BSA Troop 451, Lewisville, TX

Properly tended, cast iron will not rust nor will it emit the retchsome reek of rancid oil. Why anyone would consider cooking food in a vessel coated with rancid oil, I cannot conceive. Another consequence of the old Troop 451 method is that the iron, predictably, rusts. This time, while we had no rusty iron to remediate (a first, I think!) we did find most of the iron reeking of rancidity. Yuck! The proper care is trivially simple. Clean the vessel in whichever way you wish. Detergent and steel wool will NOT harm a properly seasoned piece of cast iron. This because of the nature of the chemistry involved in seasoning. Like so many real-world processes, this too can be understood by the application of scientific understanding. The root problem is that iron metal and oxygen gas (O2 in the air that we breathe) combine readily in the presence of water. This is an energetically-favorable reaction that occurs spontaneously and water acts as a catalyst in the process. The end product i

On November 16th, 2018, Troop 451 once again presented the Tonkawa District Youth Leadership Training at Hills and Hollows Scout Camp in Denton, Texas. This training supplements that now-standard Youth Leadership Training (YLT) that all Scouts should attend, typically within their first year. In the past, leadership training had three phases, YLT, Brownsea, and National Youth Leadership Training (NYLT), known, in the Longhorn Council, as "Twin Arrows". "Brownsea" was intermediate-level - more advanced than YLT and less intense than Twin Arrows, it was long the prerequisite for that more-advanced training. Named after an island in Poole Harbor, England, where Lord Baden Powell first held leadership training campouts for his original Boy Scouts, Brownsea was long a staple of the BSA leadership training mission. For reasons unfathomable to this long-time Scouter, a few years ago, Brownsea was eliminated in favor of taking Scouts directly from YLT to NYLT. Many in t