Cycling · Black Rock Desert, Nevada, USA · recorded with NomadTracks

Riding Black Rock City: the GPS trace of a city that doesn't exist

Once a year, a circular city for 70,000 people appears on a Nevada lakebed — and a week later it's gone without a trace. Except this one: a 9.7 km bike ride through Black Rock City, recorded with NomadTracks. The map below shows the ride arcing along the city's ringed streets and cutting across the open playa — a trace of a city that will have vanished by the time you read this.

Distance9.7 km
Elevation gain30 m
ActivityCycling
Duration3 h 23 min

About this data: this track and its photos were personally shared with us as samples by a NomadTracks user. NomadTracks never uploads, collects or shares your tracks or photos — your recordings stay on your devices and in your own cloud.

Route map of Riding Black Rock City: the GPS trace of a city that doesn't exist drawn from the recorded GPS points on an OpenStreetMap basemap
The actual recorded GPS track — start marked green, finish orange. Numbered pins mark where the photos below were taken.

Download GPX Coordinates, elevation and relative times — recording dates are normalized out, photos not included.

Elevation profile of the track
Elevation profile over the full distance. Switch the map above to interactive mode, then slide across the chart — a marker follows the route.

A track of a temporary place

Black Rock City has addresses — the clock-face-and-ring system — but no permanence; even OpenStreetMap's faint outline of the grid describes a city that exists for one week a year. The recorded track is personal cartography that survives the city: every arc a ringed street, every cut a crossing of the open playa.

Dust-proof recording

The playa eats electronics; the phone stayed sealed in a bag in the basket, recording blind all day. Live Activities meant a glance at the lock screen — through the ziplock — was enough to check the day's distance. The bike, as always out there, was the only sane way to move.

About the place: Black Rock Desert, Nevada, USA

Black Rock City is erected each late August on the Black Rock Desert playa, about 150 km north of Reno, Nevada, and dismantled to nothing days later under the event's leave-no-trace ethos. Bikes are the city's primary transport: distances are deceptive on the 10-square-kilometer site, dust storms erase sightlines in seconds, and a GPS breadcrumb back to your camp is more than a gimmick.

Record yours: every chart and map on this page came straight out of the app — no desktop tools involved. Get NomadTracks free on the App Store and bring your own adventure home as data.

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