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3/4 will work, but as an uncoordinated kid, I always felt more stable on a 1" rope. A splice sounds like a great way to increase stability. 1/2" Might not withstand the tension in a 30' span. Has anybody modified the monkey bridge design with Kevlar, a.k.a. slack line?

SBmom's den has come up with examples -- four at the time of her first post. What's in these boys' way is a willingness to defer to one another and come to a consensus. I'm not sure pointing out that they won't earn AoL will motivate them to break that log jam. But, it could be worth a try.

This is typical of Area/Regional Venturing officers. They see more of professionals than most scouts.

Having recently gone through a similar situation, I think that's about all that can be done. I explained to the aggrieved scout what scouters had done wrong, and what his options were. There was some back-and-forth about it. But at no time did I try to assign any more motive to it than, "Looks like this new committee is trying to address a skills retention problem." The scout eventually made peace with the committee, knowing he was well within his rights to keep digging his heels in. Follow-up: as crew president, he is centering meetings on refreshing those first class skills. A process that is much more fun when the only award is bragging rights, and the promise of some real-world challenges in the near future.

Institutional head. For our CO (a Presbyterian church), that is the Clerk of Session. For other churches it might be the pastor. For a fire/police station, it would be the chief.

Is it ... Trustworthy, Loyal, Helpful, Friendly, Courteous, Kind, Obedient, Cheerful, Thrifty, Brave, Clean, or Reverent? And not the striking opposite of any of those? Most of your limiting cases might fall under not being kind. But not always. Some really good skits might get precluded by your tight boundaries.

@@Stosh, I was talking about a blown out heel or sole of a boot. For actual feet, yes the duct tape, and/or a thin sock layer (I've become addicted to merino wool liners from the army surplus store, but they didn't have them this weekend ) will do the trick on most people's skin. Please, everybody who may have means to acquire it, only use incendiaries on the boot WHILE IT IS REMOVED FROM THE FOOT, and at appropriate safe distances from any body part (yours or your buddy's) as advised by your munitions instructor!

Loved my tin whistles. (The first one was probably from my oldest brother's scout gear.) Then, as we became a kayaking family and I volunteered supervising aquatics, the Fox 40 became my friend (no waiting for a cork ball to dry before the volume kicked in). Then National Camp School came out with the philosophy that life guards shouldn't have whistles -- undue sense of superiority and other such truck. Someone, please introduce me to the guy who asked for a ruling on that .

I find most adhesives give way without heat and pressure. Now if the 1st aid kit came with a little plastique and detonators ...

@@ShutterbugMom, I was one of those who led off with the "not your problem" shtick. But I was dead serious about making the boys go to the library to research this. Especially if they are at loggerheads over it. As long as they aren't getting into wrestling matches and breaking furniture, they need to go through this forming-storming-norming-performing process on their own ... perhaps with the guidance of an older scout. You know when your troop will use them. I'm assuming they do too. They might even be getting a rise out of you being irritated by this. (I was an 11 year old WEBELOS once, and getting our DL to blow his stack was a favorite pastime of ours. So, pardon me if I've wrongly generalized my childhood to your boys. ) So, feeding them concrete ideas from strangers on the internet will just reward their drama. Don't get me wrong you absolutely must keep the heat on (e.g., "You guys might look a little like Tiger cubs at the end of the meeting if you don't settle on a yell."), but you must at the same time distance yourself from the problem ("I'm sure you guys can figure this out. Just remember the 4th and 5th points of the scout law while you do.") There are somethings that are sacred. And boys' patrol "image" is one of them. Unless it's blatantly obscene, we keep our hands off.

Once upon a time, we called it a single-strand rope bridge. The materials now make it much more feasible for a lot of boys. And where on that old rope bridge the best we could do was dash across, a quality slack line enables the obsessive practitioner to master some really cool acrobatics. Our museum/library (the one with the to-scale bronze diplodocus) has a really nice cut of lawn with evenly spaced old sycamores, where some CMU/Pitt students set up their lines in the evening. Definitely fun to watch. But you have to watch out as their skills increase. For example, our troop for a while had some pretty athletic boys ... really good climbers and hikers who were pretty cautious in the wild. But, as soon as a Frisbee or football was introduced to the mixed, you could almost count down the seconds until a boy reported to us with a broken bone. Skills increase: more challenging maneuvers: get more padding and more spotters and maybe even send the boys to gymnastics class.

