Many people who attend Burning Man shell out for the famous desert festival to have a transformative experience, but one attendee had an especially life-changing experience; she had a baby at Black Rock City.
Kayla Thompson, 37, and her husband, Kasey, were attending the 2025 Burning Man festival in Nevada and weathering the scorching desert conditions in their RV on Wednesday. A sharp pain woke Kayla up, and she feared she was coming down with a nasty bug or — more frighteningly — an issue with her appendix.
Cramps overtook her and it became clear that she was going to need medical attention. The couple began screaming for help, and minutes later they were no longer just a couple of Burners having a wild time on the Playa.
They were parents.
The three pound nine ounce baby girl Kayla delivered in the RV’s bathroom is their first child. Kayla had no idea that she was pregnant and the couple had not been planning on having a baby.
“Even the nurses at the hospital were like, ‘You don’t look like you were pregnant at all,’” Thompson told the New York Times. “I didn’t have any symptoms.”
Once the baby had been delivered, Kasey darted out of the RV to call for help.
“I was yelling for anyone to come help us,” he told the paper.
Thankfully for the couple, Burning Man attracts all sorts, and within minutes a neonatal nurse, an OBGYN, and a pediatric doctor attending the event had converged on their camper to offer their assistance.
According to the couple, the OBGYN showed up in nothing but his underwear, but that didn’t stop him from helping Kayla with delivering the placenta.
The Thompsons traveled to Black Rock City — the temporary settlement that forms every August in the Black Rock Desert in Nevada during the Burning Man festival — from their home in Salt Lake City. They initially planned to camp out in the back of a truck, but Kasey’s older brother had previously attended and knew the desert could be unforgiving. He bought an RV for the three of them to stay in together during the festival.
His experience likely saved them all a lot of suffering. By Saturday, severe weather was already lashing the Burners. A seasonal monsoon swept across the desert, disrupting the festival’s opening weekend festivities. Dust storms and whipping rain tore through the camp, turning the desert into a muddy, impenetrable mess.
The conditions at Black Rock City became so bad that the festival had to stop allowing revelers in for a short time.
Had the Thompsons not had the foresight of Kasey’s brother, Kayla would have had to deliver her baby amid the dust and morass.
Maureen O’Reilly, the 61-year-old neonatal nurse who rushed to help Kayla, told the NYT that she used all of the meager resources available to her to ensure the newborn was safe.
“The hardest part was knowing, as a nurse, what can go wrong,” Ms. O’Reilly said. She added, “Having no resources was frightening.”
That included using the camper’s heat, a bath towel, and a heated water bottle to keep the baby warm.
While Burning Man is intentionally held away from the bustle of the rest of the world, as it has grown in popularity its organizers have opted, in the interest of safety, to bring a bit of civilization with them to the dunes. The festival has medical staff on hand, and within 15 minutes of Kasey’s calls for help, a group of Black Rock Rangers — volunteer event staff — arrived with medical workers to assist.
The couple and the baby were driven to a medical tent, where they were informed that, due to space constraints, only the baby could be airlifted to a hospital.
“That was the hardest decision of my life,” Kasey told the NYT.
Ultimately, they sent the baby to the hospital and traveled by car toward Reno, where the child was being examined. It took the couple nearly four hours to get from the Playa to the hospital, Kasey told the NYT.
Once they finally arrived the couple learned that their baby girl was healthy.
“She was safe and sound, and I was so thrilled,” Kasey said.
Despite the hardships ahead — recovering their belongings they left out at Black Rock City and caring for a completely unexpected newborn, not to mention the cost of the medical assistance — Kasey said he was grateful that the spirit of community at Burning Man, despite the festival’s more recent reputation as a haven for billionaires and influencers, is still alive and well.
“That’s what that community is about,” he said. “[The Burners] will always have such a special place in my heart.”
