Scoutmaster Musings

At ScoutStuff.org you can purchase 100 merit badge blue cards for $7.00 - then you get to fill them out by hand. These work great for a scout or three requesting to start merit badges, but when summer camp comes around and 100 or more merit badge requests come up it gets painful.
                                
At Troopmaster.org they have two blue cards per sheet on 8.5x11 blue card stock. An easy report in Troopmaster lets you print all the blue cards you want with all the information neat and legible. They cost about 15 cents per card but the savings in time and cramped hand muscles is worth it!

Using TroopKit.com for our troop events and scout-managed operations, scouts request to start a merit badge through email. When I receive their email, I print up blue cards and give them out at the next troop meeting.

As an additional time saver and arthritis preventer, I've got a signature stamp that I bought at vistaprint.com for $12. Instead of scribbling my scoutmaster signature over and over, it's just stamp, stamp, stamp and I'm done.

When working with a troop of scouts, I think it's important to make background tasks as streamlined as possible so more time can be spent interacting with the scouts. Blue cards and other paperwork are examples of areas that eat up time and take away from the fun part of scouting. I'm sure you know of others.

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Looks like the new National Scouting Center and Jamboree site will be in Fayetteville County, WV. Great news for us in Minnesota - it's just 16 hours away instead of 19 to Ft. AP Hill. :-)

The new site is located on the west side of the New River and bordered by the communities of McCreery to the south, Thurmond to the north, and Mount Hope to the west. It's only 11,000 acres (compared to Philmont's 137,000) but has lots of terrain and location, location, location.

Once the final decisions and paperwork are done, it will be a mad dash to build and prepare in time to open up in 3 years.

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Understanding the environment where you are headed, rather than where you are, is a key to planning. Being prepared is looking forward to the possibilities and ensuring you have gear, skills, and confidence to be successful. The more skills and confidence you have, the less gear you need - as long as you don't get over-confident and take risky chances.

When we talk about being prepared, it's sometimes challenging to convince people to prepare for fringe possibilities.

It has never snowed from June 4 to August 31 in Minnesota. But, backpacking last week in Wyoming, we had 28 degrees and some people saw snow. A few of us were not ready for such cold temperatures because it was in the 80s while packing to go. This was a lack of gear due to underestimating the possibilities.

At summer camp last month, we had 2 days of very cold wet weather. After the first day, many scouts were out of dry clothes - not because they did not pack enough but because they did not keep them dry. This was a lack of skills and underestimating how long the weather would last.

You never know what the weather can do but by considering the time of year, location, and elevation, it's possible to prepare for any weather that might come along. Snow in July is certainly a surprise, but not something that should cause concern with a little planning.

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My 30 nights of camping for summer 2009 have finished. Just got back from Wyoming yesterday and you can see our trek route and pictures here. I led a group of 9 from our church, but it included four boy scouts.
I had our SPOT Messenger on for the trip and here's where we went.

Cloud Peak Wilderness Trek

Now that I'm home from the wilds, I'll be posting again.

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Interpretation of rank advancement requirements is often an entertaining endeavor. We interpret every word we read. Right now, you are reading and interpreting these words. I was reminded of something this weekend about the Star, Life, and Eagle merit badge requirements. Our council's interpretation of the requirements is what drives our unit's implementation of those requirements.

Requirement #3 for Star Scout is currently: "Earn six merit badges, including any four from the required list for Eagle. (See the Eagle Rank Requirements, number 3, for this list.) A Scout may choose any of the 15 required merit badges in the 12 categories to fulfill this requirement."

Any fairly knowledgable BSA adult volunteer or scout knows the list of Eagle required merit badges:

• First Aid
• Citizenship in the Community
• Citizenship in the Nation
• Citizenship in the World
• Communications
• Personal Fitness
• Emergency Preparedness OR Lifesaving
• Environmental Science
• Personal Management
• Swimming OR Hiking OR Cycling
• Camping
• Family Life

We know that an Eagle scout must have one merit badge from each of the 12 categories. But, a Star scout only needs "any four from the required list". That means if a First Class scout completes Swimming, Hiking, Cycling, First Aid, Art, Archery, and Astronomy, he has completed the required merit badges. This is true, even though he only did merit badges from 2 of the 12 categories.

A Life scout needs to complete 5 more merit badges, including any 3 from the Eagle list. So, adding Emergency Preparedness, Lifesaving, Camping, Athletics, and Aviation fulfills the requirement. The scout has done merit badges from only 4 of the 12 categories, but that's ok for Life rank.

