Fall Trace September 21st -23rd, 2012 SE Corner of Missouri near Fredrick's Town (Pictures at end of report special thanks to Parson and Bob Wenneker for the pictures)
First off the weather was absolutely beautiful, warm and sunny days, clear and cool nights. The location was on Doug Laut's farm on the 500, top of the hill near the lake and one lone pine tree a really incredible place, nice flat campsites with plenty of room to spread out.
We arrived at 2pm on Friday, setup camp in a couple hours, then setup the range for the rifle match the next day. A quick run into town to Wally World to pick up a few forgotten things then back to camp just in time for dinner at sunset. A most tasty and hearty soup was served, with plenty to go around.
Doug Laut delivered the devotion at the council fire and did an excellent job as always. We were fortunate enough to have a nice group of musicians available for our worship time. An at the end, we were given the task to go out and fellowship with each other, which we did. Camp was mostly quite around midnight, but I'm not really sure cause I was in bed before that.
Up early the next morning... well around 7am anyway, fixed a quick breakfast, coffee, eggs, sausage, hash browns. The hash brown were Hungry Jack freeze dried, just add hot water let sit 12 minutes, then fry... delicious... these will be in my camp box from now on. At 8am the business meeting, the daily schedule was set, scout and buckskin testing, knife and hawk in the morning, rifle shoot in the afternoon. Ted did manage to get a guy to come and do an anvil shoot for us at 10:30am... boy that was Great! It was something to hear the boom, the ringing of the anvil and watch the 85 lb anvil fly 200 feet into the air, then it buried itself deep into the field.
After lunch, I headed down to run the rifle shoot. The shoot consisted of 5 stations, first was clay birds on a board, just so everyone could see where their rifles were shooting. Next was a two stage station, with lollipops and charcoal on a string. Next station was cut the string, which was just that, shoot the string and break it. The fifth station was the gongs, there were 3 gongs, 2 of different sizes at the same distance and one ground hog gong out twice as far as the other. The shoot was 1 shot per station, total 5 shots, each target was worth 5 point max for station 1 thru 4, with station 5, the gongs were a call your shot, the two gongs were 5 and 10 points each and the ground hog was worth 20 points because of the size and distance involved. We had one Old Timer, Simon Tanner, shoot a perfect score of 40 points for first place, and Kaleb Bresheres, who clinched first place for the young bucks.
Dinner was served around 6pm, consisting of green beans and potatoes, and roasted hog. Let me tell you, the food was excellent and plentiful, I heard there was about 40 lbs of bean and potatoes and 100 lbs of roast pork, and if that wasn't enough, for dessert there was peach cobbler. And again, no one went away hungry.
At the evening council fire, there was one new buckskin member, Ralph Davis, Tall Oak was inducted and took his place with the rest of the buckskin members. Doug Laut delivered the devotion on Saturday and again he did an amazingly wonderful job. Then after a full day, it was off to bed. The evening air was crisp and many broke out the capotes and blankets.
Sunday morning, up early again... well 7pm or so, the morning was very cool, not quite frosty but very close. So as the water heated up for the coffee, climbed back in bed to grab a little snooze. Coffee hot and breakfast going, the sun has been up for a while and the coat was put aside. At 8am, Simon Tanner convened Sunday School and delivered a wonderful message, after that we continued to break camp and by 11am we were ready to hit the road for home, sad that the Fall Trace had come to an end. Thanks, Bob WennekerClick on a Picture for a Larger View.