My First Blog - Scout Float Trip

Writing a Blog seems to be the thing to do these days. Sometimes I do things or take photos of things that I think others might be interested in. I am calling this blog “Adventures of an Old Man”. Even though I do not normally think of myself as old, sometimes I do things that used to be easy and my body complains. But I am determined that I’m not going to let that stop me from doing cool things.

For my first blog entry, I thought I would talk about the 3 day canoe trip Joseph and I went on with the scouts on June 10-12. In the past, we have done 3 day trips on the Current River about once every two years. John, Neil, Bret and Joseph have each done these trips multiple times. We have been hearing some good things about the Elevenpoint River, so Jon Wood and I decided we should try it this year. We had 3 adults and 11 boys on this trip. The three Adults were Jon Wood, James Wood and me.
The water level was up higher than normal this year, so there were some really good rapids; even some class 2 rapids in one spot. It was pretty fun. There were two things that everyone decided was better about the Current River. The number one difference is the cliffs for jumping into deep water. There weren’t any on the Elevenpoint River. This was a disappointment to the adventure loving boys. The water was not as clear as we had seen in the past on the Current River. Some of this may have been due to the increased water flow due to the way above normal rainfall.

Almost everytime we stopped for a break, the boys were playing in the water.


Most of the Canoes ended up capsizing or at least filling up with water and needed to be emptied out.

Since there were no cliffs to jump from, the boys improvised by jumping out of trees that grew over the water.

And river banks that really did not count as a cliff.
It has always been a tradition to catch crawdads or crayfish on the first day and cook them up for dinner the first night.This is captain Joseph with the mighty monster.

When it came time to start cooking, one of them tried to escape.

He ended up getting cooked with the rest of them.

This was our campsite the first night.

When they found a cave, they just had to explore it.

We carefully planned all of the things we needed for the float trip, but we forgot to bring any eating utensils. We did not let that stop us from eating. The first night, we made chopsticks by carving sticks with pocket knives and used them to eat our foil packs of chicken cooked in Yoshida’s sauce over rice. We used them again for our breakfast foil packs of bacon, scrambled eggs, and hash browns.

The second night, we had beef stew cooked over a small backpacking stove. I made a new pair of chopsticks.

Joseph made a spoon from a large stick for eating his beef stew.

Joseph ended up giving it to someone else who needed a utensil and he used chopsticks also.

The last morning I made pancakes with our standard made from scratch recipe and cooked them on a backpacking stove in a frying pan. We had butter and syrup and plates to eat them on, but again used chopsticks.

They tasted Great!!!

We ended out trip without losing a single person, by I think a few belongings got eaten by the river. Everyone was tired and ready to go home.