hops_scout

No point in expecting TRUTH2 or SCOUTER30 to reply. Both of those accounts have been closed by the particular person who wrote the posts.

Well it's been over a month since I posted this. I had to release a little bit of frustration because at the moment, the Scouting I get to experience is online. I'm registered back home as an ASM, but not involved with any troop or crew down here at school. Many of you know me on here. Some know me off of here as well. I have had the opportunity to meet Eamonn in person (dang accent made it hard to understand him:)) and I've had the opportunity to correspond back and forth with mk9750. I think they can both tell you if you can't see it in my posts that I don't care what other people think of me. There's one person's opinion that holds any water-- MINE. I listen to others, but I take it all with a grain of salt. I understand one person's values are going to be different than another's. Eagledad, I'll sign off with it right now because I already have had numerous experiences that just thrilled me.. I'll look and if I didn't already tell that story, I'll do so here soon.. Here you go.. I LOVE this Scouting stuff.

I wear what's commonly called a "Rigger's Belt" that could be used as a rappel harness in an emergency. It's pretty thick webbing and a solid buckle. I got it at the National Jamboree. One of the guys I worked with made them.

It's a great thing to live in America. You can believe whatever you want. If you want to be an atheist, you've got that right! If you want to be a Muslim, go for it! If you want to be Catholic, go right ahead! So why can't people leave others alone? Why must an atheist attack a Christian and why must that Christian attack an atheist? I like that you can be whoever you want to be. I get to believe what I WANT to believe; not what the government TELLS me to believe. Because I like that freedom, I believe others should have the same opportunity. I might not like that this person is atheist, or that person is Muslim, etc but I realize that he or she has the same freedom that I do. It upsets me to see the City of Philadelphia doing this to the local council there, but laws are laws. The BSA is the one who decided to go against the law. Sure the Supreme Court decided that the BSA has the right to do it. But with everything, decisions come with consequences. Keep the thread on-topic. If you want to express feelings about the ommission of a specific post, feel free to PM me.

Reading Scouter.com, Meritbadge.net, and CollegeConfidential lately Ive found I must know very little about Scouting and its purpose. Im lost as to how that could have happened- Ive been active in the Boy Scouts of America for over 12 years. I wont claim to be genius and I dont believe I know everything there is to know about Scouts. But I didnt realize that becoming an Eagle Scout was the focus or the purpose of the Boy Scouts of America. Did you know that a reason for joining Scouts was directly related to winning scholarships? Or admission to an elite college? What about getting an automatic promotion in some branches of the United States military? I sit in my dorm room this afternoon dumbfounded. I will willingly admit that I am not an Eagle Scout. To many (both inside and outside the organization) that puts me outside the elitist category when it comes to Scouts. To some, that means that I was not successful in Scouts and my troop was not successful in helping me. So with that in mind, that means I must be a failure. I can live with that- Ive failed before. I failed Calculus my senior year in high school, I have lost ballgames because I missed the ball, I have been denied numerous scholarships. So did I fail in the game of Scouting by not making Eagle? People tell me and have told me before that I will regret my decision not to attain the rank of Eagle Scout. Many who read this will probably look at this post as me showing regret or maybe even jealousy toward those who can claim to be an Eagle Scout. Take it as you wish I am here to show that it is indeed NOT a mission of the Boy Scouts of America for every Boy Scout to become an Eagle Scout. I truly wonder how many people realize that becoming an Eagle Scout is NOT included in the Mission Statement or Vision Statement of the Boy Scouts of America. Mission Statement: The mission of the Boy Scouts of America is to prepare young people to make ethical and moral choices over their lifetimes by instilling in them the values of the Scout Oath and Law. Vision Statement: The Boy Scouts of America will prepare every eligible youth in America to become a responsible, participating citizen and leader who is guided by the Scout Oath and Law. Since Eagle Scout is not mentioned in those statements, why is it that every example of a Scout be an Eagle Scout? One poster on MB.net mentions that many of the boys in a troop who are Eagle Scouts are not only successful in Scouts, but also in varsity athletics. At CollegeConfidential, a poster asks if it would be wise for a friends son to join Scouts in 8th grade so he can have Eagle Scout on his resume when it comes time to apply to selective colleges. Scouts are no longer about values, citizenship, and outdoors. It is now for becoming an Eagle Scout in order to be successful as a Scout and Eagle Scout is for the resume. Boy was I wrong or what.

