The CPC Climbing Committee was honored again this year to be asked to teach the COPE & Climbing sections at the BSA National Camping School at Fire Mountain Scout Camp in Washington. Doug Doss, our current Program Manager, was the Director for the Climbing section, and Joe Davis staffed. Ken Myers, previous Chair of the CPC COPE Committee, was the Director of the COPE section, with support from Ray Sayah from the Chief Seattle Council. We were all supported by Steve Dodson, the Western Region COPE & Climbing Chair, who joined us from sunny SoCal.

We had a great set of students from all across the West — Oregon, Washington, Idaho, and even California. We had three Climbing students and two COPE students. The extensive experience that the students brought to the class enabled us to share a lot more between the COPE and Climbing sections than is normally possible. The COPE folks got to set up and run incident responses on natural rock along with the Climbing team, and the Climbing folks got to learn a lot more about the extensive teambuilding methods used in COPE and to help run a scenario on the High COPE course. It was tremendous fun, we all learned a lot, and made some new friends across five different Councils!

Doug, myself, and Bryce Horine then took the new COPE & Climbing Program Trainer class so that we can prepare to have our program evaluated under the new program rules. We are planning to hold a full instructor training class in the Fall for that program evaluation.

and no one complained about the weather…really 🙂