Back from the LLD

Lakota Brothers,

We just got back from the Lodge Leadership Development Course and we had a blast! There were nineteen youth and ten adults there for the training, and a big group of trainers from the Lodge Executive Board.

Fun is a big part of any OA activity and we had a lot of it. We played games like 'The Human Knot' and had contests between groups of arrowmen. After the evening activities, we stayed up until after midnight to watch a movie together.

In between games, we learned a lot in classes about being a successful chapter/lodge leader, planning activities, and building strong chapters. The coolest class was about the meaning of the Ordeal. The adults went to their own classes, learning about their role in the order and how to help us succeed as arrowmen and leaders.

As always, the food was great. The Grizzly chapter fed us well with beef stew for dinner, pancakes for breakfast, and sandwiches for lunch.

We hope to see you at the next chapter meeting on Saturday, December 20th at 7PM. We'll meet at the South Chapel. We'll be painting giant pick-up sticks for the Klondike Derby and enjoying some treats — we also want to share some ideas from the LLD.

Lakota Fall Fellowship and Ordeal: A Success!

We welcomed 10 new Arrowmen into our lodge at our recent Chapter Ordeal held at Rock Canyon Campground. We replaced and painted picnic table planks and benches, collected and stacked fire wood, dispursed wood chips, cleaned out fire pits and picked up trash. In all we completed over 152 man hours of labor for the National Forest Service' Pleasant Grove Ranger district who adminitsters the campground. Most of all, we are excited to build a strong relation ship with the Pleasant Grove Ranger district and hope to return there each fall for future Ordeal service opportunities.

We look forward to our November 22nd chapter activity where we plan to have members of the BYU Soccer team talk with us about setting and achieving goals. We'll meet from 7:00-8:30 at the LDS church at 1038 N 1200 E, Provo, Utah.

Scoutmasters and Varsity coaches, If you would like to have a unit elections before the year is out, please contact Steve Bunker (lakota.steve@gmail.com or 356-3380) to schedule an election team to visit your troop or team.

September Fellowship

There's both good and bad to report about last night's meeting.

The bad news, we only had 7 people there, and two of those were candidates. We obviously need to do a better job of getting the word out and getting people excited. I was planning on taking pictures to help with the publicity side of things, but I managed to forget about that during the meeting.

The good news, well there's a fair amount of that:

• it looks like we'll have 6 or 7 candidates from our chapter at next month's ordeal, and as many as 25 total.
• the arrowmen that did come all seemed to have a good time building towers out of pretzels and marshmellows -- we should see all of them back next month (hopefully bringing friends)
• we got some good planning done for the October ordeal, I'm getting excited about it

Next month is looking good too. I think we'll be putting together a soccer themed activity - more news about that later. We may also end up doing a service project on or near Hallowe'en.

Pow Wow 2008

We had a small contingent at Pow Wow this year, with 1 youth and 1 adult there full time and 2 additional adults coming out for part of the Pow Wow. We also found that new chapter chief Stephen Ferris has moved to Provo to attend school and is now a part of our chapter — Hiya Stephen!

The Pow Wow was a great opportunity to meet with other members of our lodge and to get more involved in things. There were a bunch of great activities (the atlatl range, the dance exhibition, and the falconry display were some of the most popular).

The lodge put a big dent in the work required to get Camp Tifie up and running as part of a service project. Hopefully we'll send a lot of scouts in 2009 when it opens. If you missed it, you might want to think about going to one of the Lodge functions next year. With LLD, Teepee Week, and Pow Wow, you've got some great options to choose from.