What cold-weather things do you do?

[oldsm]

Our troop has decided that thay want to do cabin camping at a local council camp in January. That means heat, lights, and running water - but still use the latrine outside.

 

The guys need some new ideas for activities. Not card playing or board games. The outdoors stuff. There might or might not be snow, or ice, or rain, or mud.

 

What would your troop plan for activities in this kind of situation?

[GernBlansten]

During the day, go outside. Hike, pioneering, JLT exercises, just about everything you might do during the summer.

At night in the cabin, bring a portable DVD player and go through the JLT videos/activities. Do a program on LNT or First Aid. Use the time for planning the next year's campouts.

[Sir_Scoutalot]

I think sometimes you just need to let them be goof balls. Our troop has boys from a variety of school and church backgrounds, so there's some benefit to just letting them hang out and bond.

That being said, I might recommend a movie night, video game tourney, or perhaps special merit badge program.

We are doing a cabin outing in January to a prime bald eagle wintering area. We will be doing a bird tour and nature presentations, but there will be some hanging out time as well.

[OneHour]

We would have a lock-in. They do as they want, movies, basketball, dodgeball, Nintendo, Playstation, Xbox, whatever they decide that they want to do all night long! Our church has a huge gym ... so it is nice! We also hold a lock-in at the rock climbing gym, but that could get costly! The only thing that costs us during the Church lock-in is parental's sleep! Tried the mb thing one time at the lock-in ... didn't go far!

[Lisabob]

We did a CSI-themed camp last January (cabin camping, but outside all day) in connection with local, county, and state law enforcement. The boys & police set up "crime scenes" to "investigate," got tours of a portable evidence lab, got to work a little with police/dog teams, did some fingerprinting (had to be done inside - too cold for the stuff to work outside!), etc. This set the stage for them to work on the crime prevention and fingerprinting mbs, though most just enjoyed the campout and did not follow up on these MBs. This camp was the most popular of the year, hands down. The boys elected to do it again with some variations, this year (though in April so no cabins). This even takes a lot of advance planning though.

 

 

 

[packsaddle]

We have a cold-weather camp/ski trip every winter. Different destinations...and nature has let us down lately, the cold weather has been, ahem, not very cold. Last year we had a wonderful cold weather backpack with high winds, dry snow, and subfreezing temperatures. It was wonderful.

The winter is also a great time to go caving. Caves are about the same temperature any time so going into a cave in the winter makes you feel like you're warming up.

So our strategy is:

1. take advantage of the weather and use it for the outing

2. or ignore it by going underground.

[scoutingagain]

We do one "cabin" camp in the winter. Several of the New England ski areas have overnight lock ins for scouts and youth groups available. The scouts get to ski a couple of days & sleep on the floor of a ski lodge. One area, has a "midnight madness" special, where they ski until 3am, sleep in the lodge and then can ski the next day. You can get 20 hours of skiing in, in a 24 Hour period! Check out http://www.crotchedmountain.com/GroupRates.html

 

We did this last year and the boys had a blast. No need for an evening activity to keep them occupied. So did the adults, but we tended to chill out around midnight.

 

We also do a winter campout, hopefully with lots of snow and do some snowshoeing. It's been hit and miss the last few years, even in northern New England.

 

Other great winter activities we've thought about include skating(old fashioned pond hockey), ice fishing, and then there's broomball.

 

If you've never played broomball your missing something. It's similar to ice hockey, except without skates, and a short broom and a soccerlike ball are used instead of hockey sticks and a puck. Best played on a large frozen lake or pond in large groups. The official game rules call for six member teams on a hockey rink size piece of ice, but my experience is it's more fun with teams of 11- 15 on an ice surface the size of a football field, more like field hockey on ice. If you don't have ice, a large field would do, better covered in snow or mud.

 

SA

[gwd-scouter]

Our "planned" cold-weather campout is coming up in a few weeks. We always go to our Council Camp and use the Adirondacks (3 sided wooden structures with bunks built into the walls).

 

I put planned in quotation marks because while we may plan for cold weather, the weather may not cooperate. This week, daytime temps are in the 70s. Back in October during our District Camporee, daytime temps were high 50s-low 60s and got down to freezing at night.

 

One year on our winter campout it snowed. Guys had a great time with a game they made up. Form pairs. Put one Scout in a large plastic trashcan. Second Scout is the "driver." Say go, teams push the can across the snow covered meadow. Huge unplanned fun that they still talk about. They also still talk about the fall trip several years ago when temps at night dropped into the teens and their pancake batter froze as they were trying to mix it.

 

Here in the South the weather changes dramatically during the winter. One cold weather campout saw temps in the 80s during the day and 50s at night. Another saw 30s during the day and teens at night.

 

We've had rain, ice and snow in the morning; sun, heat and humidity in the afternoon or the next day.

 

Ask any Southerner - in the Winter we are known to have the heat running in our cars in the morning, air-conditioning in the afternoon.

 

Our cold weather campout to our Council camp is planned for the same time every year. The boys plan for a nature hike, orienteering and a service project. At night, campfire of course.

 

[CA_Scouter]

We rent a Forest Service cabin once a year, and we'll bring up DVD's and Monopoly for the evening program, but we also do a cooking contest between the patrols. Meals are judged on nutritition, creativity and presentation, and the scouts really seem to get into it. Winning patrol doesn't have to clean their dishes, the other patrol(s) chip in and do it.

 

For our winter campout last year, we rented snowshoes and took 'em on a short hike. It turned out to be short because one of my ASM's started a snowball fight, and we ended up doing that for one and half hours! ( the downside, of course, being that the adult staff was on Motrin and BenGay the rest of the week! ).

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

[Kudu]

108 Scout winter camping activities can be found at The Inquiry Net:

 

http://inquiry.net/outdoor/winter/activities/index.htm

 

Traditonal winter Scouting games by Baden-Powell, Dan Beard, etc. (including Beard's extensive treatise on "Snowball Warfare") can be found at

 

http://inquiry.net/outdoor/winter/activities/games/index.htm

 

An overview of winter camping for Scouts can be found at:

 

http://inquiry.net/outdoor/winter/index.htm

 

Kudu