A peek into troop storage equipment.
Transcript:
Here in the Northeast we camp about once per month and the weather can be relatively hot to brutally cold.
For most of the cold weather camping though we are inside of a cabin. As a result most of the troop gear is for moderately cold to moderately warm weather.
We are lucky that our sponsoring organization gives us some nice indoor space to run our meetings and store our gear. That gives us the opportunity to have all of our equipment in a controlled environment and not have to either pay for a storage facility or rely on people associated with the troop to store equipment.
When I was running the cub pack we unfortunately at the time did not have a storage space and it was very difficult to keep equipment at an external facility, along with being very expensive.
It was preferable however to storing equipment with pack members, as there were a couple of instances where pack equipment got destroyed by accident, or even once where a current leader picked up and moved over the summer taking with him some pack cooking equipment.
As far as the Troop goes however, the closet at our meeting location works out great, as it makes the quartermaster’s job easier, if not transparent.
In the closet we store the troop tents, which are owned by the troop and used by the boys and adults. We have patrol boxes that keep propane stoves, pot kits and utencil kits as well as a few other cooking essentials.
Outside of the tents and boxes we are able to store items we use more infrequently, like our 10×10 rain pop up, small tables, a good stash of plates, utensils, and cups for events, water jugs for water and drinks and smaller jugs for general camping water. We also have dutch ovens, axes and saws and rope.
For axes and rope we keep a standard supply in large duffle bags, so you can grab them and go for trips, without sorting through all the equipment.
And of course we have left over dry goods, so we can recycle them into the next trip, as a scout in thrifty.
Overall it’s a lot of stuff, and if we didn’t have the space we could pair it down to more essentials.
Over the years we have toyed with the idea of getting a troop trailer, but the general thought was that a trailer would increase our footprint, and not reduce it. But, this is what works for us.
Take what you like and leave the rest, and as we say in Woodbadge, feedback is a gift, leave yours below in the comments, with the hope we can all learn together.
I’m Scoutmaster Dave, and this was a bit on troop storage.
