In any case, I did take some pictures of something this month, so I figured they might be worth sharing. In the ward I'm going to, I'm in charge of activities for the Elders Quorum. And our bishop assigned a "Men's Outing" aka "Fathers & Sons Campout" to the Elders as our one ward activity for the year. So a lot of that responsibility fell to me. Thankfully our Quorum President took it on himself to make a lot of it happen, and that took a big load off of me. And in the end, I pretty much just showed up. We were able to find guys in the quorum who could do most of what I couldn't do or didn't know how to do.
The bishop wanted a place that was close so people could come up and not stay the night if they didn't want to. So we got a campsite at the Spruces in Big Cottonwood Canyon, about 30 minutes from my door. So that was nice and convenient. And a less active member of our ward is a chef and they got him to cook us dinner. And it was one heck of a dinner. A gigantic ham, several large turkey roasts, corn on the cob, both roasted red potatoes, and sweet potatoes, pasta, rolls. We ended up with about 30 men and boys altogether and we made ate 1/3 or 1/2 of all that he brought up. The camp host came by on his golf cart at least 3 times to fill up a plate of food for himself or someone else. In the morning we cooked eggs along with leftover red potatoes and ham. The potatoes were so good. I ate all I could fit in me.
Brian cutting up ham and turkey
Sweet potatoes around the fire
Dinner time!
Some of the guys enjoying our feast
Wandered down to the river for a minute to take some nature shots
After dinner, we had spiritual messages from the Young Mens president and then from the long-time gospel doctrine teacher. I really enjoyed his thoughts on manliness and how being a "real man" is mostly about putting others' needs before your own.
Lesson time
More of the guys
After dinner, we had three different types of dutch oven cobbler to choose from, as well as stuff for making s'mores.
I bought my first very own tent for the campout, but when I got up there there wasn't a ton of space for tents and one of the other guys offered me space in his tent along with two of his boys (aged 5 and 3 approximately). So I didn't even get to set up my tent for the first time. Guess I'll have to find another excuse to bust it out soon.
I was kind of looking forward to having my own tent and some privacy and not having to worry about whether or not someone would complain about my snoring. Turned out to be just fine in the end. The boys slept most of the night and if they woke up I didn't hear it. It was actually kind of fun hanging out with some kids. As usual, I couldn't make it through the night without having to get up and use the bathroom (pretty much a guarantee every time I sleep in a tent), but it was fairly warm when I got up in the night and the stars were beautiful.
In the morning, we ate our aforementioned delicious breakfast, got cleaned up, packed up and headed home. In the process of packing up my stuff, I came across a young moose picking its way through the brush off to the side of the main road down to the highway. It came up close to the road a few times, spotted me, and shied away. Eventually it did cross the road not too far from where I had stopped to watch it. Always fun to see animals out in nature.
The moose
All in all I thought it was a pretty successful event and I was relieved to have it over with. :)
A few more photos here.
