Happy 100th Birthday for Scouting

“I thought I’d see a bear — and I did,” said Stewart, who will be a fifth-grader at Greenbrook Elementary School. The sighting occurred last month at Redwood National Forest.

California, particularly Scouting, has been good to him.

“It’s a lot funner (in the United States) because you do outdoor activities more than in Scotland,” Stewart said. “In Scotland, it’s probably raining.”

Stewart wants to join the Boy Scouts and earn the cycling merit badge, just like his older brother, Hamish, 13, who was away on another Boy Scout camping trip this week.

Stewart and the 49 other campers at Barbecue Terrace on Mount Diablo set up camp during the afternoon.

“It’s a family activity. It’s not just the dads and sons,” said Harold Adams of Danville, who was camping with his wife, Suzanne; their son, Jonathan, 11, who will be transitioning from Cub Scouts to Boy Scouts; and their daughter, Christina, 9, a Brownie. Harold was Cub Master for Danville’s Pack 18, and Suzanne is a den leader.

Thousands participate yearly.

The Pleasant Hill-based Mount Diablo Silverado Council of the Boy Scouts of America has a $2.8 million budget and serves more than 21,000 young people per year in 11 districts in Contra Costa, Napa, Solano, Lake and northern Alameda counties, said Valerie Ridgers, the council’s assistant Scout executive.

A total of 110 campers gathered Tuesday afternoon at three sites on Mount Diablo, holding ritual camp fires (electric, not with real flames, because of the fire danger) in preparation for Wednesday’s 8 a.m. worldwide commemoration of the 100th anniversary of the founding of the Scouting movement.

Founder Lord Robert Baden-Powell’s native England is the site for this year’s World Scout Jamboree, where local Scouts are among about 40,000 from around the world. Other local Scouts, from Venture Crew 405 in Pleasant Hill, are in Nyeri, Kenya, paying tribute to where Baden-Powell is buried.

Early Wednesday, the centennial was marked by George Fosselius, a retired 33-year high school teacher who joined Scouting in 1950 and has been a leader for his entire adult life, and others.

Fosselius once traveled to the roots of Scouting at Brownsea Island in England, where Baden-Powell held the first camp-out for 21 Scouts from Aug. 1 to Aug. 8, 1907.

“It was my pilgrimage,” said Fosselius, the council’s assistant district commissioner for Venturing, a youth development program open to boys and girls ages 14 to 20.

At 8 a.m. Wednesday on Mount Diablo, Fosselius blew the horn of a kudu, or African antelope, an instrument Baden-Powell used to rouse his camp at Brownsea Island. Such horns still are used in Scout camps worldwide.

Baden-Powell acquired a kudu during his distinguished British army service in the Matabele Wars in Africa, after he learned the horn was used for military signal codes by the Matabele in southern Africa.

Baden-Powell created the Scouting concept during his military service, during which he rose to the rank of lieutenant general. He became a national hero in Britain after he led the successful 217-day resistance in the siege of Mafeking during the Boer War.