Scouts, Winter Campout, Teton Canyon Filmed with Osmo Action and Mavic ...

Backpacking to Upper and Lower Palisades Lakes

 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x9BhDgd1Zc4&t=907s

Teton River Fly Fishing Adventure

Winter Camping at Darby Canyon

Quinn on snowshoes and Heber on cross-country skis

As many of you know, the LDS church, at the end of 2019 pulled their sponsorship from the Boy Scouts of America, now known as Scouts, BSA.  Consequently, many boy scouts from the LDS church are no longer involved in scouting, but are in a different program which is similar to scouting but done at a church level.

I have been involved off and on with the Boy Scouts for most of my life and am sad to see it leave the church as a program.  That being said, there are some advantages to the change.  That is not the point of this blog however.

I started this new blog as I still find myself involved in scouting in an indirect way.  My son Quinn, along with 4 other boys from his former troop, Troop 82, has decided to stay with scouting and want to complete their Eagle Awards.  As a father, that would still involve me in a big way.  Also, I have consented to be on Wood Badge staff for this year in August as well.  Wood Badge is a great program that trains leaders of the Boy Scouts to teach the boys to be leaders.  Also, I am still a merit badge counselor of a dozen or so merit badges.

Because of this involvement, I have decided to create a different blog and I have decided to stop the Tenderfoot Troop 82 blog page as that troop no longer exists.  Troop 185 is now the troop that our boys belong to and it is the only troop in Teton Valley currently.  They have upwards of 20 boys and is kindly sponsored by St. Francis of the Tetons Episcopal Church.  Ryan Webster, formerly of Troop 82, is the Scoutmaster.  As I will be doing various different things in scouting I didn't want this just to be a blog about Troop 185, but to be a blog about all the different things I do in scouting.  I imagine most of it will be about the adventures of Troop 185, however.

The video I made of this campout.

Today I am only going to post a few photos and a video of the camp-out the boys did last week up to Darby Girls Camp in the Teton mountain range.  The boys were dropped off at the Darby trail-head at 4:00 pm on Friday Feb. 21, 2020.  You get to the Darby trailhead by going 3 miles south of Driggs and turning east on 3000 East.  You then follow it all the way to the end of the road.  In the summer you can drive all the way to the Wind Cave parking lot, but in the winter they block it off at State line road.  They had arranged with the school to use their cross-country skis or they could bring snow shoes if they wanted.  Quinn brought his own snowshoes and did fine.  I imagine if you were a good cross country skier you would have the advantage over snow-shoes but it turned out in this case all the boys were pretty much equal whether they had skis or snowshoes.

There were 20 boys and 6 men that spent the night.  Of the boys I only know a few names.  Quinn, Heber, Henry and Blake from former Troop 82 and Clint, Jarrett, Brixton and Beck from former Troop 81.  I learned some of the other boys names like Micah, Zach, William  and Parker.  The adults were Ryan Webster, scoutmaster, and Aaron Jenkins assistant scoutmaster.  Then dads were myself, Andrew Leavitt, Eric Reiser and David who's last name I cannot remember.

The boys got their skis and snowshoes on while the leaders packed gear into sleds.  We had a total of 9 snow machines to help bring gear in on sleds.  We brought in camp stoves and tools, food and equipment.  The Reisers had 3 machines and they took a few trips back and forth.  The Jenkins brought two machines, one with a dog-team like sled that somebody could ride on.  I had a machine with a  very large sled that I filled with personal gear.  Ryan Webster had a snowmachine and two other young men came with snow machines.  I did not catch their names but I know one of them was a Penfold.

I tooled around behind the boys on my snow machine for awhile just seeing how the stragglers were doing.  I saw a lot of them fall down but they got up and kept going.  I encouraged a few and then eventually headed on to camp.  I unloaded my sled and by then Brixton was already there.  He had used skis and made incredible time.  The next closest boys probably weren't even to the fork where you split off for the girls camp.  I then took my empty sled and went back.  As I was going back one of the Reiser's machines had gotten hung up on the gate.  Instead of going through the gate the snow was deep enough that we had piled a little snow over the gate and could go over it.  I helped throw more snow on the pile to build it up and then we all went on our way.  We got to the tail end and some of the boys were so far back that it would be dark before they got to camp.  We ended up hauling a few of them in the sleds.

Dinner went well and the night was cold but we slept warm.  I would say bring a thick pad if you ever do this as a 2 inch pad on the boards there was still not very comfortable.

It was a fun time and you  can see it all in the video  I made.

Scenes as we were starting out

They got up on the roof.