After decades of debauchery and an untold number of conceptions, revelers at Burning Man celebrated a rare birth at Black Rock City on Wednesday morning, after a festivalgoer unexpectedly went into labor on the Playa.
“It’s an absolute miracle,” said new father Kasey, 39, of Salt Lake City, who asked that only the family’s first names be used to protect their privacy. “Had I known [about the pregnancy], that’s the absolutely last place on this planet I would have been.”
His wife, Kayla, 36, had no symptoms and wasn’t showing when she suddenly went into labor in their RV just before dawn, the new father said. Doctors believe baby Aurora was about a month shy of her due date when she arrived minutes later, weighing a little over 3½ pounds.
“I just started yelling for anyone to come help me,” Kasey recalled through tears. “In a matter of minutes we had an [obstetrician], a NICU nurse, a pediatrician in there — I don’t know where they all came from, they just came.”
As luck would have it, a dream team of medical professionals had pitched their camp just next door. The obstetrician was still in his underwear as he and the ersatz labor and delivery crew scrambled to tend to the newborn and her mother, scrounging for clean blankets, saline and other emergency medical supplies in the dusty and mud-caked camp.
The family was transported to the festival’s official medical tent, where mom Kayla held her tiny naked daughter to her bare chest while they waited for a helicopter to take her to a neonatal intensive care unit in Reno. They made the wrenching decision to send Aurora alone after learning there wasn’t space for either parent to travel with her.
“The medical staff at Burning Man grabbed me and just hugged me and said he’s not going to let her out of her sight,” Kasey said. “He kept reassuring me she’s going to be OK.”
But the family’s odyssey was just beginning. The drive to Reno took hours. Kayla was treated and released from the hospital on Thursday. But baby Aurora remains in the NICU and could face an extended stay, family said.
“Since this is their first child and the pregnancy was completely unexpected, my brother and his wife don’t have anything prepared — no baby supplies, no nursery, nothing at all,” the infant’s aunt Lacey Paxman wrote in a GoFundMe appeal for the family.
“Most people get nine months to prepare,” she said. “They became parents in a blink of an eye.”
For now, the family is stranded in Reno, though they hope to get baby Aurora transported to a hospital closer to home.
“She’s just going to light up my sky,” Kasey said of the fragile newborn, whom he held for the first time on Friday. “She’s going to be my everything.”
Surprise deliveries are uncommon but far from unheard of, experts say. About 1 in every 500 pregnant women discovers she’s expecting more than 20 weeks along — a phenomenon known as “cryptic pregnancy.”
Cryptic pregnancies are more common among very young mothers, as well as those who may have other health conditions that mask pregnancy symptoms such as nausea, exhaustion and even missed periods. Like Kayla, a subset of such parents only discover they’re pregnant when they go into labor.
“It was absolutely 100% a cryptic pregnancy,” Kasey said. “No signs, no morning sickness. She wasn’t even showing.”
Pregnant women, young children and even babies are a regular feature of the nine-day Burning Man festival, which draws tens of thousands of people each year to a desolate strip of the Nevada desert about 120 miles north of Reno.
Still, births are all but unheard at the celebration of “community, art, self-expression and self-reliance.” Some longtime Burners have dubbed Aurora “Citizen Zero.”
Her unexpected arrival occurred just hours after a white-out dust storm brought incoming traffic to a halt as festivalgoers streamed in and attempted to set camp on Monday.
The dramatic weather recalled torrential rains that flooded the camp in 2023, leaving thousands stranded in deep, sticky mud. More inclement weather is expected heading into the weekend.
“It’s a miracle, because it was crazy weather,” Paxton said. “Had she come an hour or two earlier or an hour or two later, they wouldn’t have been able to get her out.”
