Cedarlands 2001

Location:

Cedarlands, NY (Just north of Long Lake; 250 miles round trip) Click here for map; the lake appears yellow on the map for some reason, and is the larger one in the center of the window.

Dates:

July 22 - July 28

Who:

11 Scouts, four adults, and one dog stayed the full week. In semi-random order, we have...

Dan A.
Nick B.
Justin D.
Nick D.
Brian F.
Mark F.

Chris I.
Matt I.
George J.
Matt T.
Jon Z.
Goose

John Koslosky
Dan Koslosky
Bob Decker
John Ivory
Mike Fitzsimmons
John DelMonte

(Names in bold are adults. Names in bold and underlined are adults who stayed the full week. Names in italic are very rare but well trained dogs)

Notes:

I apologize if I wasn't able to get a photo of everybody that came along. If you've got a photo from this trip that you'd like posted here, just let me know.

Cedarlands' 5,500 acres of mountains, lakes and wilderness make it the largest Scout camp in the Adirondacks.

Cedarlands has become a favorite spot for us, and we have other pages on this web site devoted to it. In particular, you can see what we did for the summer of 2000, as well as a 2 night stay earlier this spring (complete with maps and satellite photos).

Webmaster's note: I decided to try something different with this page. As with most of the rest of the web site, clicking on one of the images below will bring up a larger, full image. The difference is that each one will now come up in its own separate window. This should allow you to browse through them all a bit easier, without having to always use your browser's "back" button. Also, for those with slower net connections (ala phone-modem), you can keep reviewing this main page while the various images are downloading in their own windows.

I also noticed that the brightness and contrast of the images appeared to vary greatly, based on what machine and monitor I was viewing them on. On some computers, the images appeared dark and murky. On others, they appear lighter (almost washed out), and crisper. If you are inclined, try downloading them to your system, adjusting them a bit, printing them out. Some of these are quite nice.

Please feel free to send me a note (ivory@blue-vistas.com) to let me know what you think of this approach.

Biking, Rock Climbing, and Rappelling

We started the week with a high octane event by bike riding to Watch Rock on Long Lake, where we did rock climbing and rappelling for about two hours before biking back. Only two of the scouts managed to climb all the way up to the pulley; Nick D. and Johnny Z. As a sad side note, it's not clear what will become of this event next year. This section of land has been sold to help generate revenue for Cedarlands, and it is rumored that a $400K house will be built on this spot by next year. We'll have to wait and see.

Loon Island Adventure

The only daytime spot of rain came on Tuesday when we tried the Loon Island Adventure. It consisted of a series of team-building challenges, requiring the scouts to act as a team to figure them out.

We passed every test! :-)

Merit Badge Work

During most mornings, we broke into various study groups to work on either the Camping or Environmental Science merit badges; both are required for Eagle Scout. In the photos on the left, we see scouts planting flowers... part of an experiment to find the effects of acid rain and oil contamination.

Mount Masters

Mt. Masters is the dominant climb on scout property, rising over 900 feet above the level of the lake (although it felt like a lot more while climbing it). The final couple hundred feet of the climb involves navigating an almost sheer rock face, which can be clearly seen in the photo from the plane rides below. Fortunately, there were lots of fresh blueberries near the top.

Trebuchet Competition

A trebuchet is similar to a catapult, but operates on a different mechanism. A quick search on Yahoo will bring you to all sorts of pages going into detail. The scouts were provided printouts of a couple of these pages early in the week, and on Thursday we canoed to Windy Beach, where two teams spent 4-5 hours building competing models using just found wood and twine for lashing. They ended up amazingly strong and well built, and could hurl apples and potatoes an amazing distance into the lake!

The guys did a very impressive job.

Sea Plane Rides

The big event on Friday was to have everyone take a sea-plane ride out over the town and scout lands. For many, it was their first ride in a small plane. The top left photo below shows Mt. Masters and it's infamous rocky face that we scaled. The photo below it shows the full lake and island of Cedarlands.

Life at Camp

We had an excellent camp fire each night. Since the weather was so cooperative, it made it easy to do star gazing, where we could easily learn and identify 7-8 constellations, as well as a few stars and satellites.

We also had two full and productive snipe hunts (unfortunately, no photos, but a couple of the scouts did get there hands pecked a little). Checkers was a surprise hit with the scouts while at the main area before retreating to their tents and the usual round of card games.

The scouts did a good job cooking each meal, letting us enjoy things such as omelets and hamburger stroganoff.

Critters...

We didn't have any night time visits from bears (like last year!), but that didn't mean they weren't around. Many of us saw one ambling through the camp site on Friday as we were packing up to go home.

We heard loons nearly every morning, and coyotes most of the nights. A dear and its fawn were seen to be walking along the trail next to our site, and a bunch of the scouts chased a huge porcupine into the woods during our ascent of Mt. Masters.

We'll be supplying photos of the various animals we caught on film as they become available for scanning.

All the remaining photos...

Also check out what we did at Cedarlands in 2002!