Wall Street executives at Burning Man? You bet. Though there’s nothing farther from the cutthroat, moneymaking world of Wall Street than the anticapitalist, anticorporate festival of radical self-expression known as Burning Man, we found several New York business executives and Wall Street types who are heading out West this week and staying through Labor Day. In the dusty, storm-ridden desert flatlands north of Reno, Nevada, is a place dubbed Black Rock City, home of the biggest little countercultural festival in the world.

“I first went out there in 2003 because a classmate from the Stanford Business School had an art project on the playa,” says a senior executive for a major Wall Street company, who asked not to be named. One of the main draws for him and most of the other 50,000 participants expected this year are the massive collaborative art projects, like last year’s giant Belgian Waffle or the 50-foot stick figure that gets torched at the end of the week—the burning man that gives the festival its name.

“That’s the attraction. You create something from nothing, it’s remarkable for a short period of time, and then it’s gone,” says the executive, whose own participation includes cooking gourmet meals and distributing them for free to the masses. Other attendees contribute three-dimensional creative works, all of which result in a temporary psychedelic city of art and theme camps on “the playa,” the ancient lakebed where the event is held.

The Stanford classmate in 2003 created a multimedia installation that paid tribute to the sun, with trapeze artists performing at sunset, music synchronized with the sunrise, and, thanks to the creative tinkering of a couple of Silicon Valley engineers, a sound system with light projections. “You could actually watch the sound emanating through the light across the playa.”

But this is hardly the first time business people have attended the festival. Past attendees from the business world include Amazon C.E.O. Jeff Bezos, Google co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin, and Google C.E.O. Eric Schmidt, among others.

Of course, because the nature of Burning Man is to leave all commercial trappings behind, the organizers of the event are loath to tally the number and type of professionals in attendance, although a spokeswoman noted that “we do have a large group coming for their corporate retreat this year. They are building an art project.”

And the business folks who go (albeit anonymously, in the spirit of the event) say they get something out of this nonhierarchical, open-society environment. “When I return, I think I’m a far better executive, in terms of innovation and creativity,” says the senior executive. “And each year that I come back, I’m better for it. I think my team and my company are better for it. I stay creative and expose myself to new ideas.”

Leslie Bucksor, a partner in a New York financial-consulting firm, and his wife, Cory, will be camping out with his business partner this year; this will be his 10th year on the playa. And he may do business, if the necessity arises. In 2002, Bucksor left the camp three times to work on patent applications at Bruno’s Casino and Country Club, a nearby desert dive. “If it’s the only way I can be there, I will do it,” Bucksor says. “It’s such an important experience for me.”