Hey Blog! I’ve just done the Expedition Challenge Award, and in this post, I’ll tell you all about it!
As Pooh famously said, “It’s got an X in it,” and I say, all expeditions are fun – well, I hope they are anyway. Some can be done in a day, getting from your town to the next and taking the train back; but some take a few weeks, having to lug your luggage to the North Pole and back (or, as Christopher Robin said, the East and West Poles!). However, the one I just did was in between the two – a one-nighter, with a rather long walk on both days either side.
The top badge you can get in Scouts is the Chief Scout’s Gold Award, which is my longstanding ambition for Scouts. To gain this badge, you need to complete the nine challenge awards: Adventure, Outdoors, Skills, World, Personal, Creative, Teamwork, Team Leader, and Expedition. The last of these is almost equivalent to a Bronze DofE, in that you have to go on your own (the leaders still spy on you with their binoculars!) you have to almost break your back by carrying carry a very heavy pack containing everything you need for two days, and you do all the planning and preparation. Most of the space in my new 65l rucksack was a sleeping bag that I did use and clothes that I didn’t use. I always take too many clothes on a camp – but then, Be Prepared, eh?!
Till almost the last minute there were a couple of large issues with the camp – number one, that I hadn’t had any practice with the gas stove (I had seen them and used them, but I’d never done it all myself), and number two, the weight of the pack. There were a few other concerns – like the fact that they set us a route card to do yet I hadn’t ever seen one before and the planning for Sunday lunch changed a few times; but we pulled through. There were four of us going, in two tents, carrying two gas stoves, eating four meals total, traveling 14km Saturday and 9km Sunday.
We started at Shottle, across the Derwent, at 9:30 Saturday morning, and took the footpaths down through the fields to Duffield, or, to put it in the words of the Scout who had written the route card, “till there are lots of roads that turn right”! We often had to give our grid reference over the radio (I’m superb with maps, generally, so I was almost always the one giving it, except when I made the others do it for practice). Here, we crossed the river and the railway, met with the leaders who had been stalking us, and then began the steep climb up the hills towards our destination. We arrived at Drum Hill campsite 2 hours ahead of schedule at 3:00 Saturday afternoon (but then, the schedule had been done for ½ hour per kilometre, which is rather slow!).
I have told you about camping at Drum Hill before, in Home Ed on a Camp (25th September 2022), but I haven’t told you about the site itself – partly as we rarely see much of it in daylight. There are two fields at the top plus a trig point in one, two tracks leading to the base of the site, several cabins, several toilet blocks, many firepits, and dozens of taps dotted around in stone pillars. We were on pitch 8 of the Cub field, which is a nice spot. As opposed to all times I have been there before, we did not come in from the top where the “drum”, the reservoir, is, but from the bottom – a path with a nasty gradient if carrying backbreaking packs! Once we had pitched our minute tents, we hung about for a couple of hours till it was time for dinner (pasta & passata sauce – how Scout camp can you get?!). That done, and pudding had (Bakewell slices, thick custard, and anything else we had brought), we watched the space station fly over and retired to our tents. In my case, I deliberately tried to go to sleep so as not to be up till midnight with their silly tales – we did have a long walk in the morning, after all.
The night wasn’t too bad, we all woke up more than once but that is normal on a camp. The trouble is not the waking up but the getting back to sleep afterwards. In the morning, we got up and made breakfast (porridge) and at 9:30 Sunday morning set off. I had done the second day’s route card, with what I hoped were more accurate timings and very small, if clear, instructions. It was not so long as the first day, but feet were still aching by the time we got into Belper and reached the Scout Hut at 2:30 in the afternoon. As, in the lockdowns, we had walked many miles (though not carrying packs), I knew quite a lot of the route, which we did without too much difficulty.
It was, on the whole, a most enjoyable experience. To all you who intend to do something similar, I suggest blackmailing/bargaining with your parents to make them do the washing and unpacking when you get home – when you have just got in after a hike like that, you do not want to keep working! Hopefully you won’t be told you have to take a bigger role in housework after doing everything for yourself for two days… Either way, this is one of the last things I will be doing with Scouts – I am probably leaving for Explorers sometime soon. So I made the most of it!