Scoutmaster Podcast 346

I'm Matt Weiss and I'm an assistant Scoutmaster with Troop 38 in New Berlin, Wisconsin. This edition of the Sculpt Master podcast is sponsored by backers like me And now the old Scoutmaster.

I don't know if this is something that you've noticed, but we were out camping this past weekend. It was pretty consistently rainy weather, and here's what I observed: Scouts seem to turn into zombies in the rain.

I mean, I've seen it many times before, so tell me if this is familiar to you. It starts raining and they they look up at the rain and they seem to like be frozen in place.

And then they look at each other and then they kind of like hold out their shirts and stare at them and they remark on how wet they're getting, and it just all goes down hill from there. They stumble around, kind of lock-knead walking as if they're under water, and they forget basic things like how a tarp works or what rain gear might be.

Have you seen this? I don't know if I.

I would suppose I'm not alone in making this observation, but you know, you never know. That's why I ask:

Hey, this is podcast number 346.. Music. Welcome back to the Scoutmaster Podcast. This is Clarke Green. Before we get to the mailbag.

I should mention that last week was our unannounced spring break, and the unannounced breaks are the best ones, don't you think? But here we are, we're back and I have something special to share with you because we have another visit with Wade and in Bucky.

We'll talk more about that after we go to the mailbag. And for some reason I didn't capture a name on this one. But the question was: I read a story about two years ago about an early group of boys who found Baden Powell's book and started their own patrol, taught themselves to camp, all without adults involved. The story goes on, goes that when they go camping a police officer finds them and sends them all home. I thought I found this story on your website, but I can't find it now.

Have you ever heard of it or do you know where I can find it? And I certainly have heard of it and I do know where you can find it. It's a story that was shared by John Thurman in one of his books and it is in a post at scoutmastercgcom.

It's called Why Do We Need Scoutmasters and I will have a link to that post in the podcast notes. Rich Covinal is in the troop committee of troop 501 in Medina, Ohio, and he wrote to say this: our troops planning a canoeing high adventure trip for the summer of 2018.. Hooray for you, Rich. Everybody should be planning a high adventure trip At this moment. You should be preparing for this summer and you should have a good idea of what's happening next summer. Everybody should go and make sure they're doing a high adventure trip.

I talk a lot about that and I've written a lot about it. If you're not sure how to make that happen, get in touch with me. We'll get it going for you. But anyway, Rich continues, I was looking for some good fundraisers that the group could do outside of normal troop fundraisers, specifically for the scouts going on this trip. In a post about fundraising you mentioned your troop does two dinner fundraisers a year.

Is that the main fundraiser that you do for high adventure trips? Well, Rich, our troop does do two spaghetti dinner fundraisers every year, one in the fall, one in the spring. We lot half of the proceeds of ticket sales scouts and their families make in the spring, one towards their individual expenses and that is all the fundraising we do.

We did do years ago one specific fundraiser, for our first trip to Switzerland, I think, but it was. You know it was only marginally successful and I've never been comfortable with charitable fundraising for trips that, frankly, most of our families can afford without fundraising.

And if they can't afford it, well, we try and put together enough money for them through other sources to make it possible, or we just spread the payments out. I tell our scouts and their parents, if they want to earn money towards a trip, they will get more money for the effort extended if they go out and do things like mowing lawns and raking leaves and shoveling snow. I encourage parents to match every dollar they earn.

So in other words, by the time you put in the all the effort into a fundraiser, the return for that effort is much smaller than just going out and doing some odd jobs around the neighborhood. And then, if there's an agreement between the scout and their parents that the parents will match every dollar that they earn, they can earn an awful lot pretty fast, so Rich. I hope that helps. Benny Arnos is a board member of the Scout Museum Arhus in Denmark and he got in touch with me, said I'm writing on behalf of the Scout Museum in Arhus, Denmark. We publish an annual book and this year we wish to honor William Hillcourt who, as you probably know, was born here in 1900 as Wilheim Beergard before he went to the United States. We're looking for material for the book, including his career in the BSA as Green Bar Bill Troop 1 which he founded, the Hillcourt Museum, Memories from Old Scouts in the USA, in Denmark, etc.

