High Adventure Trip Preparations

I have to admit we have a great Committee Chairman - Dean Nelson. Although he is an Eagle Scout from our troop (he finished right before I became Scoutmaster), Scouting administration is new to him - so I get to train him. He has the parents involved, more than I could ever get involved. Anyway, I had to complement Dean first.

We are preparing to go to Gatlinburg, Tennessee on June 15th for a week of camping and adventure. Having grown up a little over an hour away in Oak Ridge, I did much of my scouting in the Smokies. This is an opportunity to have my youth experience a little of what I did.

Part of our preparation is to build a support for one of our Troop tarps - 12 feet by 24 feet. In our last two Scout meetings, the troop measured and cut metal pipe for the supports. Dean and I discussed several designs to create this tarp support. We finally settled on a cross design. Dean, being a high school physics teacher, came up with most of the ideas. Unfortunately, we have to credit Dean's dad - he came up with a simple, elegant design. I am very pleased.

The basic design was to have 6 poles, each six feet long. They will support the tarp on the four corners and two in the middle. We connect 4 four foot poles to create 2 eight foot poles. These will form the apex for the structure. Dean welded a cross piece with threads. 4 six foot section of poles were cut and threaded to screw together to form a "backbone" for the tarp. The sections screw into the cross piece. 2 additional six foot sections screw into the cross piece. The cross piece is angled such that the end of the section will at the six foot level (That was a fancy bit of welding by Dean).

As part of our preparation for this trip I asked each youth to submit a menu for two days - breakfast, lunch and dinner - hoping to get good ideas to plan out the menu for the week. The scouts seem to have limited imagination as they all put down Pancakes and Sausage for breakfast and Steak and baked potatoes for one of their dinners. In all fairness to them, we have a campout at the end of the year for fathers and sons to express appreciation for their support during the year. For dinner on that night we do grill steak over the fire and bake potatoes in the coals. Evidently they like that meal. I am surprised they haven't asked for lobster or shrimp!

The kids are excited. I am excited, we leave in less than three weeks. We estimate that the cost of the trip will be about $100 per person. We have negotiated prices for the campground, white water rafting, a visit to Ripley's Aquarium. After the trip I will post a blog as to the exact costs and activities.

April 2009 Trip to Oil Creek State Park

I think the time has come to begin posting on line what the troop is doing. Over the years we have taken many memorable trips and this seems like a good forum to share some of the things we do.


In April, we visited Oil Creek State Park and stayed at the Cow Run shelter. In the above picture you see Bryce Goettman, Justin Petrosky, Keith Neeley, Matt Biernesser, Dan Sadler, Tyler Weeks and Brett Peacock.

The Park is in the Western half of PA near Oil City. For us the driving time was about 2 hours. The hike from the parking lot to the shelter area is about a mile, so that trip was not hard. In fact, because the trip was short we took in some luxuries such as a large camp stove and an iron griddle. In planning the food for this trip they chose grilled cheese sandwiches and pancakes - two items requiring a grill. I normally would not take such heavy things on a backpacking trip, but they wanted to.

The Cow Run shelter area has six Adirondack shelters. We reserved two of the shelters ahead of time. Our trip was the weekend before Easter, hiking in on Friday and out on Saturday. On Friday, after arriving at the shelter area, the scouts went on an addition hike of four miles. Afterward we played a game of "Settlers of Catan," one of the troop's favorite. Saturday we worked for another hour stacking firewood underneath a wood shelter for future campers.