Yeah, I think the expierience depends 100% on who you do it with. The group I was in was pretty awesome. A few of my friend's older brothers were in it before we were and totally talked it up to us. The guy who ran it was awesome. He was this single, rich, 40 year old real estate lawyer who works about three days a week...because what's the point in working 40 hours if you don't have to? The rest of the time he'd dedicate to shit like this. The guy could give the best rib busters in the world. "Hey, so why do you like camping with boys so much? So you can sleep with...ow...haha...fuck, stop stop it". You could say anything you wanted to him and all he'd do was wrestle you or rib bust you unless there were strangers around...because they'd probably think it was something shady.
I learned pretty much nothing about actual scouting. I have no idea what any of the merit badges are, what any of the ranks are, or anything like that. I don't think anyone in our troop did (except for those kids who would come and then leave to go join another one because they were into that). Basically all it was was you'd meet up with a bunch of friends once a week, play basketball, floor hockey, or whatever for an hour and then talk about where you wanted to go camping that month. You'd do a little two day hking excursion every month and then a 2-3 week one every summer. In ventures we had a cabin on a ski resort that we'd go up to for 5 or 6 days during xmas break right after new years. You'd cross country up there with your stuff, stay in the cabin, build some awesome sled jumps during the day and then at night once the mountain closed you'd take your skis or snowboard, slap your cross countries on your back and rip down it.
The summertrip every year was the shit. I probably did 5 or 6 crazy trips all over BC in some awesome wilderness. To this day I can't stand camping in the same place for more than a day unless it's a big ass party. I think hiking down one side of the main island on the Queen Charolette islands was probably the best. It was easy terrain but shitty because there's no shade in the middle of summer and you're borderlining dehydration all day. There is some really cool shit there though like crashed ships embedded in the beach. We did that trip twice more or less (we were too lazy to fully plan a trip a few years later and just rehashed it but brought kayaks along and went up the other side of the island as well).
The craziest trip I was on was on the west coast of vancouver island when I was like. We set out in kayaks and travlled up the coast for like 3-4 days where we parked and hid them. The plan was to hike over this little mountain, cross the saddle, and hike back along the beach to where our kayaks were. No trails or anything and our leader had never done it (he tried once, but there was an accident before they got to the hiking portion and they had to turn around). Well, the topographic map was wrong and by the time we reached the first of the three lakes we were using as landmarks it was almost a day. We figured we'd be able to get over the whole thing in just over a day. Long story short thanks to that and a compass mishap a day of bushwacking turned into four in the pissing rain. As fucked as that was it only really got worse. When we finally broke through to the beach on the other side our leader was pretty much clinically exhausted from bushwacking through untouched westcoast rainforest for four days (he was always the first in the line). The rest of us weren't a lot better off. The next day he sent myself and another guy to check the route, and we told him the shitty news; it doesn't look likely we can do it in the state were in. From the coast most of the beach just looks like rock beach, but from the ground you can see that parts of it are pretty much just cliff faces. It's something we could have done, but we're already short about 2-3 days food and tired as fuck. Chances are we'll get fully stranded, caught in a flash tide, or someone is going to get hurt. When we tell him this he goes to check this out himself. It's like 11 in the morning. He doesn't come back untill the next day.
He got caught in one of the flash tides we were worried about and was stranded on the otherside of a big bay. We went looking for him but couldn't find him. At this point we were already rationing one meal a day, and that went down to one small ass meal a day. When he came back he told us there's no way we could actually do it, but he saw a boat, flared it, and aksed the guy to call our contact and let him know what was going on. That's a relief because up until that point we hadn't seen any boats at all on our three days on the beach and had already figured we weren't going to be able to get back along the beach and the only other options were to cross back over the saddle from where we came (not going to happen) or just sit and wait for someone to find us. The downside was that we had no idea when this guy on the boat would actually make it to a phone. Whatever, the rest of it was practically a vacation after that (I was still pissed off it was red tide though....so many mussels). We at least knew someone was going to come sometime.
A day or two later a chartered helicopter came and dropped us off at our kayaks, and we were just about a day behind schedual. We hauled ass one day, caught up and once again had 2.5 meals a day. That was dope.
The funny thing is that we would have gotten picked up that day either way. A plane crashed right by the saddle we crossed that morning and search and rescue was all over that little area. On the marine radio it says they saw a tarp on the beach, followed it up and found the water plane by one of the lakes. My theory is that it's the groudsheet we left there in our haste to get on our helicopter. Awesomeist trip ever.
And that's what fucking scouts and ventures should be about. I can't name any knots, but I can tie ones that work, I can't tell you any ranks or missions, but I can light a one match fire in the rain every time, and I've had some pretty awesome expieriences with the whole group. Merit badges and things like this serve little but to alienate the people away from organizations like this. It's all about going out with your friends, doing some hardcore shit, drinking and smoking pot and cigarettes while trying to avoid your leader even though he totally knows and learning how to handle responsibility. You know...growing up.
