04/12/2026
What a weekend!
Our crew competed at the San Saba Mountain Man Camporee. All day Saturday was a race to complete all 8 events (gold panning, log toss, tomahawk throwing, archery, fire building, tunnel trudge, scout law bridge, and canoeing) in the shortest time. Each event had the possibility of penalties of added time and rewards of time deducted from the overall race time. Other events that were part of the competition, but not part of the race were scout spirit, campfire skits, dutch oven cookoff, and mountain man punch. Two of our adults volunteered at stations during the race, and one walked all around the three parks taking pictures and video. It was the perfect day, cloudy and cool, but not rainy.
That evening, we knew that there was a strong potential for storms during the wee hours of the morning, and there would be the potential of having to evacuate if it got bad, so rather than going straight to bed after campfire, we packed up all of our camp kitchen, and everyone's personal gear into the trailer, had everyone move into two people per tent, packed up the now unoccupied tents, and moved the three youth tents under the dining canopies that had walls and tarps for walls. One youth slept in the truck, and one adult slept in the car. It was about 12:30am by the time we finished all of that preparation and got into our sleeping bags. At 1:30, the event organizers came around waking everyone up and told us all to take shelter in our cars. It started pouring shortly afterward! We attempted to sleep in the cars, some of us succeeding more than others, then we were given the all clear to go back to our tents at 3am. The rain continued quite heavy through the rest of the night, but was done by 7am. We woke up to pond for our campsite! Tents were full of water, sleeping bags were sopping wet, and our shoes and bottom parts of our pants got completely soaked as we worked to put the tents and the dining canopies away. Once everything was put away, we got dry clothes on. Thankfully we had packed our personal gear into the trailer, so we all had dry clothes! Two of our adults drove into town and got breakfast burritos for everyone since we had already packed the kitchen. Next was scouts own service, then awards. Oh the awards!! We saw our crew doing an amazing job of teamwork and patrol spirit throughout the day, and that was reflected in the awards they earned!
They placed 3rd in the tunnel trudge, gold panning, and the scout law bridge. They placed 2nd in canoeing, patrol spirit, and fire starting. In fire starting, they completed burning their string in exactly 10 minutes. This is the fastest the organizers had ever seen a patrol complete this challenge (in 13 years!) One other patrol got the exact same time, so they moved to patrol spirit at the event for a tie breaker...but they were still tied! So they moved to the overall race patrol spirit for the next tiebreaker, and the other team came out ahead.
Finally, our crew finished 3rd in the overall race with a time (don't forget there were time deductions as rewards in events) of 38 minutes and some seconds. The team that got second place had a time in the teens of minutes, and the team that finished first, the same team that won patrol spirit and fire building, had a time of negative 36 minutes! In addition to the plaque for 3rd place overall, each member of our crew received a backpacking stove!
We are so proud of the teamwork, cheerful attitudes, and resilience of our youth throught the weekend! They had a great time...on Saturday, definitely, but also today once they got over the shock of waking up to being asleep in a pond in what was a meadow when they went to bed! The stories and jokes are sure to live for years!
A few more videos will be added, but they can only be added one at a time, not as a part of a post with photos.
