A Scout is Loyal

Wolverine Patrol
James Enomoto

Since the previous Court of Honor the Wolverine patrol has grown by 2 scouts, Monet Goldman and Todd Oatman who will be our new Assistant Patrol Leader and will help me in leading the patrol. The arrival of these two scouts has not hindered the advancement of the other scouts. I would like to congratulate the Wolverines for working so hard and accomplishing a lot since our last Court of Honor. We even have three scouts who have worked especially hard and earned their Tenderfoot rank, Sean Papay, Mathew Peatfield, and Monet Goldman. Although only three scouts have advanced, the other scouts in the patrol have been working hard and will hopefully advance in rank by the next Court of Honor in June. I hope that all of you have enjoyed the outings and are planning on going on our remaining ones.

Flaming Waffles
Daniel

Hi! This is Daniel Lofgren, Patrol Leader of the flaming waffles. The current members of the flaming waffles are Edward, Spencer, David, and Chris, my assistant patrol leader. We have all gone on many outings and had fun on all of them. The scouts are learning a lot of new skills from their camping experiences, not the least of these skills is basic cooking, which I am sure they will all find useful. The scouts are great and full of energy… yes, quite a lot of energy in fact. They are responsible boys and I am glad that they are in my patrol. The patrol is working together smoothly and is still very enthusiastic despite a few of campouts that have been rained on,… and Frosted over,… Oh yes, and Hailed On. The scouts are coming along smoothly in advancement and several will be advancing in rank at this Court of Honor. I hope to see you parents at the Court of Honor. If anyone has questions about the Flaming Waffles feel free to ask me.

Blank Patrol
David

SPL Corner
Brian

Well this will be my last report as SPL! Hopefully nobody disliked me as SPL too much! Anyway, I feel that it has been a good year thus far. I no longer know whose better, the senior scouts or non senior scouts. Half of the senior-scouts no longer show up half the time while half of the non-senior-scouts don’t pay attention, we need to work on this. Unfortunately we have lost quite a few scouts from when I started as SPL, is it me? Overall though, I’ve had a lot of fun, and hope everyone else has too. I learned a lot about leading this year, and hopefully you learned lots of scouting skills, and I would like to thank you for being my guinea pigs. However, we all have a lot more to learn. I’m looking forward to continuing to work with all of you in another capacity, whatever my new troop job becomes. I’d like to congratulate everyone who is getting rank or (a) merit badge(s) at this court of honor, good job, and am wondering, what happened to the rest of you? All of you can attain eagle, it isn’t a question of whether you have the skills, all of you do, instead it is a question of determination, perseverance, and timing, trust me I’d know. Good luck everyone and happy Scouting!

the trail, dropped off our backpacks, took our water bottles, maps, and compasses, and hiked up to the peak of Mt. Wittenberg, maybe a 1 mile hike. It didn’t really seem like a mountain... the trail was mostly flat most of the way... but it was an awesome view from the top. There, we taught the younger scouts some map-and-compass skills, looked out over the forest for a while, and then went back to our packs. Along all of the trails, the younger scouts tried to identify 10 plants.
We then went down the trail out of the forest into these winding hills covered with dry brush, from which we could see an amazing view of the pure, calm ocean. This was the trail to Coast Camp. We passed a big group of campers and said hi. Anyway, like I said, the sky was incredibly clear the entire time, so it was really warm and sunny in afternoon (it was like 1:00 right now). We set up our tents again and cooked lunch (Blank Patrol had grilled cheese sandwiches). We actually had to put our stoves in the food lockers because it was so ridiculously windy. The area was in a V-shaped grassy valley with brushy hills on both sides, so it kinda funneled the wind through the valley into our area. Apparently it wasn’t as windy as last year, but even so, we had some pretty funny pictures of younger scouts trying to set up a tent; the tent not only refused to cooperate, but eventually got so tired of being fiddled around with, that it decided to act like a massive kite and start flying away =D.
So then we hiked down to the beach and went southward (to the left). The water was really cold and peaceful (especially at low tide), and the sand was really fine. The beach was SOOOO SWEEEET. We walked to the tide pools, where we saw birds, starfish, anemones, shells, and sponges. And we passed all of these totally cool rock formations. There were all these pillars, rocky arches, cliffs with columns cut out of them, and tunnels and caves cut into the sides of the cliffs. Finally, we got to one little cave/passage in the side of the cliff, just like any of the other ones (we thought). The passageway was just about the size of a regular door to your room or whatever. But when you walk in for maybe 5 feet, you reach a big clearing with light coming in. And then you look up, and you see this ginormously breathtaking open circle to the sky. It was like a huge open cylinder cut out of the rock. We played around in

