【Girls in the Night Traffic】

On Saturday night,Girls in the Night Traffic it happens again. The line of cars, bike-covered RVs and flatbed trucks with misshapen loads will slow to a crawl on Nevada state road 447. Then, somewhere outside the town of Gerlach, official population 206, it will stop altogether.

Drivers will turn off their engines and, tentatively at first, leave the air-conditioned comfort of their vehicles. Folding chairs will emerge, friends will be made, perhaps an impromptu dance party will break out.

And just like that, before the participants even reach the event gate, before its official 12:01am Sunday start time, without anyone getting naked or changing into a costume, Burning Man will have begun.

Some 30 years after it began as a small ceremony on a beach in San Francisco, Burning Man is going stronger than ever, with a record 75,000 people projected by Burning Man CEO Marian Goodell to attend the 2016 burn.

That's about 8,000 more than last year, and 74,980 more than showed up at the first one.

But what's odd, and ironic, is how much of this annual celebration of impermanence and unpredictability has felt permanent and predictable in recent years, from the hours-long line to get in on Sunday and the hours-long line to get out on Labor Day.

Like many thirtysomethings, Burning Man isn't immune to controversy stemming from the change from its younger years. But as with most of us around that age, the recurring nature of that change -- meet the new drama, same as the old drama -- is coming into clearer focus.

Here's the first gimme: some attendees are going to complain that this year's week-long event is too crowded, that there are too many techie types from Silicon Valley, too many wealthy and obnoxious bros living in air-conditioned comfort in too many "plug-and-play" camps.

That anxiety has hung around the event ever since a Wiredmagazine cover story in 1996 introduced Burning Man to a generation of tech workers. It continued when a makeshift airport was added to the makeshift Black Rock City in 1999 and when it was officially recognized by the FAA in 2006. The fact that some attendees could afford to fly to the event was, and is, seen as outrageous.

What's changed this year? "Burner Air," a series of official, regularly scheduled flights to the playa airport starting at $350 for a flight from nearby Reno. The skies may be clear in this part of Nevada next week, but the forecast calls for old-school Burner grumbling.

Meanwhile, this year's most controversial piece of art is also an airplane. Chunks of a Boeing 747 were chopped up and trucked in from the Mojave desert airplane boneyards hundreds of miles to the south by a nonprofit group calling itself Big Imagination.

The plane chunks were so large that route 447 had to be shut down while they were driven to BRC under police escort. But even after a successful Indiegogo campaign, Big Imagination could only afford to bring the top half of the plane. It hopes to finish the job in 2017, when no doubt some Burners will greet the installation with fresh outrage.

Why bring it at all? Is it just because it hasn't been done before? The idea behind the 747 project is a bit hazy, as many playa art projects tend to be, and it's still an open question whether the once-commercial structure will be, well, a bit too basic for Burning Man, where the prevailing ethos despite event gentrification is weird desert punk.

There aren't many clues in this video, which veers in style from the corporate to the hippy-dippy. At least Big Imagination insists there will be "no velvet ropes," a reference to an art car run by a plug-and-play camp in previous years, which required wristbands for entry (another notion anathema to the open-to-all Burner vibe.

Here's another easy prediction. No matter how the half-a-747 is presented, it will be outshone by other, even larger crowdfunded constructions like the 17,000-square-foot Catacomb of Veils or the now-traditional Temple, which this year will be 100-feet talll. Or the giant Space Whale.

Yeah, you read that right. A giant Space Whale.

Some factors aren't predictable, of course. Nobody knows if the playa will provide another 30-m.p.h. dust storm this year, the kind that caused whiteout conditions in 2015. There may even be a forecast-defying storm that turns the ancient lake bed into thick mud soup; it's happened before.

There may well be another tragic incident like the Wyoming woman run over and killed in 2014 by a slow-moving, double-decker art car. As it says on the ticket, you voluntarily assume the risk of death in Black Rock City. Or as some Burners prefer to put it: Safety third.

But here are some certainties: There will be dust. It will get in everything. There will be lines at the portapotties, to which everyone will have to go more frequently than they care to remember. People will forget to drink enough water in the baking desert sun; some will simply get cranky, others will end up in the med tent attached to a saline drip.

A small number of people will be arrested and fined by the ever-present federal and local law enforcement. A larger number of people will have their minds blown by the nighttime canvas of electric light in every imaginable color. And they won't even need to be high to appreciate it.

There will be gifts. Hidden bars full of free booze will appear in unexpected locations. People will cook ridiculously good food for the benefit of strangers. Some marriages will break up, while broken people will find their soul mates -- and not just the one-day kind provided in the ever-popular Costco Soulmate Trading Outlet camp.

At sunrise, late-night partiers will still be dancing while early risers speed past them on bikes. Ideas will be sparked. Lifetime friendships will be formed. Start-up ideas will be generated. And the spirit of this maturing event will spread just a little bit farther, past the gate, around the planet.

Same as it ever was -- and long may it stay that way.