OA Long Term Camp Length

[ASM915]

Knight,

 

Long term camping of at least 5 nights can include Jamborees, Moots, 50 Milers Award, Philmont, Northern Tier, NYLT, Woodbadge for adults if the Council runs the week long program, summer camp, camp staff (talk about real long term camping, LOL), etc. Any camping expierence that last at least 5 night should count.

[eisely]

To respond to a question raised in an earlier post, it is my understanding that the camping that counts must be done under the "auspices of BSA." Family camping does not count. Camping with other groups does not count. I suppose a family camping event organized by a troop that led a youth to join might count, but again that is a SM call.

 

In prior years when I tried to sort this out for our troop, the issue I encountered was long term treks. In the situation I was dealing with I had scouts who had gone to summer camp and had met the long term requirement cleanly. The question then became as to how to treat participation in long term treks during the same two years. I discussed this with the lodge advisor and he made the point that the idea was to encourage not just total nights camping but fequency of camping. He could also see the injustice of not counting any of the nights on the long term treks. He and I agreed to count up to three nights out of any larger number of nights on a longer trek. That struck me as a reasonable compromise. This never became lodge policy or anything like that, but there was an issue that I was able to resolve reasonably. Worthy scouts were not overlooked, and the intent of encouraging frequent participation was also met.

[lancefisher]

We have always gone the route that additional long term camps/treks were counted as 3 nights towards the requirement (including additional summer camps). The limit on only one long term camp counting has been interpreted as not excluding ANY nights of the trips, but simply as not having ONLY long term camp nights.

 

LF