Burners Share Apogaea Experience After Fentanyl Threat Cancellation

"There's this sort of fear that was happening," Arianna Casey recalls of Apogaea, the regional Burning Man event that was suddenly canceled on Friday, June 6. "But I just didn't believe that our leadership in the community would tear down so quickly because a policeman was being a jerk. We have numbers. We have this sense of camaraderie."

Apogaea was meant to take place in Valdez, not far from Trinidad near the New Mexico border. Many attendees, like Casey, arrived at the site on Wednesday, June 4, but were taken by surprise when the burn was cancelled days later after a non-consensual fentanyl dosing supposedly took place.

According to the Apogaea board of directors' June 8 post, two attendees reported to camp volunteers on June 5 that they'd been gifted substances which tested positive for fentanyl; Apogaea did not test those substances itself. On Friday, another attendee noticed an undissolved gelcap in a water bottle, and it was subsequently tested by Apogaea and confirmed positive for fentanyl and "multiple other substances." By 8 p.m. that night, fliers were being distributed stating the event was canceled, and Apogaea's official account posted: "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."

Las Animas County emergency director Joe Richards assured Westword on June 8 that the county did not make the call to kill the event, though it concurred with Apogaea's organizers that it was the best decision.

When the cancellation news spread around the event on June 6, "the game of telephone was in full effect, Casey says, adding that initially, the organizers told campers they needed to vacate within 24 hours. Then news came that they needed to be gone within twelve hours. "And that changed everything, because now they took away the party," she says.

A lack of reliable information sent the campers into a near-panic. Celia Daly, a first-time Apogaea attendee, said that around 5 p.m. on Friday, there were rumblings the event would be shut down. "Nobody really understood why," she says. "Maybe it's weather-related? But then it came out that somebody put fentanyl in all the water."

That rumor, that someone had dosed a general drinking water supply with fentanyl, would prove untrue. But the lack of clarity led to more rumors — that people were on their way to the hospital, or someone had been raped while unconscious. In truth, organizers reported, no one was harmed or sent to the hospital in the course of events.

The assembled burners were pursuing a theme of Disco Dystopia, and after two days of preparation, everyone was ready to party on Friday before the fentanyl incidents and the impending shutdown became widely known; the area held a huge scorpion, a pirates' den, music, lights, a slime arena. ... "You kind of leave reality when you go to a burn," Daly says. "You are recreating your own reality in this temporary way. So something like [the fentanyl scare] probably felt a lot bigger than maybe it would in our normal reality."

Still, both Casey and Daly are sympathetic with the Apogaea organizers for deciding to shut down the event. But it was a hard pill to swallow, fentanyl-laced or not. "We'd spent hundreds, thousands of dollars on supplies, and it took months of preparing," Daly tells Westword. "Just to have it cut so short, it was heartbreaking."

Casey agrees, noting that volunteer rangers in the camps were in distress as well. "You've just got to believe that whatever's happening is real," she says. Casey notes that later that evening, when campers were locked in for the night but expected to leave at daybreak, the radical inclusivity that is one of the Burning Man principles had dissipated to a degree. "It was definitely that 'Protect my own' situation where the heads of camps were very open about, 'I'm protecting my camp, don't do any bullshit.'"

Casey wrote an after-Apogaea essay that poses the question, "Why did we stop mingling after midnight and fear our fellow campers when our community is avid about inclusion?" She answers herself: "There is something very real that lingers with us post-pandemic. We are still afraid of each other and it will take work to overcome that fear. We are burners. We are resilient."

How fentanyl tests and the overall threat of nonconsensual dosing will be dealt with in the future at Apogaea and other events is yet to be seen, but Casey insists it needs to be addressed.

"Ultimately, this community has to really think about how we're going to fight this fentanyl thing long-term," she says, "because it literally stopped us in our tracks and made us question our own camaraderie."