I''ll tell ya-- I was absolutely worthless.. yep

Why can''t younger son change into Scout pants in the bathroom at the meeting place?

A similar discussion came up at Jamboree talking about being tied in and such. I believe it was brought up something about if you''re any higher than 6 feet off the ground on any kind of tower, etc that you are expected to be belayed or connected safely in some form.

We currently own 20 Timberlines. We have the 4-man Timberline Outfitters. All of them have been bought within the last 3 years. No more than two per tent. Adults have their own normally. These are for normal camping in a regular campsite where they can be pulled right out of the trailer. For backpacking (starting to get there) and for canoeing we just bought 9 backpacking tents. I don''t recall the name at the moment, but we bought these for $100/apiece. So we have a lot of money invested in tents and we take extreme care of them. And yes our Scouts are pretty well expected to use them and take care of them.

scoutldr, 50,674 tonite:)

At least MB.net and Scouter.com didn''t go down at the same time! Then a few of us would have been in serious trouble! Good to see it back and running. Thanks Terry!

Our troop always has a surplus as far as I can recall. Our fundraising does fairly well because we offer the incentive that for every Scout who sells $100 of popcorn gets their rechartering all paid for. Otherwise, the troop has annual dues of $16 along with Boys Life and BSA registration. This has allowed us to buy high quality camping equipment. In the last 18 months we have bought 18 Eureka Timberline 4 outfitter tents (retail $230 or so) and 9 2-person backpacking tents ($150 retail I think). Also we have recently obtained a canoe trailer and I would expect to see the troop buy a couple canoes in the next year or so. Right now we have access through adult leaders to 6 so this summer on the float trip the troop rented two canoes and a trailer from the council. Saved a bunch of money:)

My favorite one to take was probably Climbing. I think my favorite to teach would be either First Aid, Climbing, or Wilderness Survival. I didn't finish Wilderness Survival as a youth, but I enjoyed that kind of stuff. I'm going into a healthcare field (athletic training) and enjoy first aid stuff. My least favorite would have to be Family Life. I never did finish that one either but I hated working on it at all! Probably my least favorite to teach would be that.

kenk, I think sometimes Senior Patrol Leaders have that problem too.. Or maybe that's just me... or maybe it was just early symptoms or the Scoutmaster syndrome?

John, I just come in www . scouter . com and it brings me right to the forums. I've only encountered the problem a couple times.

I'd be interested to hear how often you'd replace rope at an event like the National Jamboree. At your rate of 250-300 rappels, you'd have to replace the rope every day for the tower I was working. That said, our director said in the caves that he works (doing some Scouting programs) they replace every 1400 rappels or so. Sure I believe there needs to be some sort of standard... but what?

I can offer a similar experience not from Scouts, but high school football. Had a teammate killed about 13 months ago in a car accident. He was on his way to football. For the wake, we were instructed shirt and tie and to come on our own rather than as a team. Our coach felt this would be best for the parents. For the funeral, we were there in shirt and tie, but we also had our jerseys on over the top of the shirt and tie. Our coach was asked to speak. Tell ya, it was quite an experience there being 200+ people at the funeral I'd guess and about 50 were in football uniforms. He, BTW, was buried in his jersey. Sure, I think it's a great idea to be in uniform.

