29 June 2023 , 15:08
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When packing away your tent after a festival, guests are asked to leave their campsite exactly how they found it - empty. But knowing that not everybody is going to clean up after themselves, festival organisers hire cleaning crews to sweep the campsite clear of litter and abandoned items.
It has prompted cleaners to share the 'weird and wonderful' things they have come across when cleaning up a festival site - with many saying 'you never know what you'll find inside an abandoned tent'. One man, who worked on the production crew for Burning Man, in Black Rock Desert, in northwestern Nevada, says he once came across an abandoned 'art project' named the Temple of P***.
He told Reddit: "It was a seven-foot long vertical clear tube filled with sample jars of human waste. The idea was that event participants on a spiritual quest that managed to find this tube and the pile of sample jars next to it could take one of the jars, pee in it, seal it, and drop it in the tube.
One cleaner has taken home 50 to 75 camp chairs over the years (stock photo) (Getty Images/Caiaimage)"Of course, whoever owned the thing left it there for us to find after the event. Yes, one of the jars had poop in it."
But this wasn't the only soiled tent abandoned in the desert, as another member of his cleaning crew came across one with a man still inside.
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He added: "When the desert was nearly empty of anything or anyone at all, a guy on our crew finds an abandoned tent, which he determined after checking inside to be chock-full of garbage and p*** bottles.
"He was preparing the tent to be lifted up by a forklift into a dumpster, when the tent started thrashing.
"A very dazed individual pokes his head out and remarks, 'Oh s***, sorry dude - is this your tent?'
"Turns out he had found himself without an exit strategy after the event ended, and some folks had offered him a ride and told him to wait at a red tent they'd set up for him, with fresh sleeping bags, pillows, water, and food.
"Well, he overshot that red tent's location by a quarter mile, found an entirely different red tent full of garbage and p*** bottles, assumed that was the tent they set up for him, proceeded to try to sleep off his bender within the pile of trash and urine, and nearly got forked into a dumpster."
However, another cleaner claims to have 'struck gold' when carrying out the nightly clean up at a four-day country music festival a few years back.
He said: "The grossest thing we usually cleaned up were beer cans or pop bottles full of chew spit.
"I have a whole list of things I have brought home with me though.
"Coolers - many, many coolers in every shape and size - from rom cheap ones to $200 top of the line jobs.
"Folding/camp chairs, same as the coolers. I probably gave away 50 or 75 to friends and family, most were brand new.
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"In lesser amounts, I have found tarps, sunglasses, hats, keys, cash, a few pipes, a bong, umbrellas, wagons, mobility scooters, a coffin, oh and we once found a portable oxygen thing.
"Most of those items I turned into the office. Any unclaimed items and cash were split up among the cleaning crews at the end of the show usually.
"Except coolers and chairs, we got so many of those we could take what we wanted when we found them, they were too big to store at the lost and found and there were just too many."