What happened to the Buddy System?

[packsaddle]

Beautiful video, Brent. Too bad at the age of 35 he left a fatherless daughter.

 

Regarding the guy in the North Cascades, that is a great way to go but to me, 70 is still a bit early.(This message has been edited by packsaddle)

[GernBlansten]

Free solo climbing. Ah, those were the best of times. Haven't done that in 25 years. But I tell you, its the most clarifying thing you can do with your clothes on. There are old climbers and there are bold climbers. But there are no old, bold climbers.

[Beavah]

Yah, I don't have a problem with da free soloists. As a group, they're very responsible sorts. Da video of Osman shows him doin' 5.11 stuff, but if memory serves Dan was a pretty solid 5.13 climber (8 grades higher). An eight grade difference is like da difference between anything you've seen your scouts climb and goin' up a ladder or steep set of stairs. Do yeh let your scouts free-solo up a ladder or steep set of stairs? Heck, I bet most of us let our kids free-solo climb trees .

 

Key is knowin' your ability and knowin' da route.

 

There've been cases I know of where Olympic kayakers have been harassed or arrested by authorities trying to put on to flood-stage rivers that they know really well. For those guys, a familiar river at flood stage is just a good practice ground, well within their ability. Ain't the same as Joe and Melinda goin' out in an open canoe with their 5-year-old.

 

B

 

[BrentAllen]

The very end of the clip shows Osman making the record-breaking 1,000 foot jump. He went back 3 weeks later to retrieve his ropes, and decided to make the jump again. No cameras that time. Unfortunately, the rope snapped and he fell to the canyon floor, which killed him. As packsaddle mentioned, he left behind a daughter.

 

After he made the jump successfully, he said he was going to slow down and give his Guardian Angels some time to rest. I guess 3 weeks wasn't enough time. I couldn't see him growing old, for some reason.

[SR540Beaver]

Not to hijack the thread....but.

 

Here are two of my buddy system pet peeves.

 

Summer camp usually has around 500+ folks at any given camp. Staff, adults and campers everywhere. The property is usually fenced in. I personally don't have a problem with a kid walking around camp without a buddy. I recall one week in an old troop of mine where the adults made a sport of sitting by the road and asking single kids where their buddy was and sending them back to wherever they came from. That was childish.

 

The other was what I consider one of those scouting myths I've seen argued here before. Scouts can't tent alone because of the buddy system. What? Why not? Now, in the troop I now serve, we use troop tents, so we make the most of them and put either two or three boys in them. On any given campout, we might have 40 to 45 boys. We can cover that with 15 tents. We don't allow personal tents for the boys because we own troop tents and because we can't haul 45 tents or take up that much room in a campground somewhere. All of that being said, when I served a troop with less than 10 boys that did not own troop tents, we allowed boys to bring their personal tents and stay alone if they so chose. One of the arguments is safety or illness. Tent walls are pretty thin if you have not noticed. You can hear a bodily noise from 100 feet away on a still night. Having a guy laying next to you isn't going to make you any safer than if he is 10 feet away in his own tent.

 

I also don't like the idea that they have to wake a buddy up at 3:00 AM to walk over to the tree line and take a leak.

[shortridge]

"I also don't like the idea that they have to wake a buddy up at 3:00 AM to walk over to the tree line and take a leak."

 

I have no data to back this up, but I'd wager that any Scout who tried to wake a buddy up at 3 a.m. for a potty escort would either (a) find out some very interesting colorful language, or (b) get punched.

[Hal_Crawford]

At summer camp we consider the latrine to be within the site and not requiring a buddy.

 

That said, we had a first year camper get disoriented (may have been sleep walking) and wander into a neighboring site wearing only boxers. He had wandered 100+ yards through the woods without shoes! Though it was after midnight there were still some people up in the site so their SM loaned the lad a set of flip-flops and they led him back to our site.

 

It would be hard to get terribly lost in our camp but I have heard lots of stories of scouts out west getting lost between the parking lot and their campsite. By this I mean lost enough to spend the night in the woods and/or requiring a full scale SAR response. I assume this is because western camps are larger and more backcountry rather than scouts in western states having a lousier sense of direction.

 

 

 

[NWScouter]

We have two camps in our council; the southern one is about 700 acres and both butt up to DNR, state timberland land. From both you can go to the crest of the Cascades without hitting an paved road and the northern one from edge of it you are only mile to Canada,

Here is a picture of what the underbrush looks like. I took the picture in one campsite and there is another campsite about 20, 30 feet from there: There are some more pictures of camp from my collection you should be able to see from there.

Hal, Ive seen some pictures of your mountains and the underbrush there looks pretty dense.

(This message has been edited by nwscouter)