Could I ask you the favor of alerting your readers and listeners to this and ask them to forward any stories they have of a personal contact with Green Bar Bill to be included in this book and Benny, I'm absolutely happy to do that. I wrote to Benny with my contribution to the book about having met Bill very briefly at the 1989 national jamboree I believe it was, and what his work has meant to me as a scouter.

So if you have a remembrance of having met Green Bar Bill and you'd like me to forward that to Benny, get in touch and we'll make that happen. Hey, just about every Tuesday- except when we have unannounced spring breaks- just about every Tuesday morning about eight o'clock eastern time, we'll get together for a couple of hours over at scoutmastercgcom for a live chat session and in addition to the many people who show up time and time again, who we call our frequent fliers. We also heard during our last live chat session from Eric Patel, who's an assistant Scoutmaster with Troop 81 in Chelmsford, Massachusetts, Louise, who is an assistant Scoutmaster in Denver, and Britt Webber, who's an assistant Scoutmaster in coming Georgia. If you want to hang out for a little bit and talk about very serious things and talk about things that aren't serious at all, come over to scoutmastercgcom Tuesday morning, 8 am eastern time, and we get together for a live chat now. Before I go any further, I need to take a little time to thank the folks who make scoutmastercgcom possible. They're the ones that underwrite the podcast and the blog by becoming scoutmastercgcom backers.

It's pretty easy to do. Go over to scoutmastercgcom, look at the top menu over on the right of every page and you'll find information how to become a backer or a patron.

But I want to thank Britt Webber, John Trader, Tim Grimmy, Marion McQuade, Chris Campos and Steve Majka, who added their names to the list of scoutmastercgcom backers since our last podcast, and I also want to thank Jake Nottamaker, who became a subscriber through Patreon since our last podcast. Once again, this is easy to do. Go over to scoutmastercgcom. Follow the links in the upper right hand menu of any page, figure out how you'd like to support this work and I'll be happy to thank you personally during our next podcast.

Well, as I said a moment ago, today I'm real happy to have another visit. I think this is our third one- with two of my old Eagle Scouts who decided that they would go out and hike the Appalachian Trail.

This year we've been following their progress over a couple of podcasts and in a moment we're going to hear from Wade Bastion and Bucky Kellogg- and I recorded this about a week ago, so they are actually a little bit farther along. In the picture that's featured with the podcast, you'll see that they are closing in on the 900 mile mark. What you're about to hear.

I think they've hit about seven or 800 miles. A couple of quick things to explain. They're also joined by Bear, who is another Eagle Scout who they've met along the way, and I have to explain the whole thing about ice cream sandwiches that you'll hear because Wade was our senior patrol leader, as was Bucky, but in Wade's speech encouraging the Scouts to vote for him as senior patrol leader, he promised the discovery of an ice cream fountain- yes, an ice cream fountain- which he only paid off after weeks of harassment with ice cream sandwiches.

So just a little inside humor there. But it's been, of course, for me great personally just to catch up with these guys because they're my old Scouts. But there's also a lot of interesting information for hikers and backpackers and an encouragement to those of you who want to get out and do the Appalachian Trail, and also there's the vicarious experience for those of us who would love to but probably never will get out to do the entire Appalachian Trail.

So, without any further ado, let's get started, shall we?

This is Wade Bastion nut shoe, here again on the trail. This is Nameless, or Bucky, or Buckminster, all all of those things. I'm Bear Eric Hapeniebi.

I'm from Farmington, Michigan, now the Eagle Scout in true 45. I really appreciate you guys joining us again.

Where are you now? Right now, we in Daleville, Virginia, right around miles 720, is that 727?

727? So just about a third of the way through the trail.

So that's about 500 miles more than we when we last talked. Yeah, yeah, and a lot of that was in the Smokies.

How'd you guys like the Smokies? Well, the first half of the Smokies were great. The first couple days were nice and sunny.

We did get some. We got beautiful views on top of Queenman's dome, which was really nice. The next day we had an easy day, went down into Gatlinburg.

That's the day we met Bear, and then, right after that, it just got foggy and rainy and cold and miserable. That was actually Bucky's birthday, and then the rest of the Smokies was just miserable: a lot of wind, a lot of cold, a lot of wet clothes and stuff.

