Category Archives: Adventure

Our September-October Adventures

Beaver Scouts started up at the beginning of September with a parent’s meeting where we went over the expectations and routines that our group uses. These are all outlined in our Parent’s Guide!

The beginning of the year is always an orientation (and reminder) for youth about how we will work together, our routines and responsibilities, and our goals.

Through a voting exercise, the youth have chosen three Outdoor Adventure Skill sets to achieve this year: Vertical (14 votes), Camping (13 votes), Emergency Aid (9 votes). We’ll also touch on Aquatics (8 votes) and Paddling (4 votes). Although only 2 youth voted for Trail Skills, we do expect to have many adventures on the trail.

The youth have also established their Code of Conduct:

  • Keep your hands to yourself
  • Tell the truth
  • Be kind
  • Listen to who is talking, take turns speaking and use your inside voice
  • No spitting and practice good hygiene
  • No false alarms
  • Take responsibility for your actions
  • Be appropriate and safe
  • Clean up and respect our space

We have had an Investiture Ceremony to welcome new beavers, and we have completed two of our main fundraisers (Popcorn and Apple Day).

We also had a Welcome Camp at Raven’s Nest Group Site in Tynehead Regional Park. We shared this camp with our friends from 6th Centre Lake. The youth learned a lot from older Scouts, who taught them some emergency skills, knots, and the requirements of Camping Stage 1 Badge, which all attending youth received. There was also lots of healthy and delicious food, a hike with licorice fern root tasting and a scavenger hunt, a visit to the hatchery and a campfire!

At our halloween party, youth did a couple STEM activities after inventing a game called “Zombie Tag”. They made slime and spiders that climb a rope.

Most recently, we joined 100 burnaby area beaver scouts for a campfire at Warner Loat Park, where each group led campfire songs.

 

Hiking in Byrne Creek

Our Byrne Creek meeting was a lot of fun. The Beavers like to meet at Ron McLean park because there is a playground there. The hike itself took approximately 1 hr 15 minutes to complete, progressing down a set of gravel stairs, along the creek, across a bridge and then up a hillside to the ridge where we passed through several distinct forest zones, from moist deciduous to dry coniferous. We stopped to look at features in nature, such as different fungi on trees, how tree and plant roots hold the earth and protect it from erosion by swollen creek water in early spring, trees with moss on only one side, nurse logs and trees that feed woodpeckers, and tree roots that have pushed up into the trail. We also noticed a number of wildflowers and stopped to silently hear the different birdcalls in the woods. There were a couple highlights of the hike that the Beavers found extra exciting: we terrified a  30cm long garter snake at the top of the ridge, and we had to pass beside a very, very dead little mouse!

There were about four or five water breaks requested by the Beavers, and they did an amazing job of hiking this route. Well done!