When it comes time to reach Eagle, those Hiking, Cycling, and Lifesaving merit badges get counted as "electives" and the other 8 Eagle-required merit badges need to be earned. It all works out in the end.

Interpreting this requirement correctly may help some of your scouts realize they've met the requirements for rank sooner than they expected. If you have a scout plodding along with one more eagle-required merit badge for Star when he's already done Swimming AND Cycling, let him know he may have already fulfilled the requirement.

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We're back from an awesome week out west! It was amazing how well everything worked out and we got to do every activity that the scouts had hoped for - even doing the Space Needle which I would have just as soon missed. :-)

18 scouts from the flatlands of Minnesota got to experience:

• Mount St. Helens - climbing and sitting on the rim of an active volcano
• Glissading - no way to describe how exciting it is to fly down a snowfield in a minute that took an hour to climb up!
• Ape Cave - clambering over rocks in an underground lava tube for a long 1.5 miles
• Fort Clatsop - Lewis and Clark's winter residence in Oregon
• Fort Stevens - built to defend the Columbia River and never fired its guns in anger
• Clamming - digging razor clams in the low tide sands
• Tidal Pools - crashing waves, crabs, and critters in the rocks
• Bonneville Dam - fish ladders, huge electricity generators, and Herman the Sturgeon
• Deschutes River - whitewater rafting through gorgeous high desert at Maupin, Oregon with High Desert River Outfitters - real good guys
• Mt. Hood - snow skiing with nothing but blue skies and bright sun at 8000 feet, in June!
• Space Needle - the most touristy thing to do in the Pacific Northwest

I'm still dumbfounded how we crammed so much into a week. There certainly were some long days and short nights. But, the two crew leaders did great work and we came in under budget. If you would like more details on our trip, send me an email and I'll get back to you.

Check out our SPOT Trek Route - pictures mapped to our route recorded by our SPOT Messenger. I've heard from quite a few parents that they really enjoyed watching us as we slowly climbed Mount St. Helens and rafted down the Deschutes.

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I've blogged a few times about the way cool SPOT Messenger that our troop uses when we go camping. It's a one-way communication device to let people know where you are and to call for help in emergencies. The unit costs around $150 and an annual subscription is $100 and up, depending on the services you choose. It also includes emergency rescue insurance (which we've not used yet so I can't tell you how good it is). But, the reassurance it gives parents back home is invaluable!

Well, the SPOT folks have two things going on that might help you decide to get a unit for your troop.

SPOT Adventures - if you go there soon, you'll see "troop479" in the Recent Activity list with the sample trip I entered. You can spy on trips others have posted and see the adventures people have taken their SPOT on. These are trips after the fact with photos, story, and travel path to view. It's a replacement for what I did last year manually for our Philmont trek. When we get back from Sea2Sky, I'll make an adventure and let you know when it's ready.

Free SPOT - until the beginning of August, you can get a rebate to pay for your SPOT Messenger unit when you subscribe for two years of Basic and Tracking service. That's $300 for two years and a free unit - you save the initial $150 or so for the device. When our troop breaks down the cost, it is about $2.50/scout each year, or 25 cents per campout.

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If you'd like to follow our Sea2Sky trek in real time, check out Our SPOT Page and see how we're doing. The messages should start showing up on Wednesday evening.

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A broken wrist, two flu victims, three scratchy throats, and less than 36 hours to go. But, I think we'll hobble along and make it ok.

We're finally ready for our cross-country, week-long adventure to the Pacific Northwest and now we're bombarded with small calamities. From the crew leader breaking his wrist in baseball to the SPL getting the flu, it's keeping me hopping. :-)
My job was just reservations as needed, but there were quite a few - for whitewater rafting, snow skiing, climbing permits, space needle tickets, airplane tickets, van rentals, and new online national tour permit (yeah!).

The crew leader put together the itinerary, menu, crews, tenting, practice hikes, and tons of other work. He did a great job of distributing jobs and checking on progress. Even with all that, there's a bit of last minute scrambling. I imagine there's no way to avoid that. But, a rash of sickness doesn't make things easier.

This will most likely be the trip to remember of these scouts. We have so much packed into a week that the four adults transporting the eighteen scouts around are going to be totally wiped out after seven days. It's not a strenuous high adventure like Philmont. We've got campgrounds with showers most days and we'll carry our gear in mini-vans rather than on our backs. But, the activities each day are pretty exciting and this will be the first ocean and high mountain experience for some of the scouts.

