Boy Scouts’ Redwood Empire Council revives Scout-o-Rama show

Senior patrol leader Michael Flett, 16, of Petaluma grabbed the top of the pyramid structure he and his fellow Boy Scouts built with wood posts and rope on a lawn behind Santa Rosa’s Charles M. Schulz Museum.

He lifted his body off the ground and grinned.

“Look, it holds me,” Flett said.

Classic Scouting skills like lashing, tying knots and making rope were on display Saturday during a “Scout-O-Rama” put on by the Boy Scouts Redwood Empire Council, which serves about 2,000 youth in 100 units across Sonoma and Mendocino counties.

The event used to be an annual event but hasn’t been held for about five years, said John Carriger, council president. Saturday relaunched the tradition.

“The Scout-O-Rama goes back 60 years,” Carriger said. “It puts Scouting on display for the public and for the other (Boy Scout) units.”

About 10 troops demonstrated their know-how and offered fun activities like a bean-bag toss and horseback riding on the museum’s back lawn off Hardies Lane. Santa Rosa police and the CHP had officers present to talk with youth and the Sonoma County Fire and Emergency Services Department brought a vehicle used for hazardous materials calls.

Few members of the public showed up, but the Scouts seemed to be having a fine time nonetheless.

Stephen Smilie, 15, of Santa Rosa donned a neon green hazmat suit with an oxygen mask and walked around for 10 minutes with Chris Mulligan, a volunteer hazardous materials specialist with the county department.

He was red-cheeked and drenched in sweat when he finally pulled the suit off.

“Was it hot in there?” said fellow Troop 55 member Joseph Coero, 14, of Santa Rosa.

“Oh yeah, toasty,” Smilie said. “It’s the humidity more than anything.”

“Imagine, we’d be working in this suit for 40 minutes at a time,” Mulligan said.

Members of Petaluma’s oldest unit, Troop 8, established in 1943, built what’s called a monkey bridge - a hallmark Boy Scout project - which is a series of wood poles lashed together in A-frames with foot and railing ropes for people to travel across about 5 feet off the ground. Children took turns climbing up the structure and walking along the makeshift bridge.

“You could use something like this to cross a river,” Scoutmaster Erik Masterson said as he coached a 7-year-old girl along the rope.

Several booths over, Windsor Cubmaster Rich Payne, with Troop 20, helped a 5-year-old girl make rope “the old-fashioned way,” with twine and lots of twisting.

They used a rudimentary device that Payne said he’d heard was originally designed by Leonardo Di Vinci.

“Sixty feet of binder twine makes 6 feet of rope,” Payne said.

In another booth, gray-bearded William Nay of Petaluma donned a red wool coat made from a Hudson Bay blanket much like the kind an early 19th-century mountain man might wear.

An environmental educator known to many as “Father Nayture,” he talked with Scouts and visitors about his displays: An array of geological samples, animal prints and taxidermied bobcats, mountain lions, rattlesnakes and skunks.

Nay, a retireee, describes himself as a master trainer in “tread lightly” and “leave no trace” philosophies, which follows his career with the U.S. Department of Energy.

“I’m the one that promotes how to play nice in nature,” Nay said.

He had boxes of different colored sand from Hawaii and California beaches. He compared the colorful grains he collected at Shell Beach on the Sonoma Coast to the relatively uniform tan grains at Bodega Head, which he said were ground-down granite - once part of the Sierra Nevada. Nay said the slow shifting of tectonic plates carried the sand north from Southern California, where the interior mountains are closer to the sea.

Children connect with nature in a deeper way when they learn to spot clues about history in the natural elements around them, he said.

“Once they learn about the rocks and they learn about the animals, they will more readily modify their behavior,” Nay said.

You can reach Staff Writer Julie Johnson at 521-5220 or julie.johnson@pressdemocrat.com. On Twitter @jjpressdem.