So it's not gotten any less miserable. Yeah, pretty miserable. But, um, just after that we actually went into Asheville for a long weekend. Um, from then on it's been, it's been pretty great. We've been bumping up our miles. Uh, an average day is somewhere between like 18 and 25.

I think it was there. I think we're up to like 13 or 14.

Yeah, from the beginning I think it's like 13 or 14. The first day we did over 20 was to: uh, was that over mount?

Yeah, which isn't, which is a barn that they converted into a shelter, so we did 25 miles to get there. That's where we met back up with Bear.

Not even a week after that 25 mile day, we did a 33 mile day into Damascus. But, no, it's been a lot of fun. Uh, whether it has not been as terrible as it could be. For the most part it's. It's been fantastic, it's been, it's been really fun.

So tell me this: when I go, when I go hiking, usually I have a song that repeats. I run over in my head. Most of the time it's the theme to Gilligan's Island.

Um, do you guys have that happen? Uh, yeah, um, the. The song that gets stuck in my head most often, the. Uh, I don't want to work, I just want to bang on these girls all day.

Uh, so that's one that I've been singing a lot lately. Uh, I don't really know what else.

Um, every now and then, some camp songs I get. So I try and play, but I'm blind and I like to get that stuck in my head because anything didn't get stuck to get stuck in everyone else's head. Yeah, that's pretty miserable.

Um, uh, what do you get there? I, I have whatever weight singing stuck in my head, and outside my head there are, like other people hiking the trail you'd probably hang out with. The word maddening comes to mind. Because he doesn't know the whole song, because he has a song stuck in his head. He means he has a pun, nine words, the song that he's singing.

Do you, do you remember, um Eric? You probably know him from working at camp. I need to tell you this story because he was the senior patrol leader for a little bit. And the other, the other night, he showed up with like a giant bag full of- what a giant bag full of, I don't know- um ice cream sandwiches. Whenever we meet another Eagle Cow and we talk about scouts, I have to tell everyone how much of a disappointment Wade's ice cream fountain was. He promised I didn't promise.

All right, that's great. Still arguing about that? Huh, oh yeah, one of us killed the other.

So listen, um, have you guys gained any weight? No, no, entirely the opposite.

Um, so one of the guys we met, Grinch. He was going southbound, he was, and one of the pieces of advice he had for us was find the food that you can eat, no matter what, that you will never ever get sick of, because there will come a point where you just cannot get enough calories.

So I started at 225 pounds. I'm down to 190, and that was about a week ago.

So I've lost about 35 pounds. Yeah, I've lost about 13 pounds. That's basically all the way to have to lose. At this point I I'm just losing muscle. I can. You can see on my arms and stuff like I'm getting, I'm getting thinner.

I've been trying to eat. I just can't. I just can't eat enough. Down from 176 to 163. 163 was probably freshman year of high school for me. I need to figure out how to stop this.

And, uh, bear 45 pounds, about 45 pounds, yeah, yeah, all right. So you go to the grocery store.

What do you get? So I'll go through my list. I I have um bars, which in in my case has become Laura bars, because they're not too hard to chew and they're fairly compact with a lot of calories.

And then I have instant potatoes, which is in addition to our our meals that we made. They'll be the sauce which we also add to our meals: summer sauces, cheese, applesauce packets- there's these like 3.2 ounce applesauce packets that they don't have enough calories to justify their weight, but they make me feel a lot happier.

I have yogurt and then the same company makes little yogurt packets and I use those for breakfast. Electrolyte additive drink stuff- one of the items on this list I would like to point out- I'm not sure bucky will read it word for word- is not hurt anymore drugs, which I I'm assuming is Tylenol or something like that. Uh, I got a question from. It really hurts, but I want it from that time.

So I don't even some paint dollars or I do have more candy, uh, this time around because I've. I just because we're adults. Yeah, we're burning calories a day.

Yeah, overall, from where you started to where you are now, this is still a good idea. Yeah, that was definitely fantastic idea. Yeah, could could not have made a better choice, even though it's miserable and you're starving- miserable, starving in significant pain, like walking around hurts, yeah, but for some reason, when we put the packs on, just there's the smiles never stop. Trailer you on weight.

