP is hiding under that small pile of dust or potentially finding a 15ft pole of bamboo hidden under a dune, exciting. Yes, exciting, because the better you do your part, the harder it is for us to find moop which makes it harder for us to focus and not walk deliriously off into outer Playa. I fully accept that challenge and I’m proud to say that most of the dunes I have raked the hell out of, that are 2 feet high with the thought of possible things hidden underneath, come up fairly clean and most of the Resto map as you can see is green. After having so many people come out to this beautiful location, being able to see first hand the possibilities and change that a community can make and affect those that are around them, is a blessing and encouragement to what I do as a career in life. And let me tell you, cleaning up after people is not easy! Thank you for all your support, energy, and hard work to make Burning Man what it is/ will be, and for taking the conscious awareness to clean up after not just yourself but the ones that surround you as well!
Cheers, love and light,
Young Blood
DPW Recycling Crew
Playa Restoration Team
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Our camp was black-dotted on the Day 1/2013 map. I spoke with our camp clean up crew about this. Each one of them confirmed our real estate was spotless when the left Tuesday morning. Also, our early crew found moop (e.g a AA battery, etc.) half stuck in the playa the morning after arrival. Further, our neighbors were blackdotted in an area they barely used. So there are definitely some unknown moop sources occurring out there.
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Right on vertigo. We all know that people sometimes drop off their trash in other people’s camps (grrrrr). The black dots are big stuff like trash bags, so don’t worry about that coming back to haunt you.
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