W+K Studio Blog

The LumberJack Offsite (Studio Retreat 2011) from curtis pachunka on Vimeo.

This year the studio headed out to Caldera for 2 days for some team-building exercises. We seperated into teams for a little friendly competition (starring: Two-man Saws, Tree Stumps, Axes, Beards, Flap-jacks, Suspenders, Sasquatches, and Plaids) a week prior.

See it with sound here.

On Friday, the morning of the retreat we got fired up with a dose of sugar from Voodoo doughnuts and got our Team photos in order. Soon after we got onto our busses for the trek towards the high desert of Caldera.

During our ride we had an individual competition to award 2 prizes for the best Instagram photo (#studioretreat or #wkstudioretreat) as we were got ready.

And now we present the Team Photos:

After lunch we started the team competitions which were hosted by ex-studio Hall-of-famer camp counselors, Dominic and Aubrey. The events were: creating a beard from found objects (primarily from nature). Next was Torture Obstacle Course. Then Cream Pie Tug-of-War. Plus Improv Cocktail Mixing and lastly TempLowBakTats. Which were a perfect segue into our lumberjack cocktail hour/dinner. After dinner Sef and crew got some dance tracks together for all to dance to.

The night wound down with a bonfire, night canoeing, star-gazing and sleeping in teepees.

Click to see the retreat in super duper quicksilver vision

Some highlights:

• David “Crazylegs” Potter
• Human pyramid 1 and 2
• The Return of Bob White
• Lederhosen
• Glass bottle melting
• Hot Sauce on beards
• Tasty food
• SAS training sponsored by Nick and Josh
• Walker man-handling a cooler full of red tecate beer cans and ice 300 yards in the dark only to realize that once the cooler was opened it was full of red soda cans instead.
• Search parties formed to find people who were safely in their tents sleeping.

Snippets of memories:

• “The Lumberjack tramp-stamp contest took a close second to stargazing.”
• “Hey dawg. We good?”
• “Awesome creative beard building talent.”
• “Due to time constraints of the tramp stamp event, Joe sent Sef and I to his tipi to find his duffel bag, retrieve the indicated pair of jeans with holes in the crotch area, and make the jeans into cutoffs. As Sef was cutting them, I was thinking, wow, that’s kind of short. And then, as you might recall as we were waiting for Joe to appear, he requested the scissors back to his tipi. When I got there, Joe said, ‘you guys could have cut these shorter.’”
• “Bearded-saw dance. This memory is deeply embedded, and I’ll never ever forget it.”
• “MC heart felt apology to WM, after he nervously blurted out “F*** you, W” while he was on stage receiving his MVP award.”
• “We played a “friendly” game of bocce ball, and on my team were Derek Kim, Josh Boston, Michele (Lights-out) Lefore. We dominated, The End.”
• “Drawing a flaming penis on the back of one of my coworkers.”
• “Ewwww – - pomegranate liquor and toasted pretzels.”
• “Check your inbox.”

And some other memories from those not able to come:

• “Laying on my bed fevering in the fetal position at home and looking at your motherf***ing Instagram posts all. weekend. Long. That was my favorite part.”
• “Working on Roflcon signage. The best.”

The next day the only activity was just hanging out. You can see it all in pictorial form below.

Thanks for all the memories.