Taking place ever four years, Troop 1 Katonah had the thrill of attending the adventurous Spring Camporee from May 2nd to 4th. Being a council-wide event, the Troop was able to participate with around a thousand other scouters in Croton Point Park for the Camporee. Once arriving, the troop was able to explore the activities of the program throughout four main areas. These four divisions of the camporee consisted of the Mountain, Arctic, Desert, and Jungle themes. Having a different district run each area, the four areas contained various programs and activities that not only tested the skills of our scouts but also proved to be a blast. Each of these activities could correlate to the theme of the area of which it takes place. Ranging from 4-7 activities, scouts could do favorites such as the mountain themed climbing wall, the arctic cardboard box igloo construction (the program had to provide a sufficient material due to the lack of snow in spring), the desert monkey bring (testing the scouts not to fall into the "snake" infested pit below **assurance that the snakes were in fact rubber**) and the jungle rope swings (challenging scouts to prevent water from pouring out of a soap can or falling in general while swinging to the other side of an invisible cliff). Revolving around group-based work, the scouts had to work together to complete each activity or they would be forced to restart if a scout was not able to succeed (talk about leaving nobody behind). On Saturday night of the event, the scouts were further given wonderful entertainment by a professional hypnotist. With approximately 15 scouts being "hypnotized", the man of talent was able to make these individuals cry, sweat, fall asleep, and dance in front of hundreds of people. Since these scouts were claimed by others to never perform these types of actions if they were not hypnotized, the hypnotist did not only reveal his talent to be anything but a hoax, but was able to receive agreements from the hypnotized by having them say "He's the Man" whenever the man's name was mentioned 15 minutes after the performance. After reluctantly returning home after a splendid event, every scout in Katonah Troop 1 as well as all the other troops can honestly say that thinking that the Spring Camporee was a cool event would be a massive understatement.
Annual Family Dinner - Feb. 7 Our family dinner will be held at the Katonah Presbyterian Church at 6:30 pm on Thursday, Feb. 7 (Snow date Feb. 9). The cost is $15.00 per person. We will need a head count by Feb. 2 to be sure we have plenty of food! Please RSVP to htschorn@aol.com. We will have lots of troop memorabilia to browse through. If any of our alumni members have some pictures or a story that you'd like to share, please bring or send them to me ahead of time so they can be included. We would like to include as many alumni members of the troop as possible, so please forward this to anyone former Katonah Troop 1 Scouts who you think might be interested in joining us!