Fond Places

There's a place up in the Santa Monica Mountains that is a fond place in my heart. It's a Boy Scout Camp off of Sunset, you have to go north through a residential area and then off on a single lane paved road that changes into gravel and back again. That may have been improved upon because now its been years since I've been up there. It started with Cub Scouts. They had camp-out weekends for the Cub Scouts, but the kid could only come if one of their parents came, so me (Cub Scout Den Leader) and my three Cub Scout part-time wives / mothers/ buddies would take our boys up there and camp. It was all very silly, the boys could not run, the boys could not have hot chocolate at the lodge unless it was the official designated time to have hot chocolate (they might drink it, I was told) and you had to put a deposit down for ping pong balls to use the ping pong tables in the lodge. (I started bringing my own). But the kids got to shoot bows and arrows (though they could not touch the rope fence around the archery range) and shoot off bottle rockets and we all slept in tents and had fires and played frisbee etc etc. The first night Chris and I slept up there in a tent, it was a warm night and I took the weather cover off the tent so we could see the stars before we went to sleep and that night it rained and I had to dry everything out inside the van so we could stay the second night and we were up at four in the morning soaked sneaking hot chocolate at the lodge. I had Leadership training up here when we graduated to Boy Scouts. I had already discovered it was a very cool place to hike after dark. I'd bed everyone down, sneak a nightcap and go for a stroll up into the hills without a light. We didn't really come back until our Order of the Arrow ordeal. I was tapped out with my kid because they needed more OA adults. We spend a day up there, eating very little, not allowed to speak all day, and clearing brush and mowing. I snuck a few words with a Dad that was a Professor of Asian Economic Development at UCLA but spent a good afternoon clearing a meadow up above the lodge. When our work was done, they fed us a big steak dinner and all the boys were going to watch videos and sleep together on the floor of the lodge. I looked around and realized that I did not want to sleep with 100 smelly boys and their fathers/ leaders so I went up to my meadow that I had cleared and slept out with a tent for the first time.
This picture is even later, when the camp was closed because of the great winter rain storms of 2003 or 2004 that washed out the only road into the place. We did a little weekend backpack trip from Will Rogers Park over to Josepho (the name of the camp) and back again to get the younger kids ready for a bigger backpack trip. My kid wasn't here. Probably playing basketball somewhere.

My buddy that took the picture, Dan Olson, (that's his son Jack next to me) has his name on a plaque in the lodge here. He was a Eagle Scout with a Malibu Troop back before ole Jack was born and a OA'r too.