High School Yearbooks. Everyone has them, and everyone shudders a little at the thought of looking through those freshmen pictures, but have you ever wondered what it is like to work on it? Probably not, so the fact that there is an annual 2025 Northwest Yearbook Workshop Summer Camp may surprise you. Yearbook camp is a four day, overnight camp located at the University of Puget Sound in Tacoma, about an hour drive from Seattle depending on the exhilarating I-5 traffic. I am, in fact, a yearbook photographer for my school and even though this is my third and last year of being in yearbook, I have never been able to go to yearbook camp up until this year, making it a mystery to me as it probably is to you. “What do you actually do there?” “Where even is the yearbook room?” and “What on Earth is a yerd?” are all questions that are frequently asked to those on the Yearbook staff. We tend to keep things secretive, but don’t worry, I can let you in on a few things.
At 9:30 am, all of the yerds* met at our school to drive to Tacoma. All the sophomores piled in a bus, driven by our dedicated, iconic yearbook moderator and corgi enthusiast, Mr. D, and the upperclassmen drove in cars. During the car ride, I was trying to gauge what I was getting into, and I was told that there was a Mormon camp going on at the same time. Now, I had a small, irrational fear of Mormons ever since I made the questionable decision of watching Keep Sweet, Pray, and Obey* while I was in Utah, so I was slightly concerned, yet open to changing my opinion, as I had never actually met a Mormon.
Once we all arrived, we unpacked the bus, which included: 3 iMacs, 3 digital cameras, 1 juggling kit, 2 spikeball nets and balls, along with 50+ dollars worth of Trader Joe’s snacks. About an hour later we went to the yearbook conference room where we had our first lecture to talk about themes, when suddenly, the main coordinator said, “You have to be careful if you are going to choose a one-word theme. I’m looking at you, Prep,” then proceeded to show his careful decision of using “If” as his theme from a prior year.
After getting called out, all the yerds piled into the common area of our dorm floor to decide on the most important part of the camp: the theme. We had already brainstormed ideas for words and crossed many out before even coming to camp, but we still had to narrow it down to one. We were in this room for probably more than four hours, using various methods of voting (some of which were questionable) and discussing the pros and cons of each word. In the end, everyone submitted their votes between the final two words, and the editors-in-chief went off with Mr. D to come to the final decision. A lot of time went by and it was about 11:00 pm—everyone had gone to bed—when the editors finally came out of the room. I was sharing a room with two of the editors, about to go to sleep, when they came in and told me, "We'll announce the theme tomorrow with everyone, but now, we have to watch the latest episode of Love Island. Do you wanna watch?” They had been waiting all day for this momentous occasion (watching Love Island), and I was intrigued. I had never watched Love Island before and was jumping in at season 7, episode 32—yet now I was fully invested.
In between the many hours of work that first day, we went to the cafeteria for dinner. Walking in, I was immediately confronted with a large line. I thought, “Oh, this is probably for the salad bar or the pasta bar,” but no, it was for the soda fountain. Twenty or more Mormons, plus two of our own yerds, were committed to this soda fountain. Every. Single. Meal. I even had the pleasure of watching someone get vanilla-flavored root beer at 7:30 am.
Dinner ended, and the yerds went outside to play Crossnet*** and Spikeball. While in line, I spotted some of the leaders of the Mormon camp setting up a dance. To the side, I saw a counselor in a small group instructing their campers that “If you see any behavior that is suggestive or someone is too close to you, shut it down!” with their arms in an X shape. After their pep talks in their groups, hundreds of campers went to the center and started dancing the Macarena. Yerds loved a good dance party, especially after our editor-in-chief won the dance competition at the opening meeting and got awarded a 30-second dance party button, so naturally we tried to get in. To our dismay, there were bouncers at both entrances checking for wristbands that we did not have. But did this stop us from dancing the Macarena at the side of the plaza? Absolutely not.
