Video: Boys Learn Winter Survival Skills at Camp

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RANDOLPH, Miss. (WCBI) — This weekend’s chilly weather gave some future Boy Scouts a chance to learn some valuable outdoor survival skills.

Some kids actually were brave enough to sleep in a tent. But most slept in cabins, which really weren’t all that well heated.

Camp Yocona hosted this weekend’s fall camporee for Webelos, which is basically an intermediate step between Cub Scouts and Boy Scouts.

“It’s ten and eleven year old kids who have completed all of their activities for the Cub packs, ” said Webelos leader Bill Carr of Tupelo. “Webelos get to go out and do a little more camping than the Cub Scouts do.”

Evan Little of Pontotoc didn’t have far to come this weekend.

“I believe it teaches you discipline, and it teaches you valuable life skills that will help you throughout your adulthood and teenage years,” he said.

“It helps you learn about when you get older and being a man. And more about life,” said Gabriel Garrison of Tupelo. “We learned that we need to put out fires all the time because it could cause a fire.”

Camp Yocona is owned by the Boy Scouts of America, and is used year round for scouting activities.

But with the frigid weather this weekend, it was the perfect place to learn winter survival skills.

“The survivalist is basically teaching the kids how to survive the elements,” Carr explains. “What they need to do as far as dressing in layers, how to protect themselves if they weren’t in these cabins, the things that they would need to do to protect their self to make it through the weekend, make it through a week, how to survive in case they were lost in the woods.”

“”I think that will help because whenever you’re lost in the wilderness at least you’ll know how to make you a shelter and find water and start a fire,” explains camp attendee Joshua Montgomery of Pontotoc.

And Little has another motivation to be here.

“In my career I’m actually going to need those skills because I want to be a game warden in Tennessee, so I might get lost in the Appalachians,” Little explains.

And eleven year old Donnie Hill of Verona learned how to use an old fashioned compass to not get lost.

“I got every number I was supposed to do because staying on north and go in the direction, just go straight,” he said.

Hill and the other boys had a lot of fun, which is really what this weekend was all about.