Troop Equipment

[Drenalin]

I’ve recently gotten involved with a Trail Life troop (similar to Boy Scouts) and am looking for some equipment suggestions:

Dining fly. Just need a tarp to pitch over our cooking and/or eating area with room underneath for about 8 people. If we have more kids, I’d probably just pitch more than one fly. What tarps have you guys used for this? Is my best bet to just get simple 12x12 tarps and rig them up as high a-frames?

Tents. We’ve got some Ascend tents that I’m not a big fan of, I’d like to move to something a little more burly. I already seriously injured one of these tents on our first trip out. I’m leaning toward 2 man tents, but maybe 3 man tents (for two campers) is the smarter way to go?

What are some other essentials you guys have seen a need for with scouting troops? We’ve got quite a bit of fairly cheap, fragile, bulky gear now, but I’d like to upgrade most of it as the troop grows. One issue we already had was transporting it all, so I’m especially interested in efficiency both in packed volume and what we’re actually setting up at a given campsite.

 

[justinspicher]

Why not sleep under your big tarps? Less junk to haul around.

 

[Drenalin]

Why not sleep under your big tarps? Less junk to haul around.

We’ll do at least one camping trip where we go over different tarp pitches and sleep under those for a couple nights. But we gotta work up to it...people were acting like I was some kind of Martian when I used a floorless on our last trip. Bug, spider and tick phobia seems to be an issue we need to overcome.

 

[nodakian]

I assume you're gearing more for tailgate camping than backpacking, and I deal with Boy Scouts so may be able to help.

You're in the same boat I'm in with the local troop. They're accustomed to hauling a 2-axle gear trailer with water tank, fridge, propane tanks with hoses for at least two stoves, fold-down side with pantry and counter, and full of cook kits, Dutch ovens, axes, and more, plus another trailer for personal gear--all for 48-hour weekenders. Some of us are going on a multi-day float trip on the Missouri River in MT in August, so I've been hounding them about slimming down their gear. Turns out they like it because it's easy to set up, take down, and clean. Less of that = more time for fun.

Dining fly: We have used fold-up canopies (search Caravan Canopy on Amazon). Very handy, but 1) wind can cause trouble and 2) they bulky and only good for one thing. Blue tarps are good, but the grommets can fail if too much wind--a constant problem around here. However, I had the Cub Scouts camp under and on top of them a few times, including one trip on which we under the tarp stayed dry while everyone in tents got WET.

Tents: I suggest making people bring their own tents if possible, and have parents get their kids emotionally invested in them. Kids will wreck other peoples' tents no matter how much they are lectured about respect, but if they're emotionally invested (better yet financially--my kids must spend their own money on a lot of their outdoor gear), they'll take better care and be more watchful for other kids' transgressions. However, if folks can't afford their own, you gotta do what you gotta do.

Either way, 3-person tents for two kids is a good plan. They're easy to set up, have room to move plus keep gear inside, there's a little extra room to squirm and goof off if kids are stuck inside during a rain event, and are wind resistant. I suggest 3-season tents--something with a bug net inside, fly, and venting to reduce the kid stink and condensation. It's worth spending decent money on these. REI Half Dome is good and reasonably priced. Big Agnes, Marmot, and many others make good stuff. I've watched too many clever, single-wall, pop-up Coleman/Ozark Trail/whatever tents leak and/or collapse. Cut a medium duty tarp to make a footprint underneath to protect the floor from poky stuff; even better, put another inside to protect from whatever junk kids haul in.

Other gear:
- Everyone should bring their own mess kit (utensils, bowl, cup, and plate) so when they get sick or disgusted from an unclean mess kit, or they don't have a mess kit, they get a lesson in personal responsibility. They should also bring their own canteen and refill it from a reservoir such as a 5-gallon jug or from a tap.
- DO NOT allow paper plates, plastic utensils, and bottled water. They result in a mountain of garbage, and you lose an opportunity to teach thriftiness and stewardship. Kids will take two sips from a bottled water and run away, leaving a mostly-full bottle from which no one else will drink and which must then be dumped out.
- Get a Coghlan's collapsible garbage can.
- Permethrin. Being in TN, you probably know about it, but in case you didn't, get it for the ticks.

How do you plan to cook? On a fire? With stoves? Single- or two-person servings or communal?

 

[Drenalin]

@nodakian Thanks for the response! Your first paragraph is real close to what I'm dealing with, and I'm trying to push the boys toward being able to get everything they need for a weekend into their backpacks.

We've got a couple of those pop-up canopies, but as you pointed out they are bulky and only good for one thing, so I definitely want to move to a tarp or tarps. I'm getting the feeling that my best best is a simple heavy duty tarp in 12x12, 12x14, or something along those lines.

Good point about the boys having their own tents. Some of the boys have their own, but I'm also considering a fundraiser with the explicit purpose of raising money for some new equipment, and leaning toward something that involves them doing manual labor. The idea being that if they have to actually work for this, they may be more invested in it and make the effort to take care of our stuff. We can certainly do with what we have and I would never let gear keep us from going out, but I would like to be at a point where we invest in decent quality stuff and further invest in actually taking care of it and maintaining it. I did have them put out ground tarps under their tents on our last outing, and then got to field questions from the parents who attended about why we were bothering to spend the extra 5 seconds to take this step. We are an inexperienced group and basically starting from zero on experience in the outdoors.

We did Nalgene bottles on our last outing, but we also used disposable plates and forks. That was largely driven by some coronavirus safety precautions, which also included kids wearing masks when I was giving classes, and wearing gloves when they were prepping and serving meals. I definitely don't want to be doing that long term though, and would like to bulk purchase a pile of mess kits and "issue" one to every new kid that joins.

For cooking, we've got a few options. One is a very large two burner propane stove with more skillets and pots than we could ever reasonably use (which they apparently take on every trip). We've also got three dutch ovens, and a grill grate. On our last outing, I tried to expose them to a little but of all of it; we cooked a meal each on the propane stove, grill, and in the dutch ovens. I also had them heat water for oatmeal our last morning with my backpacking stove. Except the oatmeal, these were all communal meals. I want to slim this area down too, maybe replace that big propane stove and the propane tank with a smaller camp stove and propane cylinders. But the biggest thing here is we need to learn plan well and only bring the stuff we actually need for each outing.

Prepping for our last trip, the boys had to make a menu and a grocery list for the trip, and their menu had them cooking every meal. I pointed this out to them, told them all the cooking serving and cleanup was on them (I wasn't doing it), and let them make the final call. They chose to keep their menu plan, and I really pushed the issue when we got out there - waking them up early to get started, pointing out every scrap of anything that didn't get cleaned up properly, dish washing, and keeping the trash emptied. I think they got the point. Our next outing is looking like a combination of no cook meals and some cooking over fire.

I think the biggest theme with my group is just them getting experience and then building off of it to make smarter decisions as we plan more outings. We've been doing weekly zoom meetings since the pandemic stuff started, and I'm going to use one of those to go over lessons learned on our last trip that can make our next one better.