To Indian Grinding Rock State Park

From the flag football team skills competition, Jack and I hurried home and packed for an overnight trip with his cub scout den to Indian Grinding Rock State Park. We caravaned with one other car. The park is a little more than an hour from Elk Grove, near Pine Grove on Highway 88. The group included six boys from the den, one younger brother and four adults.

After getting the camp set-up, we wandered through the park. The park includes a reconstructed Indian village, a large ceremonial round house, an Indian game field, the bedrock mortar, petroglyphs and the Chaw'se Regional Indian Museum. The center piece for the park is an outcropping of marbleized limestone with some 1,185 mortar holes -- the largest collection of bedrock mortars in North America.

Before dinner, we worked on a number of objectives for their Webelos Outdoorsman and Citizen badges, including whipping and fusing rope, half hitches and taut-lines hitches. We went back to the Indian game field for a couple of rounds of tug-of-war and some touch football.

The group dinner included hotdogs, sausages, beans, corn on the cob and rice. After dinner, everyone sat around the fire and the boys told some stories made s'mores. Two of the adults eventually took the boys out snipe hunting.

All seven of boys ended up sleeping in one big tent. We finally got them quieted and asleep about 10 p.m.