The MEN (not boys) of Troop 1777 returned Sunday from our first annual Manly Camp. We arrived at the MANLY hunting cabin Saturday night and after settling in, watched a MANLY classic movie: Red Dawn. We awoke at 7:00AM and had a MANLY breakfast of eggs, bacon and biscuits before greeting our snow filled MANLY adventure. We started out on our trek looking for the most MANLY trail we could find. Although our first trail required us to forge through undisturbed snow in excess of 1 foot deep, while crossing several streams, we deemed it not MANLY enough. Our second trail was cut short by those LESS MANLY putting up a gate stopping our forward progress though knee keep snow.

Our third and and final trail had us forging through knee deep snow, crossing rivers, and finally stopping when the mountain peak of Bear Hollow came to an abrupt end. From there we backed our MANLY SUVs into a snow mound and hauled what little gear we brought, to the wooded slopeside make shift camp site.

The MEN made shelters from fallen and hand cut timber, insulated with snow dug out from under the 1 inch thick ice covering our frozen tundra. All meals were prepared over an open fire, including hot sausage links for lunch. Dinner's entre consisted of a hand made venison stew, cooked over an open fire with dutch oven suspended from a hand made tripod, cooking for an excess of 4 hours. The MEN bed down in their hand made shelters, and slept through the night, only to awaken to temperatures below 20 degrees.

NO CHOKE AND PUKE BREAKFAST FOR THESE MEN! We baked a breakfast of sausage and eggs cooked in the dutch oven suspended over our hand made tripod.

This was a most MANLY weekend attended by the most MANLY of Men from the troop. As a reward for such stalwart behavior the MEN enjoyed Pizza at Roman's Pizza outside of Timberville.

And also we left out the heroic deed performed by our MEN, in rescuing a stranded doctor attempting to evacuate through one of the MANLY trails. The MEN removed several snow boulder obstructing her path. In an astonishing feat of strength, the MEN managed to clear a run way for the doctor and get her car out of the path of certain doom and destruction. A more heroic feat I have not seen.