Pioneering

Last weekend the scouts and I went on an outing to work on the Pioneering Merit Badge. Pioneering is sometimes known as "backwoods engineering." Basically pioneering is building stuff out of materials you find in the wilderness. The project we worked on this weekend was to build a tower. The boys worked together and their knots held. The tower turned out great.

.

(we brought our own poles and rope).
.

Here is a 'photo summary' of the trip:

.
Friday night we ate some dutch oven food and spent time around the campfire.

I told a ghost story that Berkley and I made up on the ride up. I partially redeemed myself from the totally lame ghost story I told last year at the same location.

Saturday morning we ate breakfast, raised the flag and reviewed the knots.

Here we are having a bowline tying competition.

Then we reviewed the tower "blue-prints and went to work:

The boys tied all the knots. I was mostly there for moral support, and to be the 'human scaffolding'. It seemed like I held those spars up for over an hour (but that's an exaggeration).

Then, once the tower was built, the photo shoot began.

The sitting/standing platform was 8 feet above the ground

I'm glad we put the tower in front of the flag pole. The pictures turned out great.

The knots were strong enough to even hold me.

Here's the whole group--proud of our accomplishment.

and, here's our scoutmaster...a good man. I can't think of a better person to have worked with the last couple of years.