On Wednesday, I woke up bright and early at 7:00, just in time to get ready and eat breakfast, which ended at 8:00. All of the sophomore togs (photographers) went to a workshop and then learned how to take photos with me and the photographer editor-in-chief. The sophomore and junior designers were hard at work coming up with potential layouts for pages. The senior designers were editing all of the pages to make sure they were perfect. However, there were a few detrimental setbacks along the way. First, we were all using the guest free Wi-Fi from the university and were working in the basement floor of the dorms, so everything was moving pretty slow. Second, the website that we used to make these pages, Walsworth Yearbook 360, kept crashing. One editor was working on a page for more than an hour when suddenly the website crashed, and she lost all the work that she had done. After this tragic incident, we all went outside and decided to decompress by playing intense Spikeball matches. Mr. D decided to treat everyone to slushies at the local 7/11, so we all piled in our cars and went. Most 7/11s were pretty sketchy, and this one was no different, but we all got our slushies at around 10:30 and headed home to sleep and/or watch the rest of the Love Island episode.
Thursday rolled around and tensions were high. Editors were rushing to edit the pages and have everything done because at 7:00, the camp directors would start judging each school’s poster board, complete with printouts of the cover, the end sheets, the theme page, and potential layout designs. I was tasked with finding photos from last year that would look good on the end sheets and the theme page. These wouldn’t be in the final yearbook since they all had to be photos of the 2025–2026 school year, but nonetheless, I took this job very seriously. We didn’t have our server with us, so we only had a select few photos to choose from. The editor told me she wanted a picture of someone diving in, so I looked through the swim photos. The only photo that would remotely work was one with a person from another school right in the center so I edited that person out. (Sorry to whoever that was, I promise it is not personal.)
Then came potentially the worst part of it all: the printer issues. The printer was very selective with when and what it printed. I estimated that a total of one and a half hours was spent troubleshooting the printer and trying to get it to work. We finally asked the Mormons to help us (in spirit, as they were not really there), and to everyone’s surprise, the whole page printed! We assembled the board and then went to see all the other schools’ boards. We realized that Mr. D had forgotten to sign us up, so we were in the last slot to get the feedback, and the long wait began.
During this waiting time, we aggressively played Spikeball and Crossnet with other schools because, obviously, we had to win. One of our yerds challenged two kids from the Mormon camp to a dance-off using the 30-second dance party button and, in my opinion at least, won. Time went by, the sun went down, yet we were still waiting. 8:00, 9:00, 10:00—but eventually, 11:00 rolled around and Mr. D got us all pizza that we gulped down in less than two minutes since many of the seniors didn’t eat lunch because they were working. We did two-minute planks and 2018 TikTok dances to keep us awake in the final stretch. Finally, at 11:23 pm, we heard the angelic words, “We’re ready for you.” We stepped into the room and listened to them give feedback. Based on that feedback, they were impressed with our pages, but not completely on board with our theme—but we didn’t really care. We liked it.
We went to our dorms, watched the latest episode of Love Island, and went to sleep. The next day, we woke up at 7:00 and went to the awards ceremony where we disappointingly got honorable mention. We packed our bags, got in the cars and bus, and headed home. Mr. D got all the freshmen Starbucks again to end the trip—but not without taking a group selfie with somebody named Jerry. To this day, nobody knows who this mystery Jerry is, but we were glad that he was included in the 2025 yearbook camp photos.
Now I know that going into this article, you probably expected it to be more about yearbook camp and not at all about a Mormon camp, but the true yerd summer camp experience is just incomplete without it. You also might be wondering about what our theme is for the 2026 yearbook, but I’ve already said enough—and the first rule of Yearbook is: a yerd never reveals the theme.
*Yearbook nerds specific to our school.
**For those who have made the correct decision of not watching this show, it is about Warren Jeffs who is the cult leader of FLDS, an extremist sect of Mormonism, and is currently serving a Life Sentence in Texas.
***Like four-square mixed with volleyball.