Burning Man began as a bonfire ritual on the summer solstice. Sculptor Mary Grauberger, a friend of Larry Harvey's girlfriend, Janet Lohr, held solstice bonfire gatherings on Baker Beach
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Burning Man began as a bonfire ritual on the summer solstice. Sculptor Mary Grauberger, a friend of Larry Harvey's girlfriend, Janet Lohr, held solstice bonfire gatherings on Baker Beach for several years before 1986, some of which Harvey attended. When Grauberger stopped organizing it, Harvey "picked up the torch", with Grauberger's permission, and ran with it. He and Jerry James built the first wooden effigy on June 21, 1986, cobbled together using scrap wood, to be torched that evening. On June 22, Harvey, James, and a few friends met on Baker Beach in San Francisco and burned an 8-foot-tall (2.4 m) wooden man and a smaller wooden dog. Harvey later described his inspiration for burning these effigies as a spontaneous act of "radical self-expression"
