Few scouts understood what the Council patch on their shoulder represented. This hike, knox-trail-proposal.ppt, was meant to bring meaning to it all.

Ft. Ticonderoga is between Lake Champlain & Lake George (on NY/Vermont border). Major battles in the French & Indian war occured in this area and many soldiers endured extreme hardships here for the good [...]

The Grand Teton Council puts on this wonderful scout leadership program in June every year. It’s at a beautiful location, the people are very nice, and they put a huge amount of effort into the program. This is scouting the way you want it to be, at least it looked that way when I was [...]

There was a great Far Side clip with two scientist who discover that time is actually equal to money. I wish I could have found it for this class.
I’ve posted a zipped file with all the training material that I produced for this class. The worksheet (.xls file) I did to help the kids understand [...]

Besides suggesting someplace interesting to go, another reason for this presentation was to suggest to the older venture kids that when we did things, we did them well and for a purpose. With everyone’s time consumed with homework, troop activities, sports, jobs, and whatever else, I was trying to coach them into putting a lot of effort into [...]

This is a great overnight hike for the older scouts. Hike up above the treeline across the entire Presidential Range and up and over Mt. Washington, the highest mountain in the northeast (6288ft). It is quite a challenge and achievement. I wanted to revise this slightly but ran out of time.
I’ve also attached a copy of a [...]

This is a great hike idea if you are looking for something the scouts can be quite proud of  -
From Monson, Maine, the Appalachian Trail begins its journey through the fabled 100 mile Wilderness. This is the longest stretch on the AT that doesn’t cross a paved road. Many of its best highlights are packed [...]

 
I had this idea for an award (patch, certificate) that the scouts could earn for hiking some part of the Appalachian Trail in each of the 5 New England states (CT, MA, VT, NH, ME). The patch would look identical to the above (the classic trail marker symbol for the organization), with the state initials [...]

Making a competitive car is very simple and you don’t need to be a physics teacher or engineer. All you need to do is get on the internet and search “pinewood derby”. It’s all there.
This does take time and you do find that most sites are ones where you have to pay for a book to [...]

This was a good program to introduce the scouts to how things worked locally and what it means to be a good citizen. I started the event with a slide presentation from our Historical Society. I really wanted them to get a sense of our town’s long history, an appreciation of the hard work and vision [...]

This was my idea for our venture crew fundraiser (which was never followed up). I heard this story a from another venture advisor that they sold BSA mouse pads on ebay and made enough money to travel to Denali and to Morocco.
On this idea - I bought one of these antique repro maps for my [...]