From your description of him, and my limited experience at Jambo, OJ and I seem very similar.. One reason I'm not a huge fan of reading is all of the required reading that is now our high school English classes. We read Shakespeare every year. And we had other reading we had to do including some summertime stuff. That really turned me off to reading though I still pull out some other stuff now and then. I've gotten away from fiction stuff quite a bit. I prefer non-fiction whether it be Human anatomy, baseball, outdoors, military, West Point by far my favorite subject to read, etc.

We solve the Friday Night ditch by packing up much of the troop and patrol equipment throughout the day on Friday. We are done with most of it by about 12:30PM and camp has pretty well wound down by that point too.

First things that come to mind for me are of course the Scout Handbook (and actually read it!) and the Scout Fieldbook though I like the previous edition better than the newer that I have. Also, any of the Hatchet books. There's Hatchet, Brian's Return, Brian's Winter I believe, and Brian's River I think. Some other suggestions I've got a Basic Essentials: Knots book, a Backpacking book, A Teen's Gameplan by Lou Holtz, and I Dare You by William Danforth.

WWW, I'd have to agree with you about the council and higher should be supporting the troops rather than vice versa.

ManyIrons, Good to hear from ya! I truthfully could not tell you who in all reality picks summer camp year to year. I don't remember having a whole lot of input while I was a youth in the troop. We've talked about camps before and we've talked about high adventure trips before, but it seems to me adults seem to still make the deciding choice.. I know our adult leaders really like Camp Sunnen for the Patrol Method stuff. The cooking, the patrol award things I seem to remember, etc. Typically thet troop starts talking about next year for summer camp near the end of the week at camp and the next couple weeks after. We seem to have the decision made in July for the following summer normally. After last year's summer camp, I'd be really surprised if the youth indeed did decide to return to Sunnen. After this summer, it wouldn't surprise me at all. Isn't that strange? One year's difference... Some of your points.... Staff- I've heard through the grapevine changes in staff being made week to week. This comes from multiple sources who I would consider to be reliable. I can also understand changes being made year to year, but I've also heard complete turn over at times? That is a little more than I could really understand. You say adult leaders teaching MB classes at Sunnen? I can remember a few, yes. I'm not entirely sure where I stand on that either; I guess it depends on the merit badge. Food- I can remember some BAD food and I can remember some decent food. I also remember LACK of food. Sure, you can run into all of those with the patrol cooking too. But the BAD food can be a good teaching point. I can remember the first time we went to Camp Sunnen: I wasn't a great cook, and I was the most expereinced Scout in the patrol. I was a Troop Guide for the NSP. We had some AWFUL meals, but you can learn something there. Can't very well when somebody else cooks AWFUL food. Dining hall I hope they get a new one. The one at Camp Van seems nice. They were originally going to build it similar to what Camp Sunnen has.. Waterfront- For one thing, I don't quite worry about the aquatics personally because I don't do them. I never did a swim test at summer camp. Wasn't a water person. However, I can recall being told at Joy to go straight to the showers after being in the lake. There was something in the water they didn't want to dry on your skin. I've seen the swimming area at Sunnen at multiple times throughout the year. I dont recall anything that stands out.. Shooting Sports- not much can be done. The ammo has to paid for somehow. Trails West is just lucky enough to have a corporate supporter there that Okaw Valley doesn't. Just something that has to be noted with everything else. Camp Joy's COPE course and Climbing tower are great! I've gone through the COPE course there. No bias there! Trading Post- no point in me commenting good/bad about that. I have no experience with it. I'm thrilled Okaw Valley is updating facilities. I hope that continues. I know our troop has talked several times about why we don't go to Camp Joy. I can't say whether it falls on deaf ears or whether it falls into a matter of "can't do much about it" kind of thing at the moment. I dont know. I just know that Mr. Rebholz and Matt Wagner have sat down many times to talk about this issue. We seem to appear as if we don't care about Camp Joy and the negative stuff I've said here seems to reinforce that, but that's NOT the case! We'd love to go to our council camp, but it doesn't give the same experience that we can get elsewhere. Summer Camp is the highlight of our calendar unless there's high adventure that summer. We want to instill the patrol method when we actually have the patrols there. Summer Camp, by far, is our best-attended event of the year. We're working to change that and a lot of those changes are being made through learning the ropes at summer camp. We have to do what's best for our troop and our boys before we do what's best for the council and the council camp. I didn't really intend for this to become a Camp Joy verses Camp Sunnen kind of thing. I was intending on it being more in general, but it's happened. Oh well.. ManyIrons, thanks for the input. I guess the biggest thing is each person has to stand on their own two feet, huh?

