Future Turtles Theme Camp

Camping with the Turtles

Large shade structure at Burning Man with two rows of tents and an aisle in the middle. The roof is silver tarp with a string of colored lights. Each tent is a ShiftPod 2, hexagonal shaped, just high enough to stand in and with room for two people. In the foreground, a shirtless man is unzipping the door to a tent. There are several hammocks and other camping furniture strewn around. The ground is dirt. The sun is extremely strong but the shade keeps most of it out.

So, you're thinking about camping with the Turtles?

The Future Turtles are a welcoming group of friends that spend time together during the year and at Burning Man.

We love you! Here’s a little guide we put together to help you decide if you should camp with us.

Culture

We’re pretty nerdy.

We are, to a large extent, nerds, engineers, programmers, gaymers, creators and artists, scientists and philosophers. A lot of us know our way around Python, LED circuits, computer science, and Monty Python. Debates about tabs vs. spaces turn us on.

We are a male gay camp.

Everyone is welcome, but we work actively to create a safe gay haven in a heteronormative world.

We're burners.

We try very hard not to be one of those camps that hosts parties at Burning Man that are indistinguishable from parties in San Francisco. Time on playa is too short to waste it by sipping vodka sodas, bopping slowly to some pop diva disco music, and getting judgy looks from tall men with perfect abs.

We are at Burning Man to get lost in dust storms, to jury-rig elaborate outdoor social showers, to fall asleep in a geodesic dome while somebody explains how to manifest aligned consciousness, to watch frat boys swinging from trapezes while removing their own shorts, and to chase sharks across the desert in a whaling ship.

Values

We share a lot of values. If you share them too, you'll fit right in!

No spectators.

Participation is key to being a Turtle. Burning Man is a temporary city, not a music festival. The best experiences come from participating in the civic life of that city, not from watching things other people are doing. We put on multiple events during the week and put a lot of emphasis on active participation in the city.

Everybody works.

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.

If that sounds like too much, that’s fine! Maybe you would like to go on a cruise ship? You will not have to work there at all.

Sliding scale for camp fees.

If we charged everyone equally for what it actually costs to run the camp, the Future Turtles would rapidly turn into a playground for the rich. That is not something we want to see. In 2024, we are switching to an income-based dues system. Fees range from $200 - $1000 (and up) based on your salary.

We also have a NOTAFLOF (No One Turned Away For Lack Of Funds) policy. If you are in a situation where attending Burning Man would create financial hardship, and you apply for Burning Man's Ticket Aid program, your Future Turtles camp dues will be $10.

No drama.

Burning Man is very hard and most people, at some point, have some major emotional moments. Usually a pickle and a nap will fix you right up. If that doesn’t, we have a team of volunteers called the Future Turtles Guardians to help. That said, behavior which creates unnecessary conflict or drama will detract from other peoples’ experience on playa and won't be tolerated.

Gifting

On playa, we aim to create a gorgeous and comfortable hangout for ourselves, our friends, and anyone who visits. Some of the gifts we offer the playa include:

  • A bar serving alcoholic and non-alcoholic drinks
  • Sunset parties
  • A morning Desert HiiT (High Intensity Interval Training) workout. With smoothies!
  • Multiple spaces for lounging, cuddle puddles, and intimate encounters 😈

If providing these gifts to people sounds like your kind of thing, for example, as a mixologist, DJ, fitness instructor, smoothie bar person, or just a greeter or facilitator for any of the above, you're in the right place.

Your Contribution

Turtles always dive in and do any work that needs to be done. If they see another turtle cleaning something, fixing something, or setting something up, they immediately go over and start helping without asking or being asked.

Every turtle will be expected to make a significant work contribution of some sort before or after the burn. Typical ways that Turtles fulfill this responsibility:

  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, helping put away gear in Reno after the event
  4. As a part of the food and beverages team, preparing 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

In addition to those off-playa work opportunities, your obligations on playa include:

  1. Arriving no later than Monday of the event week
  2. Doing assigned work shifts including LNT (cleaning), kitchen shifts, ice runs, greetings and crowd control at events, which may add up to 12-18 hours total during the week
  3. Being on playa and participating in Camp Strike from 9am Sunday morning (the morning after Man Burn) until the camp is fully packed and the site has been raked and restored, which is usually noon Monday

Finally, you can’t camp with the Turtles unless:

  1. You have camped with us before and are a camper in good standing, OR you are sponsored by an existing camper with the approval of camp leadership.
  2. You subscribe to our email newsletter (there is a form at the bottom of this page), read it promptly, and always do all the things that it tells you to do.

I know. Your inbox is a mess and you lose things in there. You are very busy and the burn is a long time away. But trust the process. Set up a filter to mark our newsletter as important. When a newsletter is released, drink some coffee and Ritalin, then make a point of reading it and responding right away. Otherwise you may miss some crucial deadline that is non-optional and you’ll find it impossible to camp with us.

What we provide collectively

Under the principle of Radical Self Reliance, every burner is responsible for providing for all their needs to stay alive in a remote desert lake bed for a week. The Future Turtles collaborates on some of these survival needs, bringing and building them together each year.

  • Large shade structures
  • Generator
  • Field kitchen, where we serve two hot meals daily, with vegan options of course!
  • Drinking water
  • Grey water removal
  • Barebones, outdoor cold showers, featuring hot nekkid boys like you

We usually work to coordinate:

  • Rental bicycles, which are crucial to getting around the city
  • Tents—we own some slick Shiftpods which you can rent, along with cots

As we get closer to the burn, we'll provide more details on exactly what you have to prepare and bring, and we'll recruit volunteers to work on the things that we are going to bring collectively.

