There
was a winter camp and survival skills competition every year for the
boy scouts in our area called the Klondike derby. The fist time I was
allowed to go was when I was twelve and I made the mistake of letting
my mom help me pack. I didn't know at the time that there are several
schools of camping and she is from the take-it-all and I am an
adherent of the I-probably-don't-need-that. She had me take extra
everything and two of others and plenty of all the benefit of course
was that I had everything I needed, the draw back was that I had some
I didn't. The camp was at the top of a rather steep and icy hill and
taking all of my gear up started to get a little ridiculous. All of
the other boys and some of the leaders took the opportunity of my
Sherpa induction to make a little fun. When we got our camp
established I joined in with the other psychopaths that made up my
troop in raising a little hell. The hill that we had hiked up to camp
became a sledding hill and we were a little way down it so we decided
to try and knock all of the other sledders off of their sleds. We got
a long section of rope and went down to on of the narrower parts of
the sledding path to tie the rope to a tree on one side and three of
the bigger boys held it neck high to a sledder. We didn't have to
wait long for our first customer who was ripped right off his sled
flat on his back. The most beautiful part of all was his sled kept
going to the bottom three hundred yards down and away. It was awesome
and funny and they just kept coming down the hill and swack, smack,
splat. We even added a little strategic misdirection to the attack my
yelling that we were from another troop whose number we had overheard
down at the opening meeting. We were told on and yelled at and
chased but we escaped. When we had gone the long way around to the
camp we saw a fairly angry mom gathering up the hill a little bit and
went to join in. They were all mad about having been cloths-lined off
of their sleds and wanted some revenge against the troop whose number
we had been framing up for the crime. We stormed up to the camp and
started trowing snowballs in and then rushed the putting out their
fire and dismantling their tents. That taught them a lesson about
cloths-lining sledders. When this little party was broken up someone
who knew someone from our troop told everyone that it was Santaquin
899 that was the ones not these wrongfully acussed and well trashed
victims. We ran back to our camp fearing the same fate for us if we
didn't start the defense.
