Good morning troop 648,
Our adventurers returned from our early winter campsite (a month early – we had planned our sub-freezing campout for December) hale and hearty and highly pleased with another fabulous weekend. While it began a bit slowly, as the lead cars returned from our camp location to get out and push the fishtailing trailer up the muddy road, followed by new life skills putting up tents in the dark in first rain, then sleet, and finally a fine layering of tiny hail, we awoke the next morning in a beautiful oasis of tall trees and blue skies in which to ride bikes, hike, cook, and do advancement only an hour as the crow flies from the valley. Completing the weather trifecta, we had beautiful snowflakes later in the afternoon and we tested our fire building and clothes and bedroll layering techniques as the temperatures dipped well into the teens on Saturday night. You know it is cold when the bottled liquids in the ice-filled coolers are warmer than those left out on the table. It is outings such as this that one looks back on fondly, as the boys deal with adversity, turn it into adventure, and come through it all with new learnings, character and good humor. Among the quotes heard – ‘I think my soul is frozen’, ‘Mr. Conrad, there is something dead behind you’ (a skinned mule deer, left by a careless hunter) ‘Let’s build a world record campfire’ and from many of the boys during our ‘thorns and roses’ ceremony at the end of the weekend – ‘no thorns, everything was a rose.’ The meals planned and executed by the patrols were hearty and appetizing, the biking was short but exceptional, and a hike yielded massive downed log sectionals to stoke a large warm campfire for days. I consistently enjoy watching our scouts putting into practice what they have learned, and there is nothing like all-season camping in Arizona to put those lessons to the test.
Now that we are back to normal Scottsdale weather on this Veteran’s Day weekend, we will be slowing down as a troop a bit for the holiday season. We do have a number of upcoming items of note, however. Tonight is the monthly adult leader meeting, followed by our weekly troop meeting tomorrow night. We have outings scheduled for December 7th (another opportunity for winter camping) and January 11th (our annual Webelos cub scout recruiting weekend). It is important that you continue to attend the weekly meetings as our boy-led meetings will do such things as further prepare you for winter camping, and begin planning fun patrol events and campfire skits for our cub scout guests. It is also never too early to begin planning for summer camp. December 1st is the due date for the first $50 deposit for summer camp – this year in fabulous Camp Alexander. Every other year the boys choose to go somewhere out of council for summer camp, and this year they have chosen a camp in the fabulous Rockies outside of Colorado Springs from July 20-28, 2013. Hope you are already planning to attend!
See you at tomorrow’s troop meeting
Mr. Cole