20 August 2008
So What’s Your Excuse?
Posted by admin under: camps; scouters .
I’ll plead weight or poor conditioning, but not age after this story in the Boston Globe.
By Derrick Z. Jackson
AS MIDDLE-AGERS at the Beijing Olympics exalt the iron abs of 41-year-old swimmer and mother Dara Torres, the gold medal for guts goes to 81-year-old Vahram “Vee” Sookikian. Three days before the games began, Sookikian jubilantly bore his backpack on spindly legs back into base camp at the Philmont Scout Ranch in Cimarron, N.M., the oldest national high adventure camp of the Boy Scouts.
He finished a 10-night, 60-mile trek in the mountain wilderness with one of the four, 12-person crews from our Boston Minuteman Council. Sookikian’s crew included his 50-year-old son Steve and 15-year-old grandson Julian. There are families where three generations can chat on a porch. There are three generations capable of a gentle stroll or a genteel round of golf.
Few are the families in our sedentary nation where three generations share a trail, undulating between 7,000 and 10,000 feet under a withering sun. Few families have an octogenarian who can carry 40 pounds on his back for a week and a half to sleep on the ground under the stars. Vee was sturdy enough to fall off a log bridge into a stream, right himself, wipe himself off and keep hiking, only complaining that he drowned his digital camera.
(hat tip: thestilettoblog.com)
- Take the Family to Philmont
- Catholics Camp and Congregate
- Philmont Planning on Getting Taller and Wider
- Crew: Couldn’t Hack the Hike
- Georgia Super Hikers
