Tag: cub scouts

  • 11 Degrees of Service

    11 Degrees of Service

    Late last year, I stood in the back of a local elementary school cafeteria during a Cub Scout meeting. The different dens (organized by school grade, first through fifth) were taking turns telling the other Scouts and parents in attendance what their dens had been up to that past month. Trip to the fire station,…

  • Little Men, Big Sur

    Little Men, Big Sur

    I’d like to think over the years I’ve learnt at least a handful of the many lessons I’ve received, and so in a rare act of Labor Day weekend wisdom, instead of heading into the cauldron that is the Sespe in the summer or scaling some blistering hill along Hurricane Deck, I led the intrepid…

  • Of Pines, Water, and Wasting Away

    Of Pines, Water, and Wasting Away

    It was a rag-tag crew that convened at the Horn Canyon trailhead on a recent Friday afternoon; dads just off work and kids and allies all ready to end the week with some fine time in a fine corner of the southern Los Padres. There have been plenty of quick trips into the backwood of…

  • Gridley Canyon Service

    Gridley Canyon Service

    In the waning days of 2014, the rather impressive rains that inundated California’s Central Coast after a long spell of virtually no precipitation were a welcome respite for our parched backcountry. But with those rains of course came some problems (most notably the mudslides in the Springs Fire area in Camarillo Springs and along the…

  • When Lion Roars

    When Lion Roars

    I’d been up Lion Canyon just a few weeks prior, looking for a Depression-era diversion dam that I believed had been used to supply water to the old CCC camp at Piedra Blanca (aka Lion Camp). And on that day the cobble-strewn creek had been a dry, sorry affair. (You know, like nearly the entire…

  • Chumash Service

    Chumash Service

    The latest issue of the Condor Call, the local Sierra Club newsletter, includes a short article about a service project fellow VWRs Kim Coakley and Bardley Smith and I led this past Spring in the Chumash Wilderness. (Read it here.) So naturally, you must wonder who did the work. Perhaps you’re asking yourself: did they…