A friend of ours has got a lot of Native American in him, I believe nearly full Cherokee. Somehow we had gotten onto this topic at a graduation party; he said everytime he goes to the airport he gets pulled aside. But he said he's got absolutely no problems with it. He says if they think it's going to "keep America protected" that's fine. This is same guy who in 2003 when the build up for Iraq and the start of Operation Iraqi Freedom was going on, he tried enlisting anywhere he could. They wouldn't let him and he was really disappointed. That was at age 50!

Program? Does working as a patrol not count as program anymore? To me, that's the most important thing and I don't see how the patrol method works in a dining-hall camp.

Here is the article again for anybody who did not see it in the other one.. http://outside.away.com/outside/culture/200707/boy-scouts-1.html The Big Idea Demerit Badge Is Boy Scouts of America doing enough to keep kids safe? By Annette McGivney MY TEN-YEAR-OLD SON, Austin, likes to hike, camp, and climb. He toddled across the Alaskan tundra at age two, hiked to the bottom of the Grand Canyon at four, and floated the Green River at six. In other words, he's a perfect candidate for the Boy Scouts of America. In some corners of the country it would be considered unpatriotic not to sign him up. But here's the truth: I'd rather see Austin pierce his tongue than earn a merit badge. My distrust of the Scouts reached a tipping point in March, when 12-year-old Michael Auberry, from Greensboro, North Carolina's Troop 230, disappeared while on a camping trip in the Blue Ridge Parkway. Fortunately, after a four-day search, Auberry was found alive and well. He'd wandered away from camp, it was later reported, and gotten lost. I was relieved, of course, that Auberry emerged unhurt. But then I got angry. What irked me wasn't the incident itself but the way Scout leaders reacted. I had followed the Auberry story on the Associated Press news wire, reading regional and national coverage of the search. Instead of apologiesa kid had been lost, after allwhat I saw was a round of collective back-patting by Scout leaders across the country who proudly recounted how the wayward boy had used his Scout-taught survival skills. "Preparing kidsthat's our motto. That's what we do," Ely Brewer, of the Mid-Iowa Council of Boy Scouts, told Des Moines TV station KCCI. Fine. Auberry knew how to make a bed out of leaves. But here's a thought: How about making sure he doesn't wander off in the first place? Auberry's epic actually had a much brighter ending than at least a dozen incidents over the past decade in which Scouts have died or nearly died. Most infamously, in 2005, two Scouts and five leaders were killed in two separate lightning incidents and one power-line mishap. In unrelated BSA accidents that same summer, Chase Hathenbruck, 15, drowned in New Mexico's Animas River, and Luke Sanburg, 13, drowned in the Yellowstone. The year before, Kristoffer Jones, 14, died when he fell 1,000 feet from a sheer cliff while hiking in Utah's Zion National Park. But even these tragedies wouldn't be so tragic if not for the hubris that still managed to pervade the Boy Scout leadership. In March 2006, nine Scouts and three leaders were backpacking in Arizona's Superstition Mountains when they became stranded by a snowstorm. Unprepared for the conditions, they had to be rescued by helicopter. "The boys proved themselves to be men," leader David Perkins told Phoenix TV stations. Or the leaders proved themselves to be inexperienced: A severe winter storm had been forecast days before. I live in Flagstaff, Arizona, and had planned a trek in the Superstitions that same weekend, but I postponed it after a routine weather check. The typical response from Scout leaders to all of the above? Freak accidents. Tell that to the parents who've sued the Scouts in recent years. One case concerns Matthew Tresca, 16, who was killed in August 2002 by lightning at a Pennsylvania Scout camp. Even though a severe thunderstorm warning was in effect for the area and lightning was visible in the sky, Tresca and other boys were sent by Scout leaders from the safety of the dining hall to