Do your troops have a high adventure policy? If so, could I get a copy of it? (shaverlaw@gmail.com)

Bob

We loosely follow the BSA policy. Depending on the trip.

Like Joe ours depends on the trip - Philmont is Philmont's guidelines. Algonquin canoing trip - 1st class, 14yo, and the following MB's - swimming, canoeing, cooking, first aid, and camping.
Recently the scouts up'ed the requirements they want the rank req to be Star.....weeds out the scouts that don't do extra stuff outside of regular meetings.

Wow. Tough troop, and pretty exclusionary. We just did our annual canoe trip, and even let the new kids who had just crossed over go.

Algonquin is in addition to our regular monthly program.... we do a local canoe trip for everyone. The Algonquin trip is 10 days in the Canadian backcountry - not your normal canoe trip. Consider it a carrot for the older scouts!

About all of our trips are high adventure, with a lot of backpacks of from 2 to 8 days. Our trips are often easy enough for 11 year olds, and are designed as introductory backpacks. I guess one thing we sometimes wish we had a policy on is for adults guests and youth guests (non-scouts). Do you require them to get a physical, sign parental permissions, fill our a medical questionaire, define some kind of requirements for them to participate on a backpack, stuff like that. Just wondering. I'm trying to write one now to give trip leaders guidelines.

One of the great things about scouts is that you rarely have to invent something like this. The BSA has a publication named "The Passport To High Adventure" that documents the BSA's high adventure policy. I have this document scanned & OCR-ed into a Word document if you're interested.

When I ran my Troop's HA program I used this document with a few added tweaks. My recommendation is to read this document and adopt it's policies.

My final recommendation is to get your leaders trained. The BSA now requires wilderness first aid and would not be surprised it LNT isn't required in the future. I would get your leaders to the BSA SM training & wilderness first aid. Then teach the boys LNT and get everyone LNT certified. When I ran my HA program I required that all boys participating had to be 14, first class and LNT trained. It may sound burdensome, but it actually works very well.

Don't recall exactly, but seems the document Wesley suggested addresses the 'Non-Scout' issues. I seem to recall that anything deemed 'High Adventure' required participates to be members of the BSA. (Don't quote me on this!) For our unit these trips are a carrot for the scouts & leaders that work the program, these are NOT recruiting events! For our unit ALL participants need to be registered members of the BSA to participant in HA activities (works for Philmont, works for us!). We will gladly take guests on most any of our other monthly outings! and any guest (adult or youth) needs to have the proper paperwork completed - permission slips for youths, medical forms for ALL!

Edited by SCKuhn on 04/23/2010 10:04:51 MDT.

I have that document, and it mentions guests in one paragraph, but no rules about whether they can go or not, or under what conditions. Our monthly trips are mostly high adventure, backpacks, rock climbing, rafting or whatever, and are thought of as recruiting events, including getting the parents hooked.

Youth guests are one thing. Some sort of paperwork should be filled out for insurance purposes, etc.

As far as adult guests, that is more problematic. They should have at least gone through at the Council or on-line the Youth Protection class.