Constantin

Little Troop 5 spent the weekend at Camp Constantin on Possum Kingdom Lake. Although completely surrounded by the Longhorn Council, Camp Constantin is the Dallas Council Camp, or as known in Scouting, Circle 10 Council.

I always tell parents if you want to know a scout troop, go camping with them. Little Troop 5 is a camping troop and this is what we do best. So we had a group of Webelos take us up on the offer. They Webelos might report differently, but I believe their campout was quite successful.

I was looking forward to our hike up to Johnsons Peak on this trip. I had done it one time before when the Troop made its only other visit to Camp Constantin 8 years ago. I had built it up to boys as the “Kyle Mountain” Trip for this camp.

So the crew of 15 boys and four adults embarked on the trip up to Johnsons Peak on Saturday morning, via the trail signs at Camp Constantin right outside the nature area. As always, I took my position in the back to have the boys get us up the trail. Besides the extra 15 minutes we spent trying to find the nature area, the boys did a good job of figuring out the map.

However, it became increasingly clear, that the trail to Johnson’s Peak had not been maintained since the last time I hiked on it. There were times where it felt we were not even on the trail, we were flat out bush whacking. I was very pleased with the boys keeping their spirits up as they dodges cacti, mesquite trees, and over growth as we made our way the mountain. It turned what should have been a 90 minute hike to the top to a two and a half our hike.

Due to the fact that the boys did not want to trudge back through the same brush, through some adult encouraging, we took the main trail back down to Park Road 36 with the plan to road hike back to camp. The extra time started to wear on the boys, particularly the Webelos. By the time we made it to the road, we were really straggling.

Luckily for the hikers, two assistant scoutmasters who were coming out on Saturday were at camp. Through the expert use of cell phones, the tired hikers were rescued on the side of the road. I still think we ended up doing about 7 miles of hiking, so it counts for something.