This Saturday, Troop 1916 hosted their annual Cub Friendly for about 20 Cub Scouts and their parents. Given the current COVID environment, we could not offer the usual overnight experience at Lake Fairfax Park but instead offered an outdoor Open House at Redeemer.
Each patrol created a station and set up to demonstrate and perform an outdoor-related activity. The Troop had five stations, one for survival shelter building, a totin' chip station, basic orienteering skills station, a catapult building station, and a station for starting a fire to boil pasta noodles. A separate group of scouts served as "Health and Safety Guides," monitoring the stations to ensure safety guidelines were followed.
The weather was great! A few late morning showers had worried us; however, they rolled out just before the event started. At the totin’ chip station, Cubs observed the proper use of pocket knives, hatchets and axes, and different types of saws. Cubs were also allowed to use the saws and had quite a competition between themselves (for each log cut, they would receive a piece of candy). At the catapult station, Cubs were taught lashings and knots essential for Scouting (and putting together catapults to launch various items through the air). The third station was a fire building station, where Scouts instructed Cubs on the various ways of building fires in the wilderness. We also had an orienteering course set up around the church. Lastly, the survival shelter building station demonstrated examples of the different shelters that one could build in the wild.
Even though this outing wasn’t our usual Lake Fairfax Fall campout Open House, I know everyone enjoyed the socially-distanced version just as much like previous years’ Cub Friendly’s. A BIG thanks to Mr. Pak for organizing this whole event!
You can take a look at the photos from the event here.
- Sebastian Herbolsheimer