The Smell of Woodsmoke and the Klondike Derby

One of my favorite things is one of the simplest things there is, that being the smell of wood smoke - or a campfire, to be more precise. Every time I smell wood smoke, I'm automatically transported back to when I was a kid and was in the Boy Scouts, and went on my very first camping trip ever.

I was in Troop 512 in Highland Springs, Virginia, the troop being sponsored by New Bridge Baptist Church. The church was pretty big, and the Scout troop had its own one-room building behind the church at the end of the parking lot. The building was pretty big, big enough for the whole troop to meet there, and it had a big fireplace on one side of the room. I was in the troop from the winter of 1969 until the summer of 1972 when my family moved to North Carolina, and those few years in the Scouts are some of my most favorite times growing up.

I joined the Scouts in late November of 1969 at the urgings of a 6th grade classmate of mine, David Nunnally. As soon as I got involved in the troop I started working on my first rank badge, Tenderfoot. There were a couple of skills I'd have to master before I could get the badge, and those could only be done on a camping trip since they had to do with woodlore and things like that. As it turns out, that was no problem because the troop was planning on going on a camping trip in January, 1970 to participate in the annual Klondike Derby. I was going along, and I was very excited about it!

A brief explanation of just what the Klondike Derby is all about is required at this point.

It was based on the Klondike gold rush of the 1800's, and consisted of a course laid out through a large wooded area that had "stations" on it. At each station, the scouts would be required to perform a Scouting skill such as knot tying, first aid, fire building, etc. The stations were manned by judges, who were the scoutmasters from each of the participating troops and the sponsoring Council. Each skill had a time limit and a minimum standard, and if you completed it in the time limit and according to standards, you were awarded a "gold nugget" which was actually a small rock painted gold. In addition to earing gold nuggets, you were also competing for time - the faster you completed the entire course, the more gold nuggets you were awarded at the finish. The course was laid out in a very large circle - one year, the course was measured out at just under three miles - and the troops would be started off on the course two patrols at a time in ten minute intervals. One would go clockwise, and the other would go counter-clockwise; ten minutes later, two more patrols would take off, and so on until all entries in the Derby were on the course. Each troop could enter as many patrols in the Derby as they could field, as long as each patrol met the minimum requirements.

Did I mention that each patrol entered in the Derby had to build a dog sled like was used in the Klondike gold rush? And to make matters worse, the sled had to be built to Derby specifications, meaning that there was a minimum length, height, and width for the sled. Additionally, the sled had to contain certains items of camping gear like the gold rushers would have carried, such as a tent, food, clothing, etc, everything you would expect to find on a sled of the time. You lost points for missing items from the mandatory list, and you can bet your sled was checked at entry time. And lastly the sled had to meet a minimum weight - if the sled was too light, you either withdrew the sled from the Derby, or you stacked ballast on it until it met the weight minimum. (The last year I ran the Derby with my troop, we ran it with a 25 pound log on board.)

So ya wanna guess who pulled the sled through the woods? The scouts, that's who. You had to have one driver and at least six "sled dog" scouts pulling it, but no more than 11 scouts total. The runners of the sleds were all lined with tin so they slid pretty easily across the open ground, but once you got those babies into the woods and started pulling them across the broken ground, dense woods, creeks and streams and all that other crap found in the woods - well, you get the idea. I participated in three Klondike Derbys, and only one - the last one - was done when there was actually snow on the ground which, believe it or not, actually made it harder to pull the sled through the woods. Over open ground you could flat-out fly, but when you hit the woods and had to traverse the sled up over logs and such, slipping around on the snow made it that much harder.

At the end of the day, the patrol with the fastest time AND the most gold nuggets was declared the winner, with 2nd and 3rd prizes being given out as well. The second year I competed, we placed 3rd by one nugget.

So my first camping trip ever was to the Klondike Derby in January, 1970, and the week before the trip my father took me to the local Army/Navy Store in Eastgate Mall and bought me a brand-new, canvas pup tent complete with floor! Then we went to the local Sears store that sold Boy Scout equipment where he bought me an official Boy Scout sleeping bag! Man, I was in tall cotton!

The troop gathered together on the Friday before the derby and loaded the sled - we only fielded one sled each year because we didn't have enough troops for two - into the back of our scoutmaster's old Ford pickup truck, and then we convoyed out to the derby site and picked out our campsite. The rest of the afternoon and early evening was spent with the older scouts showing me what I needed to know, like how to set up the tent, how to tie knots that wouldn't slip, things like that, and by about eight o'clock at night I was fairly beat. So I slipped into my tent, took off my clothes, put on my pajamas like a good little boy, and climbed into my sleeping bag to get some much-needed sleep.

Did I mention that this camping trip took place in JANUARY?

One of the things that the older scouts either forgot to tell me or didn't tell me on purpse as kind of an "initiation" of sorts was that when you went camping in the winter and intended to sleep on the ground, it wasn't the amount of covers you had on top of you that mattered, but how much you had beneath you - between you and the groud - that counted. The more layers of insulation between you and the ground the better, because without it the cold of the ground would freeze you like a popsicle in no time flat. And they didn't tell me this, so when I climbed into my brand-new sleeping bag wearing my pajamas, the only thing between me and the ground was a canvas tent floor and the back side of a sleeping bag.

I liked to froze to death.

The next day was the Derby, and I swear I'd never worked so physically hard in my life as I did that day pulling the sled along with the others scouts in my patrol. At the end of the day when we had eaten, we had the traditional "snipe hunt" during which I was formally inducted into the troop, and after that I started to head for my tent to try and sleep despite the cold. It was at this point that one of the older scouts let me in on the secret to keeping warm while camping in the winter time, and he got two or three blankets out of the troop supply chest and put them on the ground under my sleeping bag. Then he told me NOT to take off my clothes but to only take off my boots, and sleep in my clothes for warmth. He told me that if I slept with my boots on my feet would swell while I slept, and my boots would get so tight as to impede the circulation in my feet which could really be trouble. After passing these pearls of wisdom on to me I hit the sack, and slept like a log - a warm log, at that!

Somewhere during the evening my patrol leader came and woke me up, calling me out to the campfire where the Scoutmaster presented me with my Tenderfoot badge which I had earned that day during the sled run.

Sunday morning we packed up the sled and the scouts and headed back to the church, where our parents all picked us up. I came home smelling like wood smoke, which my mother commented on (but not in a bad way since my dad had been a scout, too) and which I found to be not all that unpleasant. My first Klondike Derby and camping trip was behind me now, and over the next few years of Scouting they would be followed by many more.

And you can bet that I made sure that the next new scout that joined us on a winter camping trip didn't freeze his butt off the first night like I did.

Except for that snot-nosed little whiny crybaby that came up to our troop from the Webelos in '72, that is...but that's another story for another time.

IHC