Regional Burning Man Event Shut Down After Fentanyl Threat

Confusion reigned this past weekend when organizers of Apogaea, a regional Burning Man event held in Las Animas County in southern Colorado, shot off a message on social media at 5:31 p.m. on Friday, June 6, announcing that the event had closed its gates. "Apogaea 2025 gate has been closed for the entirety of the event, by mandate of the Apogaea organization and the Los Animas Sheriff Department," the statement reads. "Please stay at home if you have not hit the road. Please plan to turn around if you are en route."

By 8 p.m. on Friday, the event was cancelled, and Apogaea's official account announced, "Attention all Apogaeans: please start packing up your things and leave the land as soon as possible. All participants need to be off land as quickly as possible."

Fliers began to circulate onsite at the event, saying that the shutdown "has been mandated by the Apo organization and the Los [sic] Animas Sheriff Department due to multiple incidents of nonconsensual drug exchange and dosing involving substances containing Fentanyl. We continue to be concerned about the danger to the community."

On Reddit, theories proliferated that perhaps county officials had overreacted, or that the test strips used to identify the fentanyl were substandard or faulty. But Joe Richards, emergency manager for Las Animas County, says Apogaea was self-policing with its own incident command and EMTs onsite, and that he simply concurred when organizers decided to cancel the event.
The Apogaea board of directors, which didn't respond to an inquiry from Westword, provided more clarity early Sunday morning, June 8, in a statement posted on its website. "To our knowledge, no one was dosed or physically harmed at the event, and there were zero medical transports from the site during the event," it reads.

In what the update calls "a series of events," the board explained that two participants on Thursday afternoon had told a volunteer they'd been gifted a substance which they tested and was positive for fentanyl. "Apogaea never had custody of the substance and did not test it," the statement noted.

It also admitted that "it was miscommunicated as a potentially bigger issue, possibly a multi-casualty incident involving an entire theme camp."

Early Friday morning, though, another participant noticed an undissolved gelcap pill in their water bottle. "Apogaea tested the gelcap again with multiple reagent tests which resulted in confirming the presence of multiple substances," the statement affirmed.

"Discussion between the Sheriff's department and our team resolved to close the event," it continued. "We made the decision as best we could with information available to us within the limited timeframe."

"I am the only county employee that was involved," says Richards, the emergency manager, "and I did make a positive nod in agreement with the consensus [to shut down the festival]. But the county did not pull the plug."

As the board wrote in its statement: "Ultimately the safety of our participants [is] paramount, and we would rather err on the side of safety instead of risk tragedy."

Richards feels the same. "We got out of it by the grace of God, in my opinion, with nobody overdosing or worse," he tells Westword.