Back from the LLD

Lakota Brothers,

We just got back from the Lodge Leadership Development Course and we had a blast! There were nineteen youth and ten adults there for the training, and a big group of trainers from the Lodge Executive Board.

Fun is a big part of any OA activity and we had a lot of it. We played games like 'The Human Knot' and had contests between groups of arrowmen. After the evening activities, we stayed up until after midnight to watch a movie together.

In between games, we learned a lot in classes about being a successful chapter/lodge leader, planning activities, and building strong chapters. The coolest class was about the meaning of the Ordeal. The adults went to their own classes, learning about their role in the order and how to help us succeed as arrowmen and leaders.

As always, the food was great. The Grizzly chapter fed us well with beef stew for dinner, pancakes for breakfast, and sandwiches for lunch.

We hope to see you at the next chapter meeting on Saturday, December 20th at 7PM. We'll meet at the South Chapel. We'll be painting giant pick-up sticks for the Klondike Derby and enjoying some treats — we also want to share some ideas from the LLD.

November Chapter Activity

Hey Lakota Arrowmen,
we had a fun activity last night, but we really missed everyone that wasn't there with us. Although our numbers were few we enjoyed eating pizza and playing a game called Chronology. We also took some time to plan our upcoming activities:

• In December, we're going to get together to paint some 8 foot long pick-up sticks for January's activity.
  
• In January, we'll be running the giant pick-up sticks activity at the Klondike Derby.
  
• In February, we're planning a special chapter overnighter -- no details yet.
  
• In March, we'll hold chapter elections and have a movie night.
  
• In April, we're going to have another game night.
  
• In May, we'll hold a call-out ceremony at the district camporee and then an Ordeal the next weekend.

Also, you might want to check out our facebook group. We try to use the group and facebook messages to get the word out about activities and to share ideas:

Lakota Chapter on Facebook

Scoutmasters and Varsity coaches, we'd like to run at least four elections each month from February through April to get ready for our May Ordeal but we're going to need your help. If you would like to have a unit elections, please contact Steve Bunker (lakota.steve@gmail.com or 356-3380) to schedule an election team to visit your troop or team.

Lakota Fall Fellowship and Ordeal: A Success!

We welcomed 10 new Arrowmen into our lodge at our recent Chapter Ordeal held at Rock Canyon Campground. We replaced and painted picnic table planks and benches, collected and stacked fire wood, dispursed wood chips, cleaned out fire pits and picked up trash. In all we completed over 152 man hours of labor for the National Forest Service' Pleasant Grove Ranger district who adminitsters the campground. Most of all, we are excited to build a strong relation ship with the Pleasant Grove Ranger district and hope to return there each fall for future Ordeal service opportunities.

We look forward to our November 22nd chapter activity where we plan to have members of the BYU Soccer team talk with us about setting and achieving goals. We'll meet from 7:00-8:30 at the LDS church at 1038 N 1200 E, Provo, Utah.

Scoutmasters and Varsity coaches, If you would like to have a unit elections before the year is out, please contact Steve Bunker (lakota.steve@gmail.com or 356-3380) to schedule an election team to visit your troop or team.

Ordeal Rescheduled

The ordeal has been rescheduled for 24-25 October at the same location, Rock Canyon. We are fortunate to provide the service to the Rock Canyon Campground as we had planned earlier. 

Even though all participants in the ordeal are experienced campers, please remember to be prepared for the weather conditions. You can keep appraised of the weather conditions for the area by viewing the National Weather Service Forcast.

Also, don't forget the great information resource, The Boy Scout Handbook. It wouldn't hurt to look up how make a bed on the ground (pp. 240-241)

Ordeal Weekend!

Tomorrow, we'll be starting our chapter's ordeal weekend up at Rock Canyon campground.  We've coordinated a lot of service opportunities with the local ranger district.  It looks like the logistics are all in place.  Now we just need to wait until Friday night to get things going.

Because schedules are tight, we're going to combine our chapter meeting (which had been scheduled for Oct 16) with the Ordeal.  hopefully we can get enough members there to make things worthwhile.

Map to the Rock Canyon Campground

Here are the directions for driving to the Rock Canyon Campground

• Enter Provo Canyon driving North East on UT 189 for least 1.5 miles. Exit to the right at the Squaw Peak Turn off.
• Drive on for at least 3.75 miles. Turn left to Rock Canyon. 
• You will pass the Hope Campground turn-off, where the pavement ends. 
• Continue driving for at least 4.75 miles. You will see a gated entrance on the right for the Rock Canyon campground.
  

September Fellowship

There's both good and bad to report about last night's meeting.

The bad news, we only had 7 people there, and two of those were candidates. We obviously need to do a better job of getting the word out and getting people excited. I was planning on taking pictures to help with the publicity side of things, but I managed to forget about that during the meeting.

The good news, well there's a fair amount of that:

• it looks like we'll have 6 or 7 candidates from our chapter at next month's ordeal, and as many as 25 total.
• the arrowmen that did come all seemed to have a good time building towers out of pretzels and marshmellows -- we should see all of them back next month (hopefully bringing friends)
• we got some good planning done for the October ordeal, I'm getting excited about it

Next month is looking good too. I think we'll be putting together a soccer themed activity - more news about that later. We may also end up doing a service project on or near Hallowe'en.

We're on facebook!

In an effort to help publicize chapter events and activities (and to build some excitement about what we're doing), we've created a facebook group for our chapter. Go here to check it out and join.

What will we be doing there? Well, we should be able to use it to send out event invitations, group messages, hold discussions, and show the facebook world what being a part of the Lakota chapter is all about.

A blog and Facebook won't be the end of our publicity push. We have a couple of additional ideas up our sleeves. If you've got a suggestion, please share it with us too. We'd love to hear about it.

Pow Wow 2008

We had a small contingent at Pow Wow this year, with 1 youth and 1 adult there full time and 2 additional adults coming out for part of the Pow Wow. We also found that new chapter chief Stephen Ferris has moved to Provo to attend school and is now a part of our chapter — Hiya Stephen!

The Pow Wow was a great opportunity to meet with other members of our lodge and to get more involved in things. There were a bunch of great activities (the atlatl range, the dance exhibition, and the falconry display were some of the most popular).

The lodge put a big dent in the work required to get Camp Tifie up and running as part of a service project. Hopefully we'll send a lot of scouts in 2009 when it opens. If you missed it, you might want to think about going to one of the Lodge functions next year. With LLD, Teepee Week, and Pow Wow, you've got some great options to choose from.