I wrapped my shoes and socks in plastic bags and tape at Burning Man to avoid getting infections from the alkaline dust after heavy rain

• Dan Murray-Serter attended his seventh Burning Man festival this year.
• The entrepreneur said most attendees were well prepared when the weather took a nasty turn.

This as-told-to essay is based on a conversation with British entrepreneur Dan Murray-Serter, 37, co-founder of smarter supplement company Heights and host of the UK Business podcast Secret Leaders, about his experience at Burning Man 2023 in Nevada's Black Rock Desert, which was hit with intense rains and heavy flooding.

I've been to Burning Man seven times. I would say I'm a "burner," which is what you call yourself if you see yourself going regularly in your life.

The way that I try and describe it to my friends is: I've been to LA seven or eight times. I've been to Berlin seven or eight times. I've been to Amsterdam seven or eight times. My favorite cities in the world I go to regularly because they're brilliant. There's amazing culture. There's awesome things to see. You've got friends that live in these cities.

Black Rock City is exactly the same. The only difference is it literally gets built for two weeks a year and then you can't go any other time.

We have a very nice camp. It's called Serendipitea. We had maybe 70 people. I was quite involved with my friends in the application process and weeding people out who aren't going to be there to contribute.

You do kitchen shifts. You do cleaning shifts. You do bar shifts. I love the sense of contribution. None of it works at Burning Man unless everyone actually plays their part.

It shows the best side of humanity. When the rain set in, I don't think there's anywhere in the whole entire world that it could have been better than at Burning Man, because people are ready for anything.

The rain came in on Friday

I think initially people were upset, of course. I think people felt a bit like "oh, bugger, it sucks for us," for a couple of hours.

There are people called rangers who come in and basically communicate the main weather information about what to expect, which was very helpful because I think uncertainty is the biggest problem anywhere.

They said: "look, the weather is bad. It's going to get worse. It's going to be like this two-to-three days. So you want to think about rations, you want to think about helping other people, you want to go into crisis planning mindset mode."

They're ready for anything because they've gone to the desert and the fundamental thing is if you're not prepared, you die. So people bring spares upon spares of everything.

We had more than enough food and water. Almost every camp has more than enough food and water to last them way beyond the burn itself because the values prepare you for exactly that.

When it rains in the desert, the mud tends to cement. It was very, very thick mud. And playa dust is very alkaline. The sand itself is alkaline. You could get a cut or there could be infections.

So, we were like: "everyone, put on socks, put zip bags over your socks, then let's tape them up, then let's put your zip-bagged socks into boots, and then let's put big bags over your boots and tie those up."

Everyone helped. We said: "here's all the bags, here's all the tape. Everyone, tape yourselves up. As long as you protect your feet, we'll be okay."

You don't want to walk around barefoot. There's a lot of water. There's a lot of cables for electricity and power. So we were just like, "let's all be really careful." This isn't a situation where barefoot is best. It's a dangerous thing to do.

We went around as a group to cover any cables and make sure that stuff was out of the water.

We were very stylish with our bags over our feet. People were wearing bin bags. Obviously not many people have raincoats. But it wasn't a big deal.

Once everything had been communicated, everyone was amazing.

Burning Man isn't like any other event I've been to

People just get really well looked after. If this had happened at Coachella, everyone would be like, "go fuck yourself, every man for himself."

But here everyone was asking "how can I help you? What can I do for you?" It's a totally different attitude.

Generally people were pretty calm. Everyone just left their bikes in the camp and went out on foot. Instead of the parties that were supposed to happen far away, people were just having them locally. So everyone was still able to go out and have fun.

It sounds ridiculous, but someone still came and delivered me a pizza. I had three different people offer me tuna sushi.

You would think that all that stuff would just stop. But actually, people were like "nope! Let's do even more of it."

It took us 14 hours to get out

That was bad. I'm not going to pretend like it wasn't. It took 14 hours to get to the gate of the festival. It's like two miles, a drive that would take you five minutes. There's 70,000 people trying to leave an event.

I think this event was an opportunity for 70,000 people to show their true spirit. When the chips are down and there's a genuine, life-threatening reality of uncertainty, everyone was like, "how can I help someone else? How can I make sure other people are okay?"

I think it was probably one of the most inspiring feats of common behavior that I ever saw there, and it absolutely made clear to me what I already knew, which is this is the best city on Earth.