A couple more things...

  • Don’t bring a vehicle, RV, or truck unless you are a part of the build team and it is required for that purpose. We don’t have room for them in camp. Most Turtles take the Burner Express Bus and boy is that a great idea, since you avoid huge huge lines getting into and out of the city. (In 2022 the bus saved Turtles 6 hours in line to enter and 12 hours in line to exit).
  • Assume that you will be offline without Internet access or cell service the whole time.
  • Tickets to the event are very hard to get. We can’t make any guarantees, but, historically, we have managed to find tickets for everyone who had been actively participating in preparation during the year. We will guide you through all the opportunities to buy tickets in the lead up to the event.

2025 Application Process

We deliberately keep the Future Turtles camp at about 40 people. Returning Turtles from the last two years have priority. We will open camp registration for Returning Turtles on March 1st.

There will be room for some new Turtles, too. To join the camp as a new Turtle, you need to be sponsored by an existing Turtle who knows you well, will be on playa, and will commit to do your work shifts if you don't.

The sponsorship form opens on June 1st. It will be filled out by your sponsor, not by the new turtle. A great way to find sponsors and to get a feel for if you are going to be a good fit for the camp would be to participate in our spring Reno Work Weekend, which is open to all. You should also attend as many in-person events in NY and SF as you can; they are monthly.

We'll evaluate sponsored Turtles on a first-come, first-served basis. We can't guarantee that we will have room for everyone who is sponsored.

Every year there are many people who camp in open camping or with other camps and still hang out socially with the Turtles on playa. All our events are open to the public, and we are happy to provide advice and logistical help to friends camping in open camping or at other camps, even if we don't have room for someone in our camp.

A couple of principles we take seriously

We value the transformative experience of sensual and consensual touch, play, and interaction. We believe that consent plays a vital part in our connectivity and community. Our vision is that all parties participate in a physical encounter from a place of enthusiasm and autonomy. Consent must be explicitly granted from an individual who is clearly in a state of mind to be able to grant it.

Future Turtles center diversity, equity, and inclusion as core values of our community. Consent culture and safe places are key tenets of the Future Turtles, particularly for people of color, transgender, and non-binary persons.

Inside the storage trailer of the Future Turtles, a young man in a white T-shirt and work gloves is climbing on a stack of wicker benches. To his left and right are shelves filled with boxes of gear. A muscular, shirtless man covered in dust in the desert of Burning Man while visibility is very low due to dust whiteouts. He is wearing giant black wings with El-wire for illumation, ski goggles, several necklaces and bracelets, and shorts. A sunset scene from the desert at Burning Man. There are two major fires in the background. In the foreground, two large buildings in the style of Afro-futurism; a tower about 40 feet high and a squat parthenon-shaped building about 25 feet high with a dozen people standing on the roof looking out at the fire. In the foreground, a mutant vehicle named Airpusher. The base of the vehicle looks like half of a sailing ship. Instead of sails, there is a large digible-shaped balloon. Bicycles and burners are seen throughout. Panoramic view of the playa at Burning Man. In the foreground, the dusty desert with large sculptures sprinkled about. One structure is a digital 88:88, like a digital clock, about 10 feet tall. Burners are riding bicycles and walking around. In the midground, Black Rock City is visible in the form of tents, trucks, shade structures, and geodesic domes. In the background, the mountains. The sky is blue with a few wispy clouds. An artwork in the Black Rock Desert with a sculpture of a polar bear, made of shiny triangles, about 15 feet high. The polar bear is looking out on fragments of white shapes which represent ice floes. The ice is being swallowed by the desert, symbolizing the loss of the Polar Bear's habitat. In the foreground, a lean french twink with little-to-no body hair is wearing a beret with flowers, a backpack, sunglasses, no shirt, and colorful trousers. In the background you see other artworks, bicycles, and burners. A group of five men, seen from behind, walking through the desert. They are approaching the Empyrean Temple on foot. It is a huge wood temple consisting of multiple angular shapes and patterns. The Empyrean Temple at night, lit up dramatically. A portal in front of the temple is in the shape of a four-sided star, with a circular portal behind it. The temple is roughly pyramid shaped, with a steeper pointy tower in the center, made out of wood cut into delicate, abstract geometric patterns. The moon shines above, and burners on foot and on bicycles are seen around. The Empyrean Temple on fire, entirely aflame. In the foreground you see silhouettes of fire safety volunteers, some in complete fireproof outfits, as the flames reach heights of 100 feet and smoke fills the sky. Three dusty, young, muscular men eating some kind of stew from bowls in the Future Turtles kitchen area. Seven people sit around on wicker chairs at night in the desert at Burning Man. One is sitting on another's lap, one is sleeping, two are chatting. There are shiftpod tents in the background, and a cozy string of lightbulbs on the desert dirt ground. A young man sitting in the shade at the Future Turtles eating a bowl of something and waving at the camera. He is wearing an LED rose tiara, long-sleeved black shirt, white long trousers and ankle high leather boots with bright flourescent shoelaces. He has steampunk goggles and an N-95 mask around his neck and a necklace with a round pendant labeled Ego Check. In the background, it is clearly a dusty day as the camp across the street is barely visible. A sunset scene from the Future Turtles shade structure. Looking over the DJ equipment at a shirtless young man doing an exhuberant dance by himself. On the left side, two beefy shirtless men are making out. In the background, you can see our neighbors camp across the street where there is an aerial hoop structure set up for acrobatics. A muscular man rests on his bicycle at dawn at Burning Man. The dust makes it hard to see the background but you can make out the mountains and some mutant vehicles. He is wearing a large black scarf, no shirt, black pants, and a headlamp around his neck.