Chris Rock and Diplo escaped the treacherous mud-filled Burning Man in the flooded Nevada desert festival Saturday with the help of a fan.
The comedian, 57, and the 44-year-old DJ trekked through 6 miles of mud looking for someone to give them a ride as roughly 73,000 people were stuck at the festival due to the weather.
Diplo, whose real name is Thomas Wesley Pentz, shared a video to his Instagram where he and Rock, who wore a New York Knicks jacket, sat in the bed of a pickup truck with five other people and bags of equipment.
“A fan offered Chris Rock and I a ride out of Burning Man in the back of a pickup,” the DJ wrote in an Instagram video.
“I legit walked the side of the road for hours with my thumb out cuz I have a show in DC tonight and didn’t want to let y’all down.”
“Also shoutout to this guy for making the smart purchase of a truck not knowing it was for this exact moment,” Diplo added.
Heavy rain flooded the usually dry land and forced organizers to postpone the namesake ceremony of the event to be postponed and thousands of attendees were told to shelter in place.
One person has died at the festival as the Pershing County Sheriff’s Office said the death came “during this rain event,” according to NBC San Diego.
The anonymous fan’s truck was a lifeline for the DJ as he raced back to civilization and caught a flight to Washington, D.C. for his 9 p.m. show at Echostage Saturday night.
“No one was making it out of burning man they didn’t believe we would walk 6 miles in the mud… no one believed we would get to dc for the show tonight,” Diplo wrote in an Instagram story post from a private jet. “but god did”
Rock took to his own Instagram story, sharing a video of the flooded desert following the monsoon thunderstorms that swept through the “Silver State.”
Torrid conditions at the campgrounds forced officials to close the entrance to the temporary metropolis for the last two days of the festival.
“Due to recent rainfall, the Bureau of Land Management and the Pershing County Sheriff’s Office officials have closed the entrance to Burning Man for the remainder of the event,” the Washoe County Sheriff’s Office wrote on Facebook.
The Black Rock Desert remains listed in a Flood Watch as of Sunday morning, according to the National Weather Service, with more rain in the forecast.
The dry lake where the festival is held annually received 0.8 inches of water from a storm Friday night into Saturday turning the usually hot and arid land into a mud-filled nightmare.
Burning Man is described as an annual gathering of people to Black Rock Desert where a temporary metropolis dedicated to community, art, self-expression, and self-reliance is built for the crucible of creativity.
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