the sand and water, and then walked back. Before we went back to camp, we watched sunset on the beach (twice, by sitting down, watching the sun set, and jumping up and watching it again =). It was about 6:00ish I guess; we had spent maybe 4 hours walking on the beach. On the way back to camp, we saw 2 more deer. We cooked dinner (Blank Patrol had chicken quesadillas), and cleaned up. It was a new moon, so the sky was filled with stars; we pointed out the Milky way, Cassiopeia, the Little Dipper / North Star, Pleiades, and Mars to the younger scouts who had to learn how to navigate at night (we later found Orion when we walked along the beach at night). We put our stuff away in the lockers, because otherwise the animals would’ve gotten to our food. Then, all the younger scouts went to sleep.
However, Mr. Thurgate said that he would go take a walk on the beach and seek the mystical place where your footsteps glow. Seriously. Apparently, last year, they found that when you walk on the beach at night, your footsteps glow faintly because of the bioluminescent organisms, I guess. So, of course, Brian, James, Daniel, and I thought that would be pretty neat and went along with him to check it out. It turns out that there are small sparks where we stepped or dragged our feet. Not super-dramatic, but still cool (apparently last year it was way better). But in any case, the beach at night is beautiful anyway. It was all dark, except for the (blinding tactical?) lights of lighthouses and boats in the distance, casting a faint sparkle on the waves and cliffs. Along the way, we saw a fish on the shore; we thought it was dead, but a wave came in and it kinda flopped around. So we were thinking, “awwww, pooor fish.” Daniel finally said, fine, I’ll go throw it in. After about 3 tries (it kept washing back up at first), it swam out, and we were like “yaaay gooo Daniel!” Later as we were walking back, the waves thundered really loudly. Everyone decided that the ocean was pleased; I commented that it was probably saying, “Woohoo! I found my fish again!” When we came back, we found that raccoons had torn open the Flaming Waffles’ / Wolverines’ trash bag, which kinda sucked; Daniel and James had to clean it up and then use our patrol’s trash bag, which we’d put in the locker. Meanwhile, I filled up my water bottle and Brian saw a rabbit move across the trail into the bushes. We played cards for a while in our tents, listening to the

younger scouts talk about raccoons attacking their tents (when I came back from James and Brian’s tent, I actually did see 3 raccoons on the way back (of course, I blinded them with my tactical flashlight, and they cowered in fear)). We went to sleep at like 10:30.

Sunday
We woke up to the frost at 7:00. One water faucet was actually frozen (until the sun rose). We cooked breakfast (Blank Patrol: oatmeal), packed up, and cleaned up. At 10:30ish we then hiked down to beach again, this time with our packs, and went out northward (to the right) toward the parking lots. It was about 1 mile; we skillfully dodged the waves, jumped up and down the sand-shelves, chased birds, and waved to a seal in the water. The first group (the older scouts) got there first at about 12:00; we played cards for a while, waiting for the rest to trickle in. We got into the cars, but at this point, Mr. Tan realized that he couldn’t find his wallet, which kinda sucked. So he walked back the to coast camp to check. Meanwhile we played cards for that hour and hoped he could find it. He found it. It turns out that the raccoons had dragged it into the bush. Everyone said “yay!”. We stopped to eat lunch and finally got home at 4:00. w00t.

Pinnacles
December 13-14, 2003
James

In March our troop traveled to Pinnacles, where we had a lot of fun, at least most of the time. For most of the afternoon, we went on a hike where Chris Corley and Sean Papay were trying to pass their compass requirements. The other scouts were able to work on their compass skills and will hopefully pass this requirement on future outings. If you ask any of the scouts which part they enjoyed the most, they would probably say it was when they got to explore under some rocks on the side of the trail. Actually they were large boulders that were stocked on top of each other, creating passageways underneath. This was a unique experience that people who go to Pinnacles will be able to experience. After a long day of hiking and cave exploring, we worked on advancement for about an hour. Unfortunately the part of the trip that most of the scouts will remember is what happened after we went to sleep. Earlier that day, we set up our tents in a really sandy area. That night, it started to rain, causing the stakes to pull out and caused the tents to fall over. Some of the scouts got wet, but learned a lesson on where not put their stakes. Early the next morning you would have seen a very strange sight. During the night almost all of these scouts had taken shelter in the cars, with some sleeping in the seats and others in the trunk. Despite the rainy conditions I believe we learned a lot and had a lot of fun.

