The Future Turtles Camp
People, teams, and spirit of the Future Turtles
- Work Requirements to Camp With the Future Turtles
- Building Camp
- Teams and Leadership - 2025
- Camp Design and Architecture
- Burning Man 2025 Tickets
Work Requirements to Camp With the Future Turtles
Camping for a week in the harsh Black Rock Desert is tough. We try to make it easier by collaborating to build a beautiful camp, organizing delicious shared meals together, and providing communal gifts to the Burning Man community.
The magic of Burning Man is the collaboration. Not only will you be collaborating to build something really awesome that you can be proud of, but you will test your own limits, learn many new skills, and make incredible friends for life. Burning Man is a transformative experience and the people you go through it with make all the difference.
This all takes a ton of work, both in the months leading up to the event getting everything ready, and during the week of Burning Man itself. To camp with us, you can expect to put in several days of work before you even get to the event, and several hours of shifts every day once we’re there.
Off-Playa Contribution
Each turtle is required to contributed meaningfully to the preparation for Burning Man in one of the following ways:
- Participate in a work weekend in Reno, NV in the spring to help prepare our gear
- Join the early build team, arriving on playa a week before everyone else to build the camp
- Join the post-strike team, staying behind on playa a day and helping put away gear in Reno after the event
- As a part of the food and beverages team, prepare food and the food truck in Reno before the burn
- Meaningfully contribute to a camp art project and/or bring your own form of art
On Playa Work Teams
Every turtle will also be a part of a work team on playa. The teams may change a bit from year to year, but in 2024 we had the following work teams:
- Food (preparing two hot meals a day)
- Dining Room (serving meals and cleaning the dining room afterwards; maintaining snack stations)
- Drinks (including drinks served at parties, water and electrolyte drinks available to campers, and ice)
- LNT (cleaning the public areas of the camp)
- Gayflower (cleaning the private shower area)
- Infrastructure (maintaining the generator and water infrastructure)
These teams organize their own shifts throughout the event week, with a goal that each turtle contribute approximately 12 hours of work during the week as a part of their particular team.
Other Teams
We have a variety of teams, large and small, that take care of some of the other things that keep our camp working. These teams often meet in advance of Burning Man to prepare and their work during the event may vary depending on the team. This work is all in addition to the work shifts mentioned above, and almost every turtle contributes to at least one of these teams. Your contribution may be to one of these existing projects, or you might have an idea to start your own project!
| Team |
Typical pre-playa work |
Typical on-playa work |
Typical post-playa work |
| Parties |
Choose themes for parties, prepare decor and accessories, line up DJs and entertainment, produce publicity and submit events to Playa Events, coordinate with drinks team |
Run the parties, make sure there are volunteers to staff parties as greeters, monitors, consent monitors, bike parking, lighting directors, DJs, and bartenders |
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| Guardians |
Plan for orientation activities, schedule training for new turtles and pre-playa meeting sessions |
Deal with personal, emotional, health issues, and conflict that may come up; coach campers whose behavior puts them at risk of not getting invited back |
Produce programming for re-integration and "decompression" from playa; make sure unresolved issues during the week are addressed |
| Bikes | Inventory bikes and order new parts |
Check bikes out and in |
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| Turtle Truck |
Reserve a rental truck and pick it up; coordinate load-in and drive to playa |
Coordinate load-in, drive from playa, take camp trash to the dump, wash truck and return it |
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| Turtle Bus | Coordinate the charter bus and make sure the right people are on it and it goes to the right places; communicate with riders |
Coordinate the charter bus and make sure the right people are on it and it goes to the right places; communicate with riders | |
| Camp Decor and Design |
Plan camp layout and decor |
Set up decor and lights |
|
| Art Projects |
Build art for the playa Work on an art car |
Set up art, maintain art lighting, maintain art car, etc. |
Take down art |
| Pillow Fort | Plan pillow fort layout and decor |
Coordinate on-playa pillow fort activities |
|
| Workshops and Events |
Prepare some kind of on-playa workshop or event |
Example events: Tarot Reading, Turkish Coffee Fortunetelling, HIIT training, Yoga, workshops and small classes, etc. |
Building Camp
A typical year for the Build Team, assuming all goes well and there is no weather emergency or space alien invasion or global pandemic or plague of locusts, looks like this:
We meet in Reno, NV on Monday the week before Burning Man. In Reno, we do some last minute preparations, and get the Build Team RV ready to go. In 2024 the biggest thing was just buying food for the build team itself.
On Tuesday morning as early as possible, we drive from Reno to Black Rock City.
Once we arrive in Black Rock City, we wait for Placement to show us where our camp will be located. Once we find it, we do the first MOOP sweep and start surveying and measuring and putting little flags in the ground where things will go.
As soon as we have established exactly where everything goes, we call the trucking services to bring us all our stuff, the generator rental company to bring the generator, the water company to bring their tanks, etc. Then we start preparing for the first night, putting down enough shade structures for our own team to sleep in.
If all has gone well, we have managed to build six shiftpods for the first night with protective tarps above and below by the time we go to sleep on Tuesday.
