Our annual Junior Leader Training weekend and camp was held at Camp Twin Echo November 11-13, 2011. Our base of operation was the Hill Court cabin.

Nine scouts, who have been with T480 for less than a year, spent most of Saturday taking the BSA introductory Junior Leader Training course. Senior Patrol Leader Dylan Dirado along with Brandon and Nathan Schuerman did most of the course training.

For those scouts not participating in the JLT program, there was an opportunity to work on the Geocacheing Merit Badge. Using GPS units these scouts sought out hidden caches which had been placed around the camp. At each cache there were directions to the next. There was also one 'virtual' cache and the scouts had to find the answer to a question about what was found at that location.

In the afternoon all scouts had an opportunity to play a game of frisbee golf along an 8-hole course set up in the lower camp area.

The weekend also featured a cooking competition between the five patrols which were in attendance. Each patrol had to incorporate a bag of frozen hash brown potatoes and a small amount of hard salami into their meal. The patrol meals were ...

• Killer Rabbits - Jumbalya with rice, pumpkin cake
• Spades - French toast, fried eggs, sausages, grilled hash brown potatoes with onions, funfetti cake
• Cobras - Baked ham, brocolli, hash browns with peppers & onions, pears
• Phoenixs - Tacos
• Mustangs - Amish breakfast (sausage, potatatoes, onions, pepper, eggs)

The cooking competition was judged by the adults present for the weekend. The winning partol was the Killer Rabbits. For their prize, the adults cleaned up cooking utensils, dishes and the patrol box from the Sunday breakfast.