I Survived Another Klondike Derby

Last weekend was the biannual Klondike Derby put on by the Timpanogos District of the Utah National Parks Council of the Boy Scouts of America.  My troop was one of the troops that attended.

Honestly, it was a good time.

Others before me learned that it's much more comfortable and much easier to NOT sleep in tents when winter camping.  Snow tracks into tents and makes a mess that has to be cleaned up or the tents will mildew.  Tents are hard to get warm, and even if one DOES get a tent up to a reasonable temperature, if that tent is pitched on a good layer of snow, the tent starts to sink in the melting snow and sooner or later ends up with a pretty good layer of water on the floor.

Instead, my troop sleeps in "burritos" under the cold, January sky.

A "burrito" is a pretty great idea actually.  It's constructed by placing a sleeping bag and blankets (or a sleeping bag inside of a sleeping bag) on top of a few inches of foam rubber and then wrapping the entire bundle of warmth and insulation inside a "tortilla" of plastic sheeting.  The plastic keeps the heat in and the cold wind out.  When it's time to go to sleep, all one has to do is open the top of the burrito ever so slightly and then burrow down into the middle of the insulation.  Excess plastic at the top keeps snow out, but can be opened up to let just the right amount of air in.  I've now slept in a burrito twice, and both times, I was snug as a bug in a rug.  It's nice to be able to throw the burrito directly down on the snow and sleep comfortably through the night.  Believe it or not, I actually sleep better in a burrito than I do on a cot in a tent.

There is one problem with a burrito that I have found though.  People exhale water vapor when they breathe.  Water is a product of the human metabolism, and the plastic surrounding the burrito holds it in.  When the water vapor hits this cold plastic, it nearly instantly condenses back into water.  The excess plastic at the top of the burrito becomes wet, and unavoidably, there is some dripping.  It's not enough to get one wet, but it can become annoying.

For example, last Friday night, I was sleeping peacefully on my side when a single ice-cold drop of condensation hit my forehead above my eyebrow, then dripped down all the way across my forehead and dripped off into the sweatshirt I was using for a pillow.  THAT woke me up, I'm telling you!

The solution to this problem is to burrow just a little bit deeper into the burrito, which I did, and promptly fell back asleep.

I had 17 scouts at this Klondike Derby.  They did very well at most all of the activities during the day.  Team building was a breeze--they figured out all of the puzzles quite quickly.  They got all of their knots tied correctly except for the sheet bend, but that's a hard-ish knot to tie.  With that many of them pulling their Klondike sled (think dogs pulling a dog sled), they did very well there too.  They paid attention and participated during the first aid activity.

But at the last station of the day, everything fell apart.  The last station was fire building.  We had already told them that they weren't being graded on how well they lit a fire.  On the score sheet, they didn't even have any points allocated to whether or not they actually ended up with a fire.  The points were mostly allocated to participation and attitude.

Without going into details, I'll just say that 17 boys turned a fire building activity into a bickering match.  You can imagine how fast our points dwindled.

In the end, my troop took 10th place out of 27-ish troops.  That's not too bad.  But they would likely have been in the top three had they cooperated better on the fire building activity.

Lessons learned by the Scoutmaster:

1. I still like sleeping in burritos
2. When the camp is far away from the road, don't take all of the cooking stuff up to the camp.  Just set up a kitchen area down by the vehicles.  It saved us a lot of time and energy!
3. Boys LOVE playing in the snow.
4. No matter how many times you tell boys to bring LOTS of extra socks, you'll still end up with a boy wearing only one pair of wet socks inside cold boots.
5. I need to teach my scouts how to light a fire.
6. I need to teach my scouts how to pick a good knife.  Some of the knives they were using to make kindling...  Oy...
7. Campouts are a lot of work, but they're great learning experiences for boys.