43
Valley Scouts find their way at annual Klondike Derby
By Sean Barron
CANFIELD
If navigating a map to get from one place to another isn’t your forte, you would be fortunate if you had Ben Burkey point you in the right direction.
“We had to use a compass and line it up with north and line it up with the map,” the 12-year-old Boardman Glenwood Middle School seventh-grader said while addressing one of the challenges of interpreting a topographical map.
Ben, who’s also part of Boardman-based Boy Scout Troop 60, worked with fellow troop members to decipher and find on several such maps a variety of symbols that included markings representing dams, unimproved roads, secondary highways, aqueducts and other points common to many road maps. They also were to use compasses to plot directions and distances, then find the elevations of two points and calculate the difference between the two.
Ben was among the Scouts who took part in the map-reading activity, one of seven stations that made up Saturday’s 2013 Boy Scout Klondike Derby at Camp Stambaugh, 3712 Leffingwell Road.
An estimated 150 Scouts and 50 leaders from Mahoning County and Hubbard in Trumbull County attended the gathering, themed “Just the Basics” and sponsored by Whispering Pines District Greater Western Reserve Council Boy Scouts of America. Hosting this year’s event were Boy Scout Troops 25 and 44 of Canfield and Poland, respectively.
The event is an annual weekend outdoor winter program with activities set up to teach and reinforce Scouting skills and increase a desire to learn more about Scouting, with an emphasis on teamwork, spirit and cooperation, organizers said.
Scouts and their leaders spent about 50 minutes at each of the seven stations: dovetail joints, nature identification, animal and mammal identification, map reading, knots and lashings, first aid and primitive fire-building.
The boys received points mainly for their successful completion of the skills, as well as for participation, cooperation, team spirit and leadership abilities.
Ben, who’s been in Scouting about eight years, said he hopes to join the Air Force and that his experiences as a Boy Scout likely will lead to a solid resume.
If he ever were to call a meeting to order, Donny Duda surely would have the means to get everyone’s attention quickly.
“A dovetail is making something that won’t come apart easily,” the Troop 25 member explained, referring to the method he used to make a hammer resembling a large gavel from pine wood.
Donny and fellow Scouts, with the help of their leader, Zac Gierlach, used the technique that entails chiseling a triangle at the top of the handle to bolster its strength and ability to hold the cross piece.
At this station, the Scouts used a bow saw, a hatchet and an ax to cut and trim the handles’ edges in preparation for making the hammers and mallets. Participants were shown proper ways to use the tools, with a high priority on safety and teamwork, noted Steve Baker, Troop 22’s Scoutmaster.
In another activity, the boys were given instructions and four minutes to quietly observe several tables that contained the skulls, prints and hides of animals such as a wild boar, a cow, a soft-tanned beaver, a muskrat, coyote and a black bear, then memorize and write down in an adjoining room as many names as possible.
“It’s a memory game, but if they work as a team, they should be able to accomplish the task without a problem,” said Mike Kupec, a Troop 25 committee member.
All of the animals are or were indigenous to the area, Kupec noted, adding that the Scouts earn points for their achievements, which allows them to take part in an auction to bid for Scouting equipment and other similar items.
At the knots and lashings area, the youngsters were challenged to work with one another to tie sections of rope in such a way as to hoist Scout patrol flags. The activity relies heavily on teamwork and cooperation, explained Kurt Hilderbrand, Whispering Pines’ district chairman.
The Klondike event also tries to stress the importance of cooperation, collaboration and other such virtues, all of which have lifelong applications and which the Scouts can use in many areas of their young lives, several leaders said.