BWCAfan

With just personal gear and no water, I would like to see that pack weight under 25#. You can save weight on clothing and raingear, really pay attention to weight on everything. Cut out things like an individual first aid kit, any eating equipment other than a plastic spoon and an empty cream cheese container for an eating bowl. The advice to go on a shakedown and leave anything that doen't get used is good. When backpacking you have to really think about how to get the maximum utility from every item that each person carries. Be brutal; if it isn't absolutely needed, leave it at home.

I am calling around to find a troop that has agood Vanturing partol, since that is what my son (and I (if my screen name doesn't show it)) really likes to do. I feel very bad about leaving behind the remaining scouts because they could get so much more from the program, but maybe if several boys leave at once (and we are going to send a letter to each commitee member with our reasons for leaving)it will sink in to the commitee that they need to do something. All of the boys that are thinking of leaving are Star or Life, so they have gotten to the point where they want more responsibility, b

I attended SMF last year and it was after that that I started getting into confrontation with the SM. He is very autocratic and leads everything, when there was a 'planning session' he put up a finished calander for the boys to look at and said that this was what they would be doing for the rest of the year(no discussion allowed). He has changed menus for the boys without talking to them, put his own son as ASPL when he needed a service position, etc. We have a storage garage that the CO bought the materials for (built as an Eagle project) that we share with the CO, where the troop tr

Thanks Bobwhite, I figured that I would hear from you. I need to seperate the issue of myself and the SM from the boy issue, I think. The SM made the inference to my wife and I (with the CC in attendence (for once I did something right)) that he can make the decision unilaterally. Remember..he says he runs the troop. I figured that the Commitee had to be invovled there somehow, since dismissal is a pretty harsh penalty. I guess what is really getting to me about this is that there was never any indication form the SM that there was any kind of a problem (and he just went through h

This is my first time posting, up till now I have been a veiwer (who has learned a lot). We have a situation in our troop that involves the scoutmaster, myself and now my son. I have had friction with the SM over the last year on how he is running the troop. Several times he has said, "this is my troop and nothing happens unless I say so". It is the total opposite of the boy run troop. The rub comes in when he yelled at the SPL and my son (quatermaster) for removing some of his personal gear from the troop trailer (where he stores it). At the end of his "chewing out" (which I heard fro