The Boy Scouts of America have a resolution on membership policy that will be voted on in May. This opens Scouting to gay youth, but leaves the adult rules unchanged. The adult rules do not allow “individuals who are open or avowed homosexuals or who engage in behavior that would become a distraction to the mission of the BSA.” In other words, stay in the closet if you want to be a Scout leader.
Backcountry cookbooks tend to stick to a single cooking approach, ranging from “just add boiling water” to cooking from scratch. You may need to sample a few cookbooks until you find one that matches your style.
Here are some of my favorites, covering several different styles.
Need that extra zing for your backpacking meal? Shelf-stable bacon bits! It is a three ounce package, so you’ll need to use it fairly quickly after you open it. But that might not be a problem. And it is at Safeway, so you can get it for this weekend. I might do that, since I’m teaching BSA Introduction to Outdoor Leadership Skills this weekend.
See Sarah Kirkconnell’s blog for the details.
Boy Scout leaders always talk about guiding boys to become men, but we don’t always get to see it happen. Late this summer, I watched it happen for my son.
Michael has been eager to go out backpacking with his friends and without older folks. He’s just turned 18, so I can’t quite say “without adults.” I was prepared to go over every aspect of the plans with a critical eye, reserving the option to cancel the whole thing.
There is control and there is letting go of control. I remember a commute home on Richmond in Houston, where it took multiple cycles at each stoplight. A Bee Gees song I hated came on the radio, so I changed stations. It was on that station too. I changed stations again and the third station was playing the same damned song. I laughed, turned off the radio, and decided that life was too short to get worked up about traffic. Stop and smell the exhaust, there is always something to appreciate.
I just finished reading Andrew Skurka’s new book about backpacking, The Ultimate Hiker’s Gear Guide. He should know a bit about that, he’s hiked 30,000 miles in the last ten years. I highly recommend the book.
I found a new paper on wilderness communications via a post on Clarke Green’s blog. It is a good resource, but it just doesn’t address the real situations I’ve experienced on treks. It seems to be written from the viewpoint of a professional rescuer, which leaves out a whole range of emergency situations that don’t involve rescue.
Paul Petzoldt didn’t include “wilderness survival” The Wilderness Handbook, but he did cover avoiding survival situations. Similarly, my preference is to avoid rescue situations, and reliable communication can help me do that.
I came home to find a hot-off-the-presses copy of One Night Wilderness: San Francisco Bay Area by Matt Heid.
This just became my top reference for backpacking in the bay area. I think the trip descriptions are even better than his previous book, and the focus on overnight trips is a great help for our Boy Scout trips. There are plenty of good books about day hikes—you don’t get to a 10th edition without being great (that would be Tom Taber’s book).
The journal Wilderness & Environmental Medicine published an article in June with new evidence-based guidelines on acute mountain sickness (AMS), also known as altitude sickness, as well as HAPE and HACE. The article, Wilderness Medical Society Consensus Guidelines for the Prevention and Treatment of Acute Altitude Illness (also: the erratum, with a corrected risk table), is worth reading in full, but I’m going to pull out two highlights.
First, how to keep our risk low. The paper lists three risk categories: low, medium, and high. The description of the “low” category is a good rule for planning mountain trips. Note that the altitudes listed are sleeping altitudes. You can hike higher, but you need to sleep low.\
I’ve mentioned this pitch in a couple of other posts, but it deserves its own. This is the tarp pitch I use most often. The video below doesn’t name it and it isn’t listed in David Macpherson’s encyclopedic collection of tarp pitches, so I call it “The Cave”.
I learned the pitch from this YouTube video about pitching an 8×10 Etowah tarp. The video is short and clear, less than two minutes, and it is much better than reading a description. Watch carefully, you do not stake the rear corners. You stake midway between the center and the corners.
OK, everyone knows about this pitch, but there are some variations.
When you pitch it high and wide, it is the most room you can get for one pound of shelter.
How is lightweight relevant to Scouting? First, it’s about safety. Tired campers do risky things. Second, it’s about preparation and responsibility, rather than about throwing forty pounds of gear in a bag on Friday afternoon. Being a prepared, safe member of your patrol builds character and citizenship (Scouting aims #1 and #2) and mental fitness (part of aim #3). And lighter packs mean more fun, which matters because Scouting is a game (with a purpose).
When I started as an Assistant Scoutmaster, I immediately bought and read the BSA Scoutmaster’s Handbook cover-to-cover. What a disappointment. Too heavy to take with you and not much useful in it anyway. It doesn’t describe the responsibilities of the Scoutmaster or any of the youth leadership positions. You don’t even need it for the copies of the forms—those are all on-line now.
Luckily, the current Scoutmaster handbook (Troop Leader Guidebook) is much better. So what else should a Scoutmaster read?
If your walking shoes are a year and a half old and the cushioning is stomped flat, get new ones before you go. You’ll be doing a lot of walking on concrete and terrazzo. My feet hurt after the first day.
Allow a lot of time to get places on the Metro. We rented a house in upper northwest, so our route to The Mall was to drive about a mile, park three blocks from the Friendship Heights Metro station, walk there slowly (with boy and dog), change trains downtown, go another stop or two to some part of The Mall, then walk to a museum. This took almost exactly an hour.
For the Henry Coe campout with our troop this past weekend, I brought some bread mix so the Old Goat Patrol (the adults) could bake bread on sticks over the campfire. Specifically, this was the “Italian Stick Bread” recipe from The Back-Country Kitchen, essentially, from-scratch biscuit mix with Italian seasonings added.
I last made this when I was Grubmaster for the Raccoon Patrol in the early 1970’s. Back then I used biscuit dough that came in a can, the kind you whack on something to split open. That was more fun but this version tasted better.
Most Casual Observer 