Every year, participants in the Burning Man Festival descend on the playa of Nevada's Black Rock Desert to form a temporary city – a self-reliant community populated by performers, artists, free spirits, and more. Last week, an estimated 68,000 people came to Burning Man 2013 from all over the world to dance, express themselves, and take in the spectacle. Gathered below are some of the sights from the festival, which lasted a week and came to its conclusion yesterday

Club-goers dance at “Morning Gloryville” at the Ministry of Sound in south London August 11, 2015. Morning dance parties with names like “Morning Gloryville” and "Daybreaker" are gathering steam in cities across the world, giving rise to a movement known as “conscious clubbing”. Its founders aim to create the energy and community of electronic dance parties with fruit smoothies and coffee instead of the drugs and alcohol more common after nightfall. (Photo by Toby Melville/Reuters)

An Israeli soldier watches as revellers take part in a gay pride parade in Tel Aviv, Israel, June 3, 2016. About 200,000 people from the LGBT community in Israel and abroad attended in Tel Aviv's annual gay pride parade Friday, the largest event of its kind in the Middle East. (Photo by Baz Ratner/Reuters)

This picture taken on May 31, 2018 shows a villager walking between abandoned houses covered with overgrown vegetation in Houtouwan on Shengshan island, China' s eastern Zhejiang province. Houtouwan was a thriving fishing community of sturdy brick homes that climb up the steeply hilled island of Shenghshan, but is now abandoned, with entire houses completely overgrown as if vacuum- sealed in a lush layer of green. (Photo by Johannes Eisele/AFP Photo)

South Korean environmental activists wearing masks symbolizing the coronavirus attend a prevention campaign as South Koreans take measures to protect themselves against the spread of coronavirus (COVID-19) on March 30, 2020 in Seoul, South Korea. South Korea has called for expanded public participation in social distancing, as the country witnesses a wave of community spread and imported infections leading to a resurgence in new cases of COVID-19. According to the Korea Center for Disease Control and Prevention on Monday, 78 new cases were reported. The total number of infections in the nation tallies at 9,661. (Photo by Chung Sung-Jun/Getty Images)

“Sangoma” initiate Dipuo Banda (C) is led out of her teachers shack while she remains in a trance like state prior to dancing during her 3 day initiation ceremony with her teacher, family, friends and students in the Alexandra Township in Johannesburg, South Africa, 14 May 2021. Sangomas, the Zulu term for Medicine Women or traditional healers, fulfill different social and political roles in the community, including divination, physical healing, emotional and spiritual illnesses, directing birth or death rituals and finding lost cattle. (Photo by Kim Ludbrook/EPA/EFE)

While communism, collectivism, worms, dry rot and casual looting failed to destroy the majestic wooden churches of Russia, it may be ordinary neglect that finally does them in. Dwindled now to several hundred remaining examples, these glories of vernacular architecture lie scattered amid the vastness of the world’s largest country. Just over a decade ago, Richard Davies, a British architectural photographer, struck out on a mission to record the fragile and poetic structures. Austerely beautiful and haunting, “Wooden Churches: Traveling in the Russian North” (White Sea Publishing; $132) is the result. Covering thousands of miles, Mr. Davies described how he and the writer Matilda Moreton tracked down the survivors from among the thousands of onion-domed structures built after Prince Vladimir converted to Christianity in 988.

NASA says it could be another 20 years before humans touch down on Mars, but in a sense, the Mars Society has been exploring the red planet for more than a decade – in Utah. Photo: Csilla Orgel, a geologist of Crew 125 EuroMoonMars B mission, makes her way back to the Mars Desert Research Station (MDRS) in the Utah desert March 3, 2013. The MDRS aims to investigate the feasibility of a human exploration of Mars and uses the Utah desert's Mars-like terrain to simulate working conditions on the red planet. Scientists, students and enthusiasts work together developing field tactics and studying the terrain. All outdoor exploration is done wearing simulated spacesuits and carrying air supply packs and crews live together in a small communication base with limited amounts of electricity, food, oxygen and water. Everything needed to survive must be produced, fixed and replaced on site. (Photo by Jim Urquhart/Reuters)