More than 70,000 people were stranded at the Burning Man festival when torrential rains turned the desert site into a massive mud pit.
As if being stranded in a massive mud pit in the middle of nowhere wasn't bad enough, now looms a new threat for 70,000 holiday weekend revelers at the Burning Man festival.
Trench foot.
Thousands were forced to trudge through foot-sucking mud after torrential rains dumped two months’ worth of rain in just 24 hours on Nevada's Black Rock Desert, site of this year's Burning Man festival.
That meant hours of slogging through muck as roads were overrun and festivalgoers tried to pry themselves from knee-deep mud that pulled off shoes and forced some to tie plastic bags over their feet in an effort to keep moving.
Some just went barefoot, and that could pose a threat.
"Trench foot is a condition where the foot becomes super moist from keeping (the) foot in water, mud," podiatrist Dr. Neal Blitz told Inside Edition.
"It allows for allows for bacteria to get into the skin, and get into the foot, and create a really bad infection," Blitz said.
Catherine Gacad went to her 13th Burning Man festival. But she wasn't prepped for a mountain of mud to flow through site.
The gooey muck "just completely caught us off guard," she said. "We were not prepared for it."
Was she worried about getting trench foot?
"I think that was a concern," she said. "I didn't go barefoot. You could use boots, which is what I did," she said.
The annual celebration is neither glamorous nor cheap.
Tickets can cost more than $800 each, and event organizers warn on their website the remote desert expanse is "one of the most strikingly beautiful and utterly ethereal locations in the world that will ever try to kill you.”
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