Poles are way too long, yeah, shorts are way too long, yeah, yeah, two of the things that have changed since we talked last: uh, the training poles I'm using- now we're in a hiker box at a hospital and they're skiing poles that are probably about half a foot too tall for me. Uh, it constantly looks like I'm like a baby trying to pretend to be a real mountain climber, and I got these shortest shorts I could find in. The mask is um, which may or may not have originally been designed for women, but they feel great.

How about the food drops. Has that been working out? We haven't had our own food for probably a month.

We were forwarding boxes and then one of our boxes got stuck in a loop, just sending itself back and forth between towns. Today is the day we finally got caught up with our food, or food caught up with us. You're south of Shenandoah national park and I spent a lot of time in Shenandoah.

I think you you'll love it. And then off to west Virginia, up through Maryland, up to Pennsylvania.

Any plans ahead on the trail for meeting up with people or anything? I mean, I'm not sure about people to meet up with in Pennsylvania, but I am doing my, the same job I did last year in the Adirondacks again.

So I have to leave the trail sometime in Pennsylvania and then I go back to the Adirondacks to work. So that's my big plan right now is trying to figure that out.

And the thing- the thing about people meeting us too is just at this point we're walking so much further than a normal person could just pick up and walk. I never entertained the idea that I was going to come out and hike with you, but if you need to get a ride in or something like that, let me know.

So ways off, so I'm not sure exactly how to work out. Hopefully we'll be doing the four state challenge right before that.

So what's the four state challenge? You start at the Virginia- West Virginia border, you go through West Virginia, Maryland, Virginia and Pennsylvania. All in one day it's about 45 miles. And you start after midnight and go and go, and go, and go, and go and go and try and get through all 45 and 24 hours. And the merit in that is it's a just cause principle. Yeah, once you're over 50, those kind of things just sound really awful.

Exactly. No, you guys go for it.

You can only do it once you guys have like a lot of time on your hands, don't you? It looks like we're doing nothing but walking. Any big gear changes. My pack is starting to take some damage. Uh, I like if I, if I wasn't getting off in a month, I would be switching that pack out.

You know, around 700 miles. A pair of shoes is like hey, stop. I just picked up new shoes today. I got one of the inflatable pads that are a little thicker. Instead of my zero degree bag I got a reversible 55- 35.

So on one side it's a 35 degree bag. On the other side it's a 55.

We did switch out the water filters broke. My katahden hiker pro- the handle snapped off so I replaced it with the katahden pocket.

Yeah, bucky pretty much pumps water most of the time, every now and then I'll do it. Are you in shelters most nights? Yeah, most of the time. Yeah, yeah, we're starting to see a lot more people. Yeah, you're gonna see a lot of people in Shenandoah. Yeah, we've been seeing a lot, a lot more day hikers out.

So you haven't had to rescue anybody yet. Um, we did carry someone's pack for him for a little bit. He's probably in his 70s and he should have taken a break.

He's still going and I think he's still having knee trouble. We also had- and we ended up giving somebody two dinners too. Oh, yeah, somebody who that wasn't really- I mean, it wasn't like rescuing. Um, we, we ended up giving him two of our dinners that we picked up in town. Got any big plans for Easter.

Somebody's cousin lives about five miles off the trail and, uh, they're gonna feed us an Easter dinner on Saturday and then two 20 mile days and those say: you're hitting shelters, shelter, shelter. And then the next one is to a town where, yeah, and that's where our uh mail drop is being bounced to uh the rest of our meals, so we'll pick a couple more up there and then after that, I think it's another few, like another four or five days, to another town.

We've got about six of us now, uh, just like sort of in this group. Well, you probably wouldn't have lasted this long if it was just the two of you and you never saw people. It definitely makes it a lot better at the end of the day, especially the miserable days. We also have a lot of fun at the shelters.

Yeah, the group we have we're just constantly laughing and I think we we brighten a lot of other people's shelter experiences. I think it's always good to talk to you guys.

I'm glad things are going well and I look forward to talking to you again soon. Yeah, yeah, we'll, we'll be in touch and yeah, it would be. It'd be really great to uh get together, uh in tenant there and nice to meet you too.

Bear, I think he's calling about some of his gear, trying to get something. We'll pass the feeling along.

Okay, I'll talk to you soon. Yeah, we'll do