The Future Turtles Camp

People, teams, and spirit of the Future Turtles

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:

  1. Participate in a work weekend in Reno, NV in the spring to help prepare our gear
  2. Join the early build team, arriving on playa a week before everyone else to build the camp
  3. Join the post-strike team, staying behind on playa a day and helping put away gear in Reno after the event
  4. As a part of the food and beverages team, prepare food and the food truck in Reno before the burn
  5. 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:

  1. Food (preparing two hot meals a day)
  2. Dining Room (serving meals and cleaning the dining room afterwards; maintaining snack stations)
  3. Drinks (including drinks served at parties, water and electrolyte drinks available to campers, and ice)
  4. LNT (cleaning the public areas of the camp)
  5. Gayflower (cleaning the private shower area)
  6. 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
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
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
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.

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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.

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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!

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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

Kitchen

Lead: Christophe

Guardians

Lead: Jihoon

Finances

Lead: Ben W
Team: Alejandro

Tools, Supplies, and Procurement

Lead: Spacemaster

Parties and Events

Co-leads: Bambam, Grant

Music / Audio

Lead: Ben W
Team: Shuai

Architecture and Layout

Lead: Gary

Transport

Lead: Alex Sartel

Bikes

Lead: Alex Sartel

Build

Lead: tbd
Confirmed Builders: Beam, Basil, Dat, Joel

Infrastructure

tbd

Strike

tbd

Volunteer Coordinator

Romain

Drinks

tbd

Camp Tickets Coordinator

Lead: Jeremy

Pillow Fort

tbd