Category: Scouting

If you want to park at the weekend at Rancho san Antonio, you have to get up early! Being so close to the city, we turned up around 0800 (or possibly even earlier) and were out of luck in all the car parks 🙁 The surrounding streets for at least 1.5 miles are all parking hostile and so we abandoned the effort and came back later in the week. Most T260 families managed to make it work and there are some great pictures of wild deer, flowers and views over Mountain View and San Jose.

Hellyer Park was a short few miles walk / bike up the Coyote Creek Trails – one of the main Class A trails in San Jose that stretches from near Historic Park in downtown San Jose to Morgan Hill. Shaded with trees mostly, and clear from the homeless encampments that mar the northern sections this was a nice walk / bike ride finishing at the popular pond (with ducks!).

A combo (and backdated post) to catchup on the 2nd and 3rd mini-trips in this series. Gorgeous weather greeted our weekend walkers at Mt Madonna, with several family groups bumping into each other on the way (but avoiding the horses, thankfully).

Lexington was busier: accessible from the reservoir side and from the houses to the North, this was a quick circuit to get an excellent view of the reservoir and hills. It was a bit concerning to see the reservoir water levels so low barely into spring.

Starting back in August 2020, Scout Emily C completed her Eagle Project this past weekend. Despite a number of Covid-related delays and setbacks (including having to send a bunch of Troop scouts and family members home who turned up to help!) the beneficiary – Our City Forest – now has a spanking new, eco-friendly plant pot solar sterilizer!

OCF wanted more sterlizer capacity, and an upgrade to the old unit. Emily focused on building a more robust design and on adding additional heat-absorbing features like the plastic under the lid and matt black paint in and out.

Emily started adventures with the Troop in 2015, doing her first 50-miler in the Hi-Sierra in 2016 when she was 10. The inaugural Patrol Leader for our female youth, Emily is now working on the rest of the badges she needs to complete her Eagle rank.

Well done Emily!

Right. We can’t hike together as a Troop with the current viral situ, so in a masterful stroke of program leadership, the Troop is instead using the Santa Clara County PixNParks 2021 challenge to encourage each troop family to get out.

Once per month, we set a particular park challenge, and during that weekend we are all encouraged to (separately) head to the location and grab a pic of ourselves there (and on the way).

Month 1 (January) was the Bass Pond at Joseph D. Grant park. An easy ~2 miles to get everyone back into the swing of things after the holidays. Nice effort T260!

We always really enjoy hosting Webelos (incoming Cub Scouts) as they explore troops in the area they may like to join. Normally, we roll-out our standard round of skill stations: knives, campstoves, first aid – to much fun and enjoyment.

Of course, this time our Patrol Leaders had to re-tool for an online approach – and they did a great job, with interactive presentations, quizzes, demonstrations and stories. It’s not quite as good as getting up close to that big knife for the first time, but still fun!

Turnout was high with about 7 Webelos and some of their family members joining.

Times might be tough for our Troop and Scouts right now, given the restrictions around our usual outdoor program. However, in true spirit, that didn’t stop our most recent Eagle Scout – Weston S. – from arranging his Court of Honor: virtually!

A great way to close of a year of adaption and ‘firsts’

Weston arranged this all in only a couple of weeks, and we had over 30 groups / people joining. We all missed the food and in-person get-together, but were very pleased to help Weston close-out his scouting achievements.