I'll take our SPOT Messenger with us and plan to post a URL so anyone that is interested can follow our progress online. It should be cool.

As long as I don't get any phone calls about more accidents tomorrow, we're good to go! Well, pretty good to go anyway.

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I've been looking for some sort of fun memento for the troop. Something inexpensive that could be given away and might be held onto rather than tossed. I finally settled on creating a custom wooden nickel for the troop.

My plan is to use these to promote the troop in a fun way:

• We hold a Scout-o-rama each fall for local Webelos to meet the scouts and now each visitor will get a wooden nickel to remind them of which troop they visited.
• When we go geocaching, we can leave a few nickels in the cache.
• When we pay for campsites, we'll leave one.
• And who knows what else...

I've been trying to get scouts to have scoutmaster conferences at least every 6 months with little success. I'm not going to announce anything, but am just going to start giving a nickel at each conference. The word will spread that to get a nickel, you need to have a conference.

If the nickels become popular, and if the scouts want to do it, we can have a troop trading post where nickels can be exchanged for 'stuff'. With the risk of diluting the 'value' of the nickels, one could be received at every campout, service project, or troop activity. One could be 'earned' by rank advancement, leadership role, or special Good Turn. Scouts that participate the most have the most to trade. It would be important to keep it light and fun so the getting of nickels doesn't become the reason for participation.

You can design your own nickel, like I did, at Wooden-Nickel.com - scroll to the very bottom of the page to view a cool video about making the nickels. They are printed in San Antonio, TX.

If you've used other devices to successfully promote your troop or motivate scouts, I'd love to hear about them.

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We use SPOT Messenger when we go on campouts and high adventure treks.
There is now an embeddable SPOT widget so you can publish and share your adventures. It's pretty cool and makes tying pictures to trips much easier.

See my sample trip from this past week at Visit Wisconsin.

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Anthony Thomas of Troop 3471 here in Northern Star Council (I believe Burnsville, MN) has been recognized as the 2,000,000th Eagle Scout yesterday. How cool is that?

Arthur Eldred of New York was the first Eagle Scout in 1912, so it's been a busy 96 years.

Congratulations, Anthony!

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Let's play Jeopardy...

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I'll take Scout Cooking for $200, Alex.

And the answer is: Hotdogs

BZZZZZ... "What is the simplest way to get Second Class requirement 2g signed off?"

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I'll take Scout Cooking for $400, Alex.

And the answer is: Poptarts

BZZZZZ... "What is an even simpler way to get Second Class requirement 2g signed off?"

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I suppose you probably know of some even simpler - maybe heating a piece of bread with a Bic Lighter? So, the question becomes "What constitutes 'cooking' for cooking requirements?"

By expanding the cooking repertoire on a campout, the meals can certainly be much more challenging and rewarding. I really enjoy making meals outdoors using heat from coals burned down from a fire that I started with just sticks, my knife, and one match. As a matter of fact, I'm usually up before anyone in camp just so I can play with fire without scouts seeing me. :-)

There needs to be a consistent definition of 'cooking' across the leadership of your troop. That definition should come from the PLC with the scoutmaster's input. It should then be shared with each scout and adult leader so everyone is on the same page. If you've not done this, give it a try and I bet the scouts will come up with a fairly good definition. Then, they own it and can ensure it is followed for rank advancement.

As leadership changes and troop dynamics evolve, some skills will trend down while others improve. In our troop, cooking has gradually degraded into the simplest prepackaged, precooked, processed foods available. It's time to push that skill back up so the SPL and I will discuss it next week.

Last weekend, the SPL and ASPL had meals with the adults. They really enjoyed all the dutch oven meals and they even made cookies in a dutch oven. Well, actually one big cookie, but they made it and cooked it perfect.
At the end of the weekend, the ASPL said it was amazing how easy the dutch ovens are and how good the food is and how he plans to have his patrol use them more. Now, the adults have been using d.o.s for 3 years and have been trying to get scouts hooked with virtually no luck. Maybe this ASPL will be the convert that wins the tug-of-war.

Using dutch ovens is just one way to expand the cooking experience at camp. They really are easy, but until scouts are confident using them, scouts will stick with pots of water, hotdogs, and poptarts.

There are many other ways to cook on campouts. We have a few of those pie irons that clamp stuff between bread and roast over a fire. Stuff wrapped in aluminum foil and dropped in the coals can be good cooking with a variety of vegetables and meat and spice. Getting off propane and onto a real fire occastionally is a good move to make towards more expansive cooking.

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