their tents, where Tresca died after a bolt struck a metal tent spike. In 2004, in testimony for a lawsuit brought by Tresca's parents against the BSA in New Jersey Superior Court, meteorologist Ronald Holle, a lightning expert formerly with the National Severe Storms Laboratory in Norman, Oklahoma, concluded, "The national and local levels of the Boy Scouts of America failed completely to take into account any recent or current information on the impacts of lightning. The management of the risk of lightning was extraordinarily poor and at an extremely low level of understanding compared to similar organizations. If planning had been emphasized at the national level, and local individuals had used this information correctly, the completely preventable death of Matthew Tresca would have been avoided." The BSA reached an undisclosed settlement with the Trescas, part of which prohibited the family from talking to the media. THEN THERE'S THE BOY Scouts' mission itself, which is "to prepare young people to make ethical and moral choices" (read the complete text at scouting.org), making no mention of wilderness skills. "We emphasize outdoor activities, safety, and stewardship, but do not consider ourselves an outdoor or survival training program," says BSA associate director of marketing and communications Eric Moore. That would make more sense if troops spent as much time playing kickball as camping. "Unfortunately, many Scout leaders do not possess the level of decision-making skills that is required in the outdoors," says Ken Phillips, chief of emergency services for Grand Canyon National Park, who has been involved in numerous backcountry rescues of Scout troops during his 23 years there. "Many of the leaders of these trips are not used to the wilderness environment. The kids don't make bad decisions; the leaders do." I can hear the protests, so let me answer: Yes, with more than three million Scouts and a million volunteer leaders in the United States, it's inevitable that accidents will happen. And competent, even excellent, Scout leaders with years of experience and training in wilderness first aid do exist. Plus the BSA mobilizes a vast number of volunteer leaders who sincerely want to help kids. But even kindergartners are taught to learn from mistakes. The BSA, meanwhile, won't divulge accident data and declined to share any statistics for this story. And they've let at least one opportunity to learn from other wilderness-education organizations wither on the vine. Drew Leemon, risk-management director for the National Outdoor Leadership School, says the BSA joined the committee for the annual Wilderness Risk Management Conference from 1997 to 2001, but declined to share accident data with the group. "The Boy Scouts expose so many kids to the outdoors, it's phenomenal," says Leemon. "We wanted the Boy Scouts to be more involved. We hoped their participation would rally the troops and lead to Scout leaders attending the conference. But it didn't happen in any great numbers." Of course, the BSA national office encourages wilderness-safety and first-aid training for Scout leaders. But participation is completely voluntary. According to BSA director of camping and conservation Frank Reigelman, the group's primary means of educating troop leaders is through the Boy Scouts' Fieldbook and other BSA literature. "We provide various publications and planning tools to help volunteers with trip planning. The material is out there if they choose to use it," says Reigelman, who emphasizes that it's hard to enforce requirements in a volunteer organization with 47,000 troops across the country. That argument would be more convincing if they didn't manage to exclude gays and atheists from all BSA chapters. I may rue the day I wished a tongue-piercing on my only son. The mere thought makes me cringe. But at least I know he won't need to be rescued. --- I for one wish that Wilderness First Aid was offered more in my area. It's hard to find it. The American Red Cross offered it for a year or so, but not recently. I believe this article has a lot of truthful stuff in it, but she loses all credibility when she mentions gays and atheists. Wrong place for it.