How to get an OSHA Violation While Camping

Every year in Boy Scouts, I would go camping for the local Boy Scout jamboree.

All the regional scout troops would assemble. Despite having moved to Greene County, I remained part of the troop in Albemarle.

A lot of the kids in that troop had wealthy families, some were even the children of celebrities who had homes just outside of Charlottesville.

This meant that every year for the jamboree, our troop got campsite Baker at the Shenandoah National Park Boy Scout camp. Camp Able was reserved for the camp counselors and adults. It had electricity and permanent cabins.

Baker didn’t have electricity, but like Able, it had permanent cabins. We didn’t have to bring or set up tents, which lightened what we needed to pack. We just needed our bedrolls to lay out on the provided cots.

Some of the other campsites had semi-permanent tents set up on pallets. Others just had cleared ground to set up tents. Campsites Charlie onward were progressively deeper in the woods, farther from the activities and the mess hall—and they got progressively shittier too.

It was a lottery system that decided placement for most troops. But for our troop? Campsite Baker was always ours.

The last year I went, a bunch of us decided to build a crazy tree fort.

One kid’s father worked in the maritime industry, and we got access to several thousand feet of 3-inch rope.

That’s the stuff they use to tie up aircraft carriers and cruise ships—we were told. Who knows?

What we did know was that we had a shit-ton of rope, a month of camp, and a slew of knot-tying merit badges.

The plan got started quickly. We performed night raids on other campsites, stealing pallets from under tents in the dead of night.

The center of our campsite had four amazingly tall trees with a fire pit in the empty space between them. Our cabins circled the outside of the grove, and thick woods surrounded us—except for the path that led to the main trail.

The climbers took lead lines up, and we used pulleys to hoist ends of the massive ropes over branches.

A rope ladder was made on the ground, then hoisted into position. We wove a large net between the four trees—it gave us a safe place to rest up there, maybe 100 feet in the air.

Over the next few nights, we hoisted up several of the pallets. We threaded the rope through them and strung three pallets between each segment of the trees. This gave us a perimeter of twelve pallets, with four lengths of the 3-inch rope running between each pallet segment. All of it sat directly above the net.

One kid ran a series of extension cords through the trees. Camp Able wasn’t far, and we tapped into their power for box fans and a TV we stole and hoisted up.

The final touch before we moved camp vertically was a rope fence around the perimeter. It started just below the net and used a slightly wider weave than the net itself. We extended it ten feet above the pallets, which were themselves about three feet above the netting.

None of the adults, counselors, or authority figures noticed our construction until we were done. They simply never looked up. We kept the rope ladder rolled up during the day using a piece of twine and a pulley. The brown twine blended into the tree bark.

By that point, other campsites had started filing complaints about missing pallets. We were questioned but didn’t fess up. Camp counselors looked around our site and the nearby woods.

Then came the night we moved out of our cabins—into the air.

One last night raid. In the dead of night, we stole the tents off the campers at Campsite Charlie.

The ground team cut the tie-downs and secured pre-made hoist lines. The air team pulled them straight up into the darkness.

It didn’t take long for the first campers in Charlie to notice they were exposed and sound the alarm. Too late. Our team collapsed the canvas and aluminum structures in mid-air and used the zip lines we’d strung to return to Baker.

All except one. One tent we sent via zip line to Campsite Foxtrot, where we dropped a few of the poles and the canvas into the woods around them.

The tents got set up in our aerial encampment. The counselors still didn’t catch on. Camp Foxtrot was initially blamed and put on latrine duty. Our misdirection worked.

We were only discovered when one of our troopmates dropped crumbs from a snack onto the head of a passing counselor.

A few of us were on the ground when it happened. As that counselor looked up, we dashed—heading to the spots where we had ropes and ladders installed, pulling them up behind us as we ascended into our sky fortress.

The counselors and adults gathered at our campsite. One adult grabbed a megaphone and demanded we return to the ground.

Of course we refused. We stayed up there for several days. Night raids and our network of zip lines let us steal food from the mess hall and commissary.

Finally, the camp called OSHA. They sent an inspector who declared the structure unsafe. The fire department brought a ladder truck and evicted us.

No merit badges were earned by our troop that year as punishment, but damn we sure had a great time.