Leaderboard

We did the Wind River Range in Wyoming. That was where the bugs were but it was stunning. My understanding is that the start of August would be fine there but don't quote me on that. We tried to do a 50 mile loop in about 6 days and we were just beating ourselves up. My GPS said we were doing something like 500' vertical for every mile horizontal. So about a mile vertical every day. We finally decided to cut a corner off of our loop and make it 38 miles or something. The scouts started smiling. Now, this was all because I, the old man in the crowd, pulled a muscle in my knee because I wasn't d

There are a lot of nice backpacking trails in Colorado. So much that I've never been to Philmont. Philmont isn't about beauty, so I understand why scouts would like it. To answer your question, no, I haven't taken scouts to the San Juans. So you can get better specific trail information from others. However, in other HA trips I've taken scouts in Colorado and Wyoming, the things I'd be aware of is that 1) June in the high country is not summer, it's late winter/early spring and I've had 10 foot snow drifts to deal with over July 4th. Given the run off, trails can be very wet and mudd

There are not a lot of outdoor oriented merit badges like Bird Study required for Eagle which I think is a shame. Camping is really the only one. Bird Study of all the outdoors badges is probably the easiest for any scout, urban or rural, to complete because bird study can occur anywhere. It would also be helpful if more people learned the ethics of bird watching because some of these vagrants and rarities are being pursued to the point of harassment.

Patrol leaders ought to be doing gear checks before setting out. There is a rank requirement to present oneself to your PL properly dressed and packed... this should be standard operating procedure NOT a 1-and-done requirement. Prior to the 1st campout of the year(or even more often), the PL (or another scout) should be bringing in their pack to a patrol/troop meeting and demonstrate what and how to pack it. (This would fulfill a req for Communications mB). Scouting done right can fulfill requirements by just doing scouting right. Rank and mB requirements are not the program, but kn