Over the course of the rest of the week, we get as much built as possible. That includes all of our public and private shade structures, tents, electrical grid, water system, and as much of the camp decor as we can get done. Hopefully around Thursday night or Friday the food team rolls in and starts feeding us and setting up the kitchen and dining room. A lot of campers arrive Saturday before the gates officially open and help finish anything we didn't get done. And that's about it!
Build Week is one of the best parts of Burning Man. It's amazing to arrive in a giant empty desert and transform it to a city.
Here's the Build Team Movie!
Teams and Leadership - 2025
Food
The food team is responsible for preparing healthy and delightful food for campers. We aim to provide two hot meals daily. Lunch is served at noon which is also the daily camp meeting and mandatory for everyone. Dinner is served at 6pm. This year we are going to put more emphasis on making it easy to find something healthy to heat up and eat at any hour.
Lead: Christophe
Subteam: Healthy Snacks
Mess Tent
This team serves the food, maintains the snack area, cleans up after meals in the dining room and keeps that area clean and tidy.
Lead: NEED VOLUNTEER
Guardians
The guardians team is responsible for camper's emotional well being, camp cohesion, new camper acculturation, and other "soft skills." They are responsible for noticing campers in crisis and other difficult situations and either helping out or arranging professional help.
Lead: Jihoon
Finances
Keeps the books for the camp, collects camp dues, files camp tax returns (990s), and arranges reimbursement for campers who purchased things on behalf of the camp. Going forward, this team will also create a budget for each department.
Lead: Ben W
Team: Alejandro
Tools, Supplies, and Procurement
Camp storage, tools, equipment, and supplies. Maintains inventory spreadsheets, figures out what we need for camp and how to get it to playa. Leads the project during Reno Work Weekend to prepare the Tool Fort for playa making sure we arrive with everything we need. Publishes the "where is it" sheet so that campers, and especially the build team, can find things quickly and figure out where to put things away.
Lead: Spacemaster
Parties and Events
Plans all the camp parties. Publishes events to PlayaEvents, including any smaller events put on by campers. Publicizes all the events on- and off-playa
Co-leads: Grant
Anyone else interested?
Music / Audio
Manages all audio gear and also the DJ program for our events.
Lead: Ben W
Team: Shuai
Architecture and Layout
Designs the camp frontage and major structures to be built by the build team. Produces schematic plans and drawings required by Placement, Build, Infrastructure, and other teams.
Lead: Gary
Transport
Organizes a truck from San Francisco to bring bulky items to and from playa. Drops off the camp MOOP at a dump. (No personal moop!)
Lead: Alex Sartel
Bikes
Manages and maintains our fleet of 50 bicycles.
Lead: Alex Sartel
Build
Arrives early on playa to build the camp.
Lead: tbd
Confirmed Builders: Beam, Basil, Joel, Jeremy S, Mdm Viv, Klajdi
Possible Builders (not 100% yet) Jon, Jorge, Dat
Infrastructure
Manages the electrical grid and the water system, including fresh water, grey water, and black water and the Gayflower.
NEED VOLUNTEERS
Jetpack, Ben Wild, Beam
Strike
Plans the strike of camp at the end of burn week. Coordinates all campers on playa to help take everything down easily and quickly and leave it in good condition for next year.
Lead: Efendi
Volunteer Coordinator
Insures that there are volunteers lined up for every shift on playa. Prepares those big charts telling everyone where to show up for their shifts.
Romain
Drinks
Plans and purchases any drinks that we gift at our bar, whether alcoholic or not. Organizes a steady supply of ice, ice water, and electrolyte drink for campers 24/7 and coffee for campers in the morning.
OPEN
Camp Tickets Coordinator
Helps campers secure tickets to Burning Man. Manages the Stewards Sale program that insures our camp can receive a certain number of tickets.
Lead: Jeremy
Pillow Fort
Designs and plans the pillow fort / cuddle fort areas of camp
Lead: Tristan
Recruiting & Acculturation
Finds great new Turtles and prepares them for Burning Man
Lead: Jorge
Camp Design and Architecture
What our camp looks like!
2025 Pavillion
We are considering a major redesign of the main interactive area of the camp for 2025. The concept would be to have a single, strong central pole supporting multiple shade triangles.
Inspiration pictures
Schematic
Aesthetic (Tomorrow Today!)
The theme of our public areas, Tomorrow Today, pulls elements from:
- Atomic Art
- Jetsons Aesthetic
- Mid-century
- Googie Architecture
Reference images:
Burning Man 2025 Tickets
https://tickets.burningman.org/
Important dates:
| Date | Thing | Details |
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| Wednesday 2/19/2025 12:00 pm PST | Ticket Aid Program Opens |
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| TBD | Future Turtles Ticket Survey |
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| Wednesday 3/5/2025 12:00 pm PST | Stewards Sale Commences |
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| Saturday 3/8/2025 12:00 pm PST | Stewards Sale Closes |
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| Wednesday 4/30/2025 12:00 pm PST | STEP Sale Registration Opens |
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| Wednesday 7/30/2025 12:00 pm PST | OMG sale Commences |
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