I can't believe its been over two months since I last posted!!!
Here's what's going on:
Jakob bridged over into Boy Scouts at the end of February and I became one of the Assistant Scoutmasters in his troop. We have been doing tons of stuff in the great outdoors in the past couple of months (We've been camping 4 times and are going again this weekend).
The only problem is; unlike with Scoutcraft Academy, a big organization like the Boy Scouts of America has a LOT of red tape when it involves any possible infringement upon their Youth Protection Guidelines.
This means that, not only are we supposed to do a load of paperwork to simply obtain the rights to post pictures of a Boy Scout activity, we're not even supposed to say where we are going or where we went online without approval.
This is far too much red tape for my taste, so Scoutcraft Academy has been put on hold for a bit.
However, I am now a merit badge Councilor/Instructor for nineteen different merit badges (mostly outdoorsmanship-related) and soon, though, very soon, I will be taking Jake & Josh out to earn some merit badges. The red tape is non-existent when its just a father and his boys, regardless of what organization they're with.
For the Hiking merit badge, we will be hiking the TCT (Trans California Trail). This shares much of the same path as the SDTCT (San Diego Trans County Trail), but shoots off on its own east of the PCT (Pacific Crest Trail) just past Lake Cuyamaca. For the Hiking Merit Badge, we will be hiking the 75 mile stretch of the TCT between the Pacific Ocean at Torrey Pines State Beach and the PCT over 6 hikes.
Then we will be earning the Wilderness Survival and Backpacking Merit Badges by doing multi-day trips along the TCT down into the Imperial Desert from the PCT Junction. 150 miles in 4 multi-day treks from the Laguna mountains of San Diego to the Colorado River.
This program will be conducted between June 2012 and April 2013. I'm looking forward to blogging every trek.
See you on the trail.
~Richard