Troop 54 returned to the Arcadia Management Area, hiking the Tippecansett Trail for our first time since 2010. We hiked to and camped in Camp Yawgoog in Rockville, Rhode Island. We camped in Smuggler's Cliffs, a Leave No Trace site which had a fire pits and two picnic tables, relative luxury for this type of trip.
We had four Scouts and three adult leaders participating.
We hiked 6.4 miles on Saturday and 6.3 miles on Sunday. See our actual trail as recorded by Keith MacNeal:
My Maps -
map uploaded into Google My Maps
GPX file
Once our site was set up, some us took a day hike into the main camp on the White Trail, about a mile each way. The various facilities were not open, but the hike gave an overview of how extensive this camp is.
Once Scout set up a camp fire and took advantage of the mild weather and plentiful, dry wood to get a nice fire going. All of the cooking was done on the five lightweight stoves we had brought. It was nice to have a comprehensive representation of the MSR product line, but this probably defeated the “light weight” aspect a bit.
The nearest water was a small stream feeding Yawgoog Pond, about five minutes minutes from the site. We got by with two fill-ups of a 5 gallon container. After sanitizing, it was the color of weak tea, but it tasted fine and no one died.
On the way back, we deviated from the trail we had taken in 2010. After some scouting, map reading and discussion, we decided to take a segment of trail that was not in recent use, which worked out when we finally found ourselves back at the Tippecansett.
This was our one hundred twenty-third consecutive month with at least one overnight camping trip.
Page updated 3/31/19
J. Froimson
