Burning Man year that the event was held in the middle of the Black Rock Desert with no fence around it. Before the event opened to the public in 1996, a worker named Michael Furey was killed in a motorcycle crash while riding from Gerlach, Nevada, to the Burning Man camp in the Black Rock Desert. Harvey insisted that the death had not occurred at Burning Man, since the gates were not yet open. Another couple was run over in their tent by an art car driving to "rave camp," which was at that time distant from the main camp. After the
Burning Man racial makeup of Burning Man attendees in 2014, about 87 percent of them identified themselves as white, 6 percent as Hispanic/Latino, 6 percent as Asian, and 1 percent as black. When interviewed by "The Guardian" about these figures, Harvey replied, "I don't think black folks like to camp as much as white folks ... We're not going to set racial quotas ... This has never been, imagined by us, as a utopian society". The terms of the Burning Man ticket require that participants wishing to use photo and video-recording equipment share a joint copyright of their images of Black Rock