First Trip of the Year — Skills Weekend at Alpine

When and Where

When: September 18-20, 2026 , 6:30 pm — 11:00 am
Nights: 2

Location: Alpine Scout Camp / Cub World 11

The scouting year opens at Alpine Scout Camp, and it opens with skills. This is deliberately not a sightseeing weekend: the trip is built around the three things that gate almost everything a scout does outdoors afterwards — handling a knife, saw and axe safely, building and controlling a fire, and moving a patrol along a trail without leaving anything behind.

Scouts who earn them go home with the Totin' Chip and Firem'n Chit cards. Those are not decorations. Without a Totin' Chip a scout may not carry or use a woods tool on any troop outing, and without a Firem'n Chit he does not light the fire — so this weekend is, quite literally, what makes the rest of the year's trips possible for a new scout.

For scouts joining us this fall, this is also the trip where the patrol method stops being a word and becomes the reason dinner exists. Patrols plan their own menus, buy their own food, cook it, and clean up after it.

What Scouts Will Work On

Three skill areas, taught by older scouts under adult supervision, and each one anchored to a card or a rank requirement rather than to a demonstration nobody records. They run on Saturday in the order below, and the order is practical rather than tidy: the wood that the evening's fire is built from comes off the afternoon's trail.

Totin' Chip — knife, saw and axe

Safe handling, safe passing, the blood circle, sharpening, and the rules that get the card taken away. A scout earns the card by demonstrating the skills and agreeing to the rules — and any leader may cut a corner off it if he breaks them. This is the morning block, and a scout who holds the card by lunchtime spends the rest of the weekend using troop tools rather than watching them.

Hiking — the camp's own trail

Saturday afternoon we walk the trail that runs inside Camp Alpine itself, taking its side branches and stopping at the ruins on the property. We stay inside the camp for the whole weekend — there is no drive to a trailhead and no need for cars on Saturday. Map and compass come out of the pack and stay in hand, the patrols move in buddy pairs, and the walk back is when the tinder and kindling for the evening are gathered.

Firem'n Chit — fire

Site selection, tinder and kindling, building a fire that lights on the first match, keeping it under control, and putting it dead out — including the cold-out test at the end of the night, which is a requirement in its own right. The card carries the same forfeit rule as the Totin' Chip.

Around those three: pitching a tent properly, running a wash station, cooking as a patrol, and a campfire program where every patrol owes a skit and a song.

Advancement

A first camping trip carries more Tenderfoot requirements than any other weekend in the year. Scouts working toward it should arrive knowing which ones they intend to finish:

• 1a — Present yourself to your leader prepared for an overnight campout. Show the personal and camping gear you will use, and how to pack and carry it.
• 1b — Spend at least one night on a patrol or troop campout, sleeping in a tent you helped pitch.
• 1c — Tell how you practiced the Outdoor Code on the campout.
• 2a — Help prepare one of the meals, and explain why every patrol member shares in preparation and cleanup.
• 2b — While on the campout, demonstrate the appropriate method of safely cleaning items used to prepare, serve and eat a meal.

Read the Outdoor Code before Friday. Requirement 1c asks what you actually did about it on the trip, and a scout who first meets the words on Saturday morning has nothing to say.

Second Class and First Class scouts have their own cooking, navigation and nature requirements available on the same weekend — bring your handbook and tell a leader what you are working on before we leave. The camp trail on Saturday afternoon is where the buddy system and durable surfaces get signed off for Tenderfoot, and where Second and First Class scouts can name their ten animals and plants.

The Weekend

Times are firm on the ends and flexible in the middle — the instruction blocks move around the weather.

Friday evening
Gather at OLA, load the cars, and drive to Alpine — under an hour without traffic. Patrols pitch their tents in the dark, which is itself a skill, then a short campfire and lights out.

Saturday
Troop opening and flag ceremony. Patrols cook breakfast, then a camp check — tents, guy lines and the knots that hold them. Mid-morning goes to Totin' Chip instruction and testing. Lunch as patrols, and the afternoon on the camp trail out to the ruins, with the firewood coming back in with us. Firem'n Chit runs in the late afternoon, around half past four, because that fire cannot be laid before the wood for it has been gathered. Dinner as patrols; the patrol leaders' council meets afterwards to plan the month ahead; then the campfire program — every patrol owes one skit and one song, and the adults owe one too.

Sunday — short, and it runs on a clock
Up at 7:00 am and breakfast straight away, tents struck and cars loaded by 8:00, scout's own service at 8:45, then a police line across the site — nothing left behind but the fire ring. We leave camp around 9:45 and are back at OLA about 11:00 am. There is no Sunday lunch, because the troop is home before it: patrol menus cover four meals — Saturday breakfast, lunch and dinner, and Sunday breakfast.