Scouts purchase/fabricate their own tents or borrow their buddy's (or go without). Quality varies. But, as boys share different tents over the years, they get a good idea of what they want to invest in when they come into their own $$'s. If anyone asks me, I tell them that over the years Eureka has become my brand to trust. After exploding in 100mph winds, I could keep one patched and serviceable for a decade of use by two active scouts. The Venturer tended to prefer the 6-man Coleman, or the 50-cent pup tent.

No problem as far as I'm concerned. Many Area officers do have responsibilities that could benefit from WB's goal setting. However, he needs to understand that WB is not a two weekend course, it is an 18 month commitment. Not always easy to do with a bunch of life transitions coming down the pike. He should have a chat with his advisor(s) about the pros and cons. (That includes parents' expectations).

When we ask "Is this reasonable" we need to specify "for whom." For every scout in your council? No. For all, or even half, the scouts in your troop? No. For 1 in 40 boys scouts? Well, that's where we find ourselves on a bubble. This kind of big-ticket scouting is the sport of 1-percenters or scouts surrounded by 1-percenters who could provide jobs or fundraising opportunities. (Jambo always only attracted less than 3% of registered scouts.) That number plays out in our troop/crew. Of about 40 eligible, one signed up. So, the working assumption of far-off councils might be that it's worth it ... only if they can guarantee opportunity-of-a-lifetime side-trips. And for boys in distant councils, the working assumption is that they will never be anywhere near these places again unless their parents shell out for the entire family's air fair. But, son #2 at age 16, for example, having met a regional venturing officer who we dropped off at the Megabus stop after an area summit, came to Mrs. Q and I with a plan to go visit a buddy who had re-located to Charlotte, changing buses at the DC rail station. The boy had a solid plan, and was going to cost us less in gas and food than if we had taken him along vacationing with us at his grandparents! He could have stayed over in DC, except he and I had already done that once when Mrs. Q had a speaking engagement with the hotel expense paid. Paying $ to be on someone else's tour schedule has always been a non-starter for my kids. And I guess for most of our council, which offers no side trips. But, most of the scouts around here don't mind the kick-in-the-butt to buy a spare uni (scout shop coupon comes with our council's Jambo fee). There's the mystique of maybe being able to swap a whole shirt with one of another scout's your size. One of our scouts came back with a larger-than-life story about him and a buddy swapping their uni's for two soldiers' BDU's. The boy then parlayed that into getting fast-tracked at the doughnut line, then going to the back of the line and selling his box of doughnuts to impatient scouts.

If he really is into conservation, this is is probably the right schedule. I'd like to see more boys hustle up and get their Eagle at the start of high school so that they can tackle things like Hornaday as older scouts.

And I, being a revolutionary, believe we would do well give only Den Mother/Father patches to adults, dispense with Den Chiefs, and have Scouts and Venturers be the Den Leaders.

@pchabdo, for point of reference, the crew president decided to devote last nights meeting to fire-starting skills. Each member successfully kept to one match - except for the oldest, most impatient and easily distracted venturer. Long range goal: multi-point insertion, land-navigation, and general survival drill. (Or as we used to say growing up: a walk in the woods to some cool campsite in the middle of nowhere.) I don't talk adventure anymore. I'm about resourcefulness. Be resourceful, and the adventure will come.

Not your problem. Make it clear that it's not your problem. They either fix it or be the umpteenth patrol in this country who never settled on a yell. If they want to get unstuck, have them try this ... Go to the library, check out Hank, The Cow Dog series (in paper or audio books), enjoy the story or fast forward to where Hank encounters coyotes, pick a really cool line from the coyote characters, convert it to a yell. But let me re-emphasize: not your problem to solve. Like @@Stosh says, it may not even be a problem. The boys may call the SM/SPL about how often their troop uses patrol yells. If they do, ask the SPL on an older scout to pay your boys a visit. If they don't, well, there you have it. Finally, there's nothing saying they can't have a multi-part yell: one for the morning, one for the evening, one for when they brush their teeth ... Real coyotes certainly know how to mix it up. They've been driving us campers nuts ever since they've been reintroduced to WPa.

Yep. Sounds nice. Until some creative scout does something really creative, and a disgruntled committee member spouts off about it not being in the guidelines as if you've just tread on holy writ. This is a question for patrol leaders to resolve. Period.

Not service anymore than reading a MB pamphlet or attending NYLT is service. It sounds like great preparation for service. And I think he should look into unique opportunities that he can have outside of his troop (e.g., schools, youth groups, etc ...) once he completes his training. Let us know what your son thinks of the course.

