This spring, Russ was invited by our stake leaders to go to a 6 day, Boy Scout leadership training camp (seminar) called, "Wood Badge." Bishop Hatch asked me if I'd like to go along too (even though at the time I wasn't even a scout leader) and I said, "Sure!" I'd heard so many good things about Wood Badge, I just had to go, plus I thought it would be fun to go with Russ. I was right!
We were put into patrols and mine were the BEARS!!! I grew to love these fellow bears A LOT! There is me (Yogi), Robin Timmernamn (Winnie the Pooh), Bishop Larry Kirkpatrick (Smokey), our patrol leader Lynn Romney (yes, she is related to Mitt Romney), Bryce Wyler (Bear Grylls), Brandon Cotter (Baloo) and Ann Habecker (Kung-fu Panda, "Po").
Russ and his fellow BUFFALO patrol. We have ?, and Trent, Dave, James, Russ, ? , and Brother Bitter. Boy did these guys kick up a lot of dust everywhere they went!
Even though he wasn't a bear, I still love this guy.
We sure had fun pranking each other. Brandon got some real buffalo chips and everyone had to step over this nice morsel on the way into class one morning. It got quite the laughs. The last night we spread the rest around the buffalo's camp for them to find in the morning. Tee hee!
One night I almost got the whole camp shut down when I stole the keys from one of the four wheelers the leaders use to zoom around camp. They made an announcement over the loud speakers that they were going to close off all the water and electricity to the camp in 15 min. unless they got their keys back. Boy did people come running to use the bathroom and showers right before bed, just in case the keys didn't reappear! Some of our bears tried to stealthily return the keys to the cart, but everyone already assumed it was us anyway!
The leaders were always pranking each other too. Ted Morgan's cell phone got stolen when he left it on a table so he had to sing a song with this spoonful of strawberry ice cream on his forehead before he could get it back!
Pamela and Bishop Hatch sure got a kick out of that. I think it was revenge for previous pranks.
I can't remember why John Johnson had these bunny ears on, but we had fun laughing at him.
My favorite game of the whole time was this Zulu ball tossing game. The six of us had at least 6 balls going between us at one time. Very tricky but cool!
We watched "October Sky" and then made our own bottle rockets and launched them sky high for some VERY INTERESTING judges!
Darth Vader
Yosemite Sam
and our favorite was our bear patrol leader who turned into this playboy bunny momentarily.
Russ with the buffalo patrol's rocket. It went pretty high.
In fact, they won a pink flamingo as their reward.
The pranks started pretty quickly and we had our flag stolen by the little Bob Whites right away. They made us go and sing "I'm a Little Tea-pot" in front of everyone at dinner time, to get it back. So us bears wrote this song and sang it to them the next night.
The buffalos and bob-whites ganged up on us and sang this original song to us another night. Pretty clever, but not as good as ours!
We stole the service spade from the buffalos and I snapped this picture as soon as I had run far enough away with it tucked under my shirt. Unfortunately, we stole the shovel during an apparent "no stealing" time of the day. Right before we were to make the buffalos sing for it, they "counted coo" and thanked us for taking care of their shovel for them all day. Hahahaha! Everyone got quite a kick out of that (besides us).
Wood Badge was a wonderful experience and it still continues as Russ and I work on our 5 goals each (he's done already) to complete our "ticket" and receive our Wood Badge beads in recognition of successfully completing the entire course!
Go bears!!
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