Mt. Madonna
January 10-11, 2004
Derek

We were gathered at the church early in the morning, as usual, to set off on our annual camping trip to Mt. Madonna. It was exciting because we hadn’t done this trip in a year, hence the term “annual”. We went through our usual morning routine, running here and there gathering up stray scouts until, when we called patrol lines, they all actually got into some sort of a line, many indeed actually made it into their correct line. For it was the fate of this trip to have one patrol leader for the three residing patrols. Thus it was that the senior patrol had to do much of the work normally delegated to the patrol leaders, and so were lacking skills in the area of scout gathering.
When we finally managed to load up into the cars it was still very early in the morning, due to the awesomeness and dynamic nature of our troop. (And yes I just said “awesomeness”). We were set for the long car ride, which wouldn’t have seemed so long if you were hyped on caffeine, which I wasn’t, so it was indeed long. (However in relative comparison to most other trips, the ride to Mt. Madonna was fairly short).
We arrived at Mt. Madonna a few hours before I usually like to wake up on Saturdays, say roughly 9’ish. We managed to get all the tents pitched in a timely manner with only a few miner set backs (such as missing a complete set of stakes and polls for one of the tents. This was due to my error in less than adequate supervision of the Quartermaster Brian Thurgate and his duties). (By the way, we also forgot to bring any extra tents). However this turned out to be a great opportunity and learning experience for the scouts, where, through his

sheer improvisational skills and experience the SPL, Brian Thurgate, established for the scouts an alternative means to pitch their tent.
The next activity was that of the equivalent of a patrol meeting. It was an opportunity for the younger scouts to get their requirements signed off. This is always significantly important on campouts due to the nature of many requirements having requirements of their own, such as one of the more simplistic examples: “on a campout pitch a tent in a location that you have chosen for your patrol” etc.
When it was time too eat lunch, I soon discovered that these lunches were arranged individually. I say discovered because I was left out of the loop (the fault I must admit was my own). At any rate, it was supposed to be lunch, for myself it was a time to watch people eat and maybe starve a little. However being surrounded by scouts I soon was generously given small portions of a few of the scouts lunches. This is just one of many occasions that even scouts are able to appreciate the scout law.
It quickly became time to proceed on the main event of the trip, the archery course. Many of the scouts had to share a bow but over all the equipment was very well supplied. We each were given a set of arrows (5), which we were instructed to mark with some pens so that the arrows were identifiable apart from everyone else’s. We began at the shooting range for a warm up practice. This went well in a vague sense of the term. Most importantly though was the fact that no one was injured worse than possibly a couple of scratches. When we mobilized onto the actual course, the troop split up with adult supervision for every group. For my group, the course provided us with a new and very humorous view of this sport. In fact, it was going so well that we didn’t end until it was nearly five p.m., which was the designated time for the gates to be closed. From what I had heard from the other groups, the course had proven to be a very healthy practiced activity, with all implications of enjoyable and entertaining as well. Personally I had never known an arrow could bounce off so many trees before it hit the ground.
After we arrived back at camp, we prepared to cook dinner, while some scouts went about rapping up some requirements they were trying to get signed off.

my first experience of sleeping in a shelter and have decided that tents are more to my liking as the bugs like to eat me!!
The next morning we had breakfast consisting of French Toast and fruit. This was my first experience of French Toast and I must admit it was very good. After breaking camp, we made our way back to the car, this time hiking out a different way (lots of uphill climbing to work off that good breakfast).We returned home around lunch time, in enough time to shower and greet our boys.
You may wonder where our name came from and as far as I am aware it was Marie’s husband Jason who suggested it. We are now proud owners of little cuddly chicks which clip on our backpacks, they even have a bell inside them so that we can’t get lost, Thanks Lisa!! We are planning to do more trips so if there are any more Moms out there that want to join us please contact one of us.