The drop in enthusiasm for side trips might be money, but it might be a sentiment like "My folks are gonna drag me - or I'm gonna go - to a march on Washington someday anyway. So why bother now?" Also, more kids are post-modern nomads anyway. (Heck, you can't even pile in the back of the station wagon for a wrestling match anymore.) So, more time on the road does not impress them.

No, if BSA really wants a seamless transition, then inculcate an expectation that Boy Scouts and Venturers will be den leaders, not den chiefs. We would have to operate something like this ... Any troop/crew who does not field at least one leader for every 10 cub youth would be considered a failed troop (seriously: net zero on the JTE matrix). The summer camp focus of the troop is one week to themselves (half the patrols before the cubs' week of camp, the other half after) and one week running camp for cubs. In this context we can begin to have a co-ed emphasis. A male and female den leader would team up to operate the den. Segregating and integrating as necessary according to the cultural norms put down by the the SM in conjunction with the CO. The SM covers the entire unit. (So, yes, @@NJCubScouter, they most likely will be a unit, but it won't be because they have the same number on their sleeve. It will because the troop is defined by it training youth to run the cub program.) In practical terms, Cubmasters and Crew Advisiors would report to the SM (I know half the audience his hovering over the down-vote if they haven't started to do so already.) Involved moms and dads could call themselves den hosts. But their responsibilities would be mainly providing space and, possibly, driving kids. That's right, get mom out of the room from the minute they call the kid a lion. Don't like it? Then toss it and quit pining for seamless transitions because that's what parents have been asking not to have for 8 decades. Why change now? BTW, even with a seamless transition, I don't think we'd avoid that lost of 1st year scouts. Even if we're providing a continuum for the youth, life in this US is throwing down discreet changes. I figure you'd get the same loss, just spread evenly over a couple of years.

@@SSScout, mine is the Seneca district in Laurel Highland's Council ... A little more outside the beltway!

So, there were these young-adult scouts who were sent out to determine the suitability of a permanent site for an up-and-coming program. (Let's call it the dirty dozen patrol.) They took their good old time, looked into available land, water quality, food service, and were generally discrete about the whole process. Basically the usual planning and preparation, and a true First-Class adventure. When the dirty dozen returned to their unit, they gave a a thorough report. The land was awesome! Plenty of sites to choose from. Good water. Great food ripe for picking. (They even had samples to prove it.) Everything was up to spec. However, the majority report was pessimistic. Staking claim would require constant wrangling with existing owners, and they had some big guns on their side. Two scouts in the minority report said, basically, "Come on guys, we can take them! The time is right. You know we can do this! It's exactly what you've been wanting!" Well the unit as a whole was in no mood for a fight, in spite of their current digs not being anything near National Camp School standards, so they went with the majority report. Nobody remembers the names of the ten scouts who succeeded in swaying their unit to keep the status quo. But the scouts with the minority report, Joshua and Caleb, grudgingly went along in their crappy camp selection .... They did however commit their time to teaching first-years how to take on Giants. So, that in due time they had a unit full of patrols who were ripe to occupy new territory and out maneuver the bigguns. (As a side note, one of the patrols formed a band with a crazy good horn section ... "The Shofars" I think they were called ... their gigs had a reputation for bringing down the house.) So CP, you may indeed be stupid. But, you could still be right. Let us know what you desire to do about it.

emphasis on necessary.If you have an organization of members whose objective is self-reliance, resourcefulness, and adventure beyond the range of digital media, is it not necessary to communicate with members in ways that deploy tools that cater to those traits? My CO does not give us access to their internet. So when council information is strictly in the cloud, it is not available. (Neither is this forum. Which is okay with me. Although I do miss you all for maybe a second when I'm out in the wild lands around a real campfire. ) What I used to spend in ink goes to registration fees. So, if the district hasn't printed the flyers for me, they aren't going back to my unit. To (the great) Seneca district's credit, they do maintain an E-mail list and forward along the most pertinent one or two items under relevant subject heads. But, my advice to all, if you're digitizing announcements, please, just the facts ma'am. Your anchor page listing pertinent announcements should - drop all logos and graphics. - plain text, ASCII or default html. - entries in outline format: - include only date/times, title, abstract, location, cost, contact, link to details If whatever software you propose to use cannot produce that page of data about everything in your calendar, drop it. That page of one or two sheets should be printed for every scouter who wants it. Trust me, a sheer of paper like that will find its way into your lead scouter's backpack, and he/she will pull it out at Cracker Barrel for youth and adult leader to peruse and prioritize