Pumpkin Chuck

Right after Halloween, when every house in town has a pumpkin going soft on the front step, Pack 2 puts them to better use.

Each den designs and builds a launcher — trebuchet, catapult, slingshot, or something no one has a name for yet — and we spend a morning throwing pumpkins down a field and measuring how far they went. There is a tape measure. There is a leaderboard. It gets competitive.

The actual point

Underneath the mess, this is the pack’s engineering event. Scouts sketch a design, argue about it, build the thing out of real lumber with real tools under adult supervision, watch it fail, and fix it. The dens that do well are almost never the ones with the fanciest build — they are the ones that tested it in someone’s driveway the week before.

Tool safety instruction comes first, and no Scout uses a tool they have not been checked out on. Younger dens work on simpler builds with more adult hands.

Bring your pumpkins

Do not throw out your jack-o’-lantern. Bring it. We go through more pumpkins than you would think.