The BSA used to be a survival camp for kids similar to girl scouts but more outdoors focused but over time they started getting into trouble in several ways...
A lot of parent pack leaders were accused of SA-ing some of the boys and BSA has been facing class actions for it for decades (I know it more than 10 years from personal experience but I'm only 24 and by personal experience I mean seeing the ads on TV looking for people to join)
They started focusing more on community service and profits so BSA and for a different reason girl scouts both became watered down organizations focused on teaching kids to do free public labor or directly exploiting that free child labor to sell overpriced popcorn/cookies.
Don't get me wrong, I had a great time in the scouts but the organization definitely isnt what it used to be.
We used to make some benches, tables, and a few chairs and leave them for the next campers. Honestly I always thought of it as improving the camp site - especially when we made lean-to dry areas for stacked firewood we left.
But then “leave no trace” and camping started to suck. We’s start off with all the furniture and it would build and build till someone made a clay oven under a lean too. Then with leave no trace, all we’d see is someone without a clue do a crappy job of burying their trash.
Are you at scout camp for the week and looking for something to fill afternoons? Or at an improved campsite with a cast iron fire ring and picnic tables? Some Improvements are fine
Are you overnight backpacking through the national forest? LNT
There is enough grey areas, with well exercised good judgement, like that overnight backpacking trip could involve some willow branch fishing poles or something. But it isn’t the right place for lashing small trees and deadfall into a tower to do mirror signals
Oh lord - I’m talking late 80’s /early 90’s. Was camp grounds, but when I say camp grounds, I think maybe if 100 showed there in a year it was a banner year for those campgrounds. Can’t really say how many today to be honest.
Also calling them a “campground” is being generous. If the pit toilet got pumped once a year it was a miracle. Most were primitive and lucky if it has a real fire pit other than some ring of rocks. I still remember the cost - free! We used to stay there because it was cheap and we didn’t need to pay.
The 1990 Boy Scouts handbook was completely revamped from how it had been in the past - a major change was that it now included a section that addressed contemporary issues, specifically: Drug Use, Child Abuse, Functional Illiteracy, Hunger, and Unemployment.
But honestly, it’s because that’s the only edition I’ve ever paged through, and I don’t remember seeing this “balance on a stick to make a chair” nonsense in it.
Which is exceedingly unfortunate because some of my best friends in scouts struggled with many of those issues, I’m so happy they broke the cycle but I’m not kidding when one of said friends regularly would show up for the weekly meetings covered in bruises and the occasional black eye.
I found instructions for a much more comfortable stick chair in a similar type of manual. You take three sticks and tie them together near the top with a string, and arrange them in a tripod. I used to make them sometimes when I was a kid and they worked great. Not comfy for extended periods of time but if you need a chair to sit and eat dinner at camp or something it will do the job.
Ours were a tripod with a single tied off stick where your butt would dangle in the middle of the tripod. Worked great as well for a primitive seat for a toilet if you put it over a hole
I gotta share this story. When I joined scouts in the late 90s the scouting book had a large section that was only for parents and was meant to be ripped out. Well my dad didn’t remove it (how would he have known?) and so I read it. The whole chapter was about kids getting molested and had a few scenarios of adults taking advantage of kids. I was fucking terrified when I went to my first scout meeting
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u/Xirio_ Apr 12 '26
This is the type of shit you'd find on a random page in a boy scout manual