Ray Mears is an expert woodsman from southern Great Britan. I remember watching him on a U.S. cable network a few years ago. They can still be found on UKTV but I can’t find them in the U.S. Thankfully there are a number of clips on line like the one embedded above. Mears is a serious student and teacher of bushcraft not a sensationalist unlike another British import whose show is (unfortunately) much more popular on U.S. televisions. He has authored many books available (with a selection of gear and related items at his website .

Canadian canoeist and writer Kevin Callan shows how to rig a tarp - The quality of your tarp and the skill of erecting one is more crucial on a trip then a tent. Why? It’s all about group dynamics. During foul weather the worst thing for a group of paddlers to do is to cram tight inside a small tent to wait out the storm. It won’t take long before even the best of friends begin to irritate one another. But under a tarp, with a warm fire going and a cup of tea brewing, things don’t seem so bad – as long as you’ve put the tarp up correctly… Read the full post here

Tom Gillard is a Scoutmaster in Tullahoma Tennessee. We struck up a correspondence after he was part of a session about the patrol method I presented over the internet for a group of Scouters attending a Merit Badge University. Over the past couple of months Tom has written to tell me about his experiences applying the patrol method in his Troop. Tom is no newcomer to Scouting but he wanted to work towards strengthening his youth leadership. He shares the same reservations and doubts we all have when we really jump off into the deep end and unreservedly invest our youth leaders with real responsibility. Here’s Tom’s latest installment – I think you’ll find it inspiring: Our plans for this month’s outing changed suddenly leaving one week for the Patrol Leader’s Council to adapt. No sweat for them. They don’t have the same appreciation of time that us older folks have. Anyway we usually have an “advancement weekend” for the newly crossed over Webelos, so this is what they started planning. The permission slips were taken up on the Monday prior to the outing so at least they knew who was going. A couple of the older Scouts helped them plan a menu, which I wish I’d seen before I saw the Ramen noodles on Saturday night, but…anyway. Equipment check? Almost none. We had 6 of the 9 new Scouts and 10 of the older ones going out. I was still worried… Monday night I sent the SPL an advancement report that outlined what each Scout needed for their next rank. I asked him to give us the most’ bang for the buck’ he could while we were camping. He came up with a schedule and quite a few of the requirements that are best done while out in the woods. Not bad… No calls from anyone all week. Saturday I was actually quite apprehensive. The acting SPL (the real one couldn’t be there) showed up. I gave him the roster and asked him to start checking them off and when all arrived, get them to the vehicles and prepare to leave. It worked with just a little questioning on my part. “How many are we missing? If we are all here shouldn’t we load up and go?” I had most of the older Scouts in my suburban. Between their chatter on the drive to our campsite I asked them to tell me what their mission was this weekend. One of them piped up; “If the older Scouts hadn’t helped us we wouldn’t be where we are today, so we’re here to help these new Scouts start advancing.” I thought I should probably stop the car and wipe my teary eyes, but I said, “Good, that’s good!” The others agreed with him. They had said the words but could they dance the dance? I asked more questions about how they would be doing things during the drive. When we arrived I ran though your instructional methods with them, (circle-up, round robin, etc.) Finally they went on their merry way… I sat down to watch with two other ‘seasoned’ ASM’s (they are on board with the idea of the Scouts leading), and 4 ‘new’ dads. I warned them that, while it may be painful to watch, we were letting the Scouts handle things. With little to no prompting the older Scouts put the new Scouts into smaller groups and started instructing. Of course they forgot a lot of what I had told them about instructing earlier but I didn’t care: I was proud that they were taking charge! I wandered around casually asking if they needed anything, then returning to my chair. One of the ASM’s was keeping the new dads busy showing them map and compass skills. As the day progressed we adults remarked what a good job everyone was doing. At lunch I let the Scouts know that they were doing a WONDERFUL job. They had a 2 hour session, 2 hour lunch and then another 2 hour session then free time for the rest of the day. On their first camping trip with the troop we have a ceremonial welcome for our new Scouts. I had asked the older Scouts about doing this. They remembered the ceremony and wanted to do it for the new Scouts. We set out 12 candles down the road to our camp. The candles are lit and the younger scouts are led past. An older Scout is standing at each candle. He gives the Scout sign and repeats his point of the Scout law. When they reach the end of the road the new Scouts arrive at a campfire. I had each of them pick up a stick and bring it to the campfire. I used your SM minute about sticks The new dads were suitably impressed by the ceremony. Most importantly I watched 6 new Scouts bond with the older Scouts during the day. The older Scouts accepted them without question and without being compelled to do so. I commended the Scouts at every opportunity for how well they carried out the whole weekend. I know that the next outing could very well be a complete disaster. But times like these you hope that, in their own teenage way, they are actually getting the message! Like I’ve told you before we were around 70% youth led. I knew we could do better and it looks like our older Scouts were really capable of doing this all along. I was just scared to let go completely. I know they can surprise you when you least expect it, but WOW what a wonderful weekend it was. Of course there were the eggs cooked on a stove that was way to hot, the bugs that flew into our supper and the unfortunate spiders that wandered into the tent; as you said endless entertainment! Thanks again for the support you are giving me and others! YIS, Tom Tom’s story is a familiar one. It takes some real courage to put the responsibility for things in the hands of the Scouts. But that’s where the responsibility belongs. Tom wasn’t totally comfortable with this – none of us ever really are! We worry and fret over whether the Scouts are catching on. But, time and time again, they step up and surprise us with their skill and competence. If you give your Scouts few responsibilities they’ll be a little responsible. If you give them more responsibility they’ll be more responsible. If you give them complete responsibility they’ll be completely responsible.

