Colleagues paddle alongside a pod of orca whales. A dozen employees shout encouragement as an executive overcomes her acrophobia by traversing a balance beam 30 feet above the ground. A sales team zips down a line 20 stories above the rain forest. The IT staff, having dismounted from their horses, learn to pause on the backcast before tossing a dry fly in search of steelhead.

Doesn't sound like your typical business meeting? That's exactly the point.

Increasingly, businesses are realizing that meeting in the conference room with a whiteboard and stale doughnuts isn't the best way to build a sense of camaraderie among employees. Getting away to a plush hotel in another town may serve part of the purpose, but it's still a meeting in the end. It helps when the surrounding environment directly fosters teamwork and creative problem solving, and a number of outdoor-oriented resorts and tours have emerged to fulfill demand for adventure-based corporate retreats.

"Companies have become very interested in alternative team-building exercises lately," says Rob Thorlakson, sales and marketing director  for Sun Mountain Lodge in Okanogan County. "So we created 'The Wounded Pilot.' Groups form reconnaissance teams and search behind enemy lines for the injured crew member, who they must then treat and carry to safety. There are even traitors hidden in the search party to add variables."

Sun Mountain Lodge recentl y completed renovations of its Pasayten Room, which accommodates up to 300. Meeting attendees can break for a fly-fishing class before heading to the Methow River to angle for steelhead. Or they can cycle a continuous nine-mile trail for an espresso in Winthrop, snowmobile on more than 400 acres, or travel by horseback or sleigh to a buckaroo breakfast or cowboy camp dinner.

The Methow Valley is renowned for its vast terrestrial vistas. It also has more than 200 miles of cross-country ski and snowshoe trails and even more mountain biking options, so conducting a meeting here makes sense in any season.

But if the Inland Empire seems too close, there are options farther afield  some are near traditional resort destinations like Whistler, British Columbia, while others are almost off the grid.

"Eddie Bauer came to us and said they wanted to create a meeting like no one among their executives had ever seen before," explains Scott Chreist, CEO of Adventura Consulting, a Redmond-based company that specializes in "teaming" programs.

Although team building is integral to Adventura's mission, the company's products also include "recreational play," a series of games designed to explore interrelationships, and "developmental programming," a longterm consulting service.

"Our first goal with Eddie Bauer was to help this new team get to know each other," Chreist says. "The second goal was to look at the psychology of their team's dynamics."

Adventura Consulting designs about 150 programs a year for Microsoft, as well as courses for Alaska Airlines, Boeing, Google and many other local and national companies.

Because Eddie Bauer had recently added several executives, Adventura designed a program that began with an icebreaker. The participants were told to come to work with three days' worth of casual, active clothing. They received kayaking instruction on the banks of Lake Washington. They then paddled to the middle of the lake, tied up to one another and conducted their first meeting. They put out near Kenmore, where vans took them to Woodinville's Willows Lodge, "base camp" and home of Adventura's High Ropes Challenge Course.

Participants at the challenge course climb a cargo net to a series of platforms and fixtures, such as balance beams and ziplines suspended 30 feet in the air, each large enough to hold a meeting of six to eight participants. Instructors are stationed about the room, but participants determine the group's route through the course.