New Year, 365 new opportunities!

This month our Scouts had an opportunity to earn either the Eagle-required Family Life merit badge or the Dog Care merit badge. A huge thank you to Mrs. Nemeth and Mrs. Berson for guiding us, we appreciate your time and effort.

We held Senior Patrol Elections on the 14th. Nate N. will be continuing on for another term. We also had discussion about a few openings on our PLC and look forward to new faces taking over different roles in the near future. We also prepared for Klondike by working on various outdoor skills like knots, fire building, etc. While that was going on, John S. was became New Scout – well done, John!

The big event this month was the Klondike Derby, a challenging winter camping event where patrols participate in competitive activity stations, prepare their meals outdoors and camp in tents for 1-2 nights. It’s been a few years since we’ve had a good group attend and the boys – and ASMs were excited. This year it was held at Tetertown Preserve. We were able to set up our giant troop tent, including the wood burning stove.

Our SPL, Nate N. kept the patrol moving – which was good since it was so cold out. We competed in the level competition and were excited for the sled race and won our first heat. All Scouts attending were asked to bring two cans of soup (no ‘cream of’ soups)…one to donate and one to use in Klondike Stew…where they mixed all of the soup in one big pot. It was pretty good…not what you’d expect!

We had a great time – it was cold, but not very snowy – and look forward to next year’s competition. Thank you also the Scoutmasters who attended this weekend and it was great to see the large tent make an appearance as well.  Without them this would not have been a successful weekend!

We didn’t have a meeting on Martin Luther King Jr. Day and at our last meeting of January we held our Minute-to-Win-It meeting and invited local Webelos and boys interested in learning more about our Troop. We had a lot of fun, laughing at some of the games we played. We’re hopeful to have some Webelos bridge over to Troop 200 in the coming weeks/months.