Alpine Scout Camp

Alpine Scout Camp sits on the New Jersey side of the Hudson, on top of the Palisades cliffs in the town of Alpine — close enough to Brooklyn that we can leave after dinner on a Friday and still make camp at a reasonable hour, which is exactly why it is the troop's default opening destination.

Our site this year is Cub World 11, booked for both nights. The camp gate does not open before 6:00 pm on Friday, which is why we leave OLA when we do rather than earlier.

The camp has both tent sites and cabins, close together. That has been useful before: on the September 2023 trip the camp offered us the cabins free of charge when heavy rain moved in, and the weekend went ahead as planned. Scouts should still bring a tent — a cabin is a fallback the camp may offer, not something we have booked.

The Palisades trail system starts at the camp's doorstep, and the Revolutionary War history of these cliffs is close by; the 2023 trip paired its hike with a visit to a small history museum on the shore.

What to Bring

September in the Palisades is warm by day and can drop into the forties overnight. Pack layers, not one heavy coat.

• ⧠ Executed permission form from ScoutBook
• ⧠ Ten Essentials
• ⧠ Backpack
• ⧠ Class A for travel, Class B for camp
• ⧠ Tent — a 3–4 person one, not a two-person tent (see below)
• ⧠ Sleeping bag and sleeping mat
• ⧠ Mess kit and eating utensils
• ⧠ Hiking shoes or boots — broken in, not new
• ⧠ Rain gear
• ⧠ Warm layers and a hat for the evening
• ⧠ Refillable water bottle, at least 2 liters of capacity
• ⧠ Scout Handbook and a pen — this is a skills trip; things get signed off on the spot
• ⧠ Pocket knife only if you already hold a Totin' Chip — scouts earning it this weekend use troop tools under supervision
• ⧠ Compass, if you have one
• ⧠ Flashlight or headlamp
• ⧠ Personal first aid kit

Send the big tent, not the small one. This year scouts sleep three or four together rather than splitting into pairs, so a 3–4 person tent is what we want arriving at the cars on Friday. If your family owns one, that is the one to send; if all you have is a two-person tent, send it anyway and tell a leader, so it can be paired up rather than discovered at the campsite. Who sleeps where, and whose tent each group uses, is sorted out before Friday — and every scout helps pitch the tent he sleeps in, which is a Tenderfoot requirement and the fastest way a new patrol turns into a patrol.

Leave at home: fixed-blade sheath knives, hatchets and axes brought from home, and anything electronic beyond a phone that stays in the pack.

For Parents

Drivers are what make this trip run. Alpine is a short drive, so a parent who can take a car up on Friday evening and be home the same night is enormously useful even without staying for the weekend.

Staying overnight: start the paperwork now, not the week before

Any adult who sleeps at camp must be a registered member of Scouting America. This is national policy, not a troop preference — since September 2023 every adult eighteen or older staying overnight at a Scouts BSA activity has to be registered, and unlike Cub Scouting there is no exception for a parent camping with their own child. Registration means an adult application, a background check and approval by the chartered organization, so it is not something that can be sorted out on the Thursday. If you might ever want to camp with us this year, start now — what adult registration involves.

The same adult also needs current Safeguarding Youth Training and an Annual Health and Medical Record, parts A and B. Safeguarding Youth Training is the course that replaced Youth Protection Training in May 2025 — if your certificate still says Youth Protection, renew it as SYT. It is taken at my.scouting.org: about ninety minutes the first time, then a short refresher and test once a year. How to take it, step by step.

Driving up and coming home

Driving does not require registration, but the troop asks every adult who helps at an activity — including driving scouts — to hold current Safeguarding Youth Training. That one you can genuinely do this week.

For families new to the troop, this weekend is the clearest picture you will get of how we operate: scouts run the patrols, adults stand back, and the cooking is genuinely done by eleven-year-olds. It looks chaotic and it is supposed to.

The trip fee is $30 per scout — $10 toward the campsite, which the troop has already paid, and $20 for the patrol food. It is collected at the first meeting on Monday, together with the permission slip, and it does not change with how many scouts come. Transportation is not in it; the troop covers that separately.

How We've Opened the Year Before

• 2025 — Camp Seton, Connecticut. A compact Saturday-to-Sunday overnight, deliberately built to leave Friday free for homework, and capped with a professional soccer match on the drive home.
• 2024 — September camping trip.
• 2023 — Alpine. The rain-into-cabins weekend, with a five-mile Palisades hike and a scout who cooked crepes for the whole patrol.

From here the year runs on into the shooting sports weekend at Ten Mile River in October and the Thanksgiving cooking trip at Pouch in November — both of which assume the skills earned this weekend.