My first reaction to this title was “yeah, right”. I’ve been a camper all my life spending a thousand or more nights under canvas or on the trail. My camping education started forty years ago with Colin Fletcher’s book ‘The Complete Walker’ and expanded to the classics written by Horace Kephart, Nessmuk, and Bradford Angier. I thought I knew all the tricks until I read ‘Camping’s Top Secrets’. Cliff Jacobsen’s collection of techniques and ideas have been tested over many years of guiding canoe trips in northern Canada. Creating a comfortable camp in such unforgiving conditions is no mean feat.  No doubt Jacobsen stands on the shoulders of several generations of guides and outdoorsmen yet Camping’s Top Secrets is full of original and really quite useful information. I have certainly learned a great deal from this book and place it among the best outdoor how-to books in my library. EXCERPTS Storm proofing the Eureka Timberline tent with  a couple of additional guy lines and tie-outs makes a three-season tent into a four-season tent. These same principles can be applied to many tents lending them the stability of much more expensive models. Cooking Pots Blacken your pot bottoms: Pots that are used on open fires get quite black outside. Some experts suggest that you coat the exposed surfaces with liquid soap or shaving cream so the carbon black will clean easily. The result is an awful mess for the dish-washing crew. I leave pots black (they cook faster and more evenly) and keep them inside a plastic-lined nylon bag between uses. Aluma Black, a chemical used to blacken aluminum gun sights and mounts, works wonders on pot bottoms. Just daub the chemical on the pot, allow it to dry, and a rich blue-black color will result. Aluma Black is available at gun shops. Camping’s Top Secrets

Father of three child and family psychologist Richard Weissbourd teaches at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government and School of Education. His new book ‘The Parents We Mean To Be’ argues  that parents have a much greater influence on their children’s moral lives than peers or popular culture. Serving as a Scoutmaster  involves a fair amount o exposure to many different styles of parenting and I believe that Weissbourd’s ideas form a solid approach. He discusses that preoccupation with achievement, superficial happiness and attempts to befriend our children often misdirect a parent’s attempt to develop moral, balanced, functioning human beings. I was drawn to his ideas because Scouting meets Weissbourd’s prescription for good parenting. His book is available at Amazon “What matters most as a parent is not whether my wife and I are ‘perfect’ role models or how much we talk about values, but the hundreds of ways – as living, breathing, imperfect human beings—we influence our children in the complex, messy relationships we have with them day to day.” “Many parents are narrowly focused on their children’s happiness and believe that happiness and self-esteem are at the root of morality. We may be the first generation of parents in history who hold that belief. We think that a child who feels good, and who feels good about herself, is more likely to be good. Historically, parents have thought that suffering, burdens, and sacrifices were an important basis of morality, that through suffering children learned empathy. But in many day-to-day ways, we as parents place our children’s happiness above their caring about others. We are too quick to let our kids write off friends they find annoying. We fail to insist that they return phone calls from friends, or give credit to other children for their achievements, or reach out to friendless children at the playground. Or we fail to interrupt our children when they talk too much when they’re around other kids or adults.” “Morality is comprised of many attributes—courage, honesty, kindness, a sense of justice, moral reasoning, etc.—and there are many different ways that adults can promote these qualities. We can model appropriate moral behavior, help our children register kindness and unkindness in the world around them, define clearly their responsibilities toward others, listen responsively to their moral dilemmas and questions, hold them to high moral standards, and develop in them from an early age the habit of attending to and caring about others. We can do much more to emphasize kindness rather than happiness—rather than telling our kids all the time that the most important thing is that they’re happy, it wouldn’t hurt to tell them that the most important thing is that they’re kind. But if I could give just one piece of advice to adults, it would be to focus not on children’s happiness or self-esteem but on their maturity . Maturity, including the ability to manage destructive feelings, to balance and coordinate our needs with those of others, to receive feedback constructively, to be reflective and self-critical—to fairly and generously assess our behavior is the basis of both morality and lasting well-being. It is these capacities that enable children and adults to appreciate others despite conflicts of interest and differences in perspective, to adhere to important principles and to engage in sturdy, meaningful relationships and endeavors that create lasting self-worth.” “Many of us have unacknowledged fears about our children not achieving at a high level. And because of these unrecognized fears, many of us are quietly organizing our children’s lives around achievement and sending inconsistent and hypocritical messages to our kids. The kids we interviewed talked about these hypocrisies. Kids would point out, for instance, that their parents would tell them they don’t care how much they achieve and then pay jaw-dropping amounts of money for SAT-prep courses. When parents tell teenagers to achieve at a high level so they “can have options,” teenagers sniff out that their parents are talking only about certain options—it’s not really okay for them to be beauticians or firefighters, for example. These hypocrisies undermine us as moral mentors. We should make achievement for our children one theme in the larger composition of a life, and we need to understand our own feelings better so we can have more authentic conversations with our children about their achievements.” “Yet the reality is that every stage of adult life can bring new moral strengths and weaknesses, and that these changes have profound consequences for children’s moral growth. “There is nothing noble in being superior to somebody else,” the civil rights leader Whitney Young said. “The only real nobility is in being superior to your former self.” Parenting can spur either great moral growth or regression—think of the large number of fathers who abandon their children. We send a smug and false message to our children when we suggest that morality simply arrives with adulthood and that all they have to do is imitate our moral qualities and values. If we parents work at it, we can greatly increase our own capacity for fairness, caring, and idealism, and our developing morality will be deeply interwoven with our children’s developing morality.”