When Evan first walked into a Trail Life meeting, he was 11 years old and looking for something different. It was late 2020. Covid had disrupted nearly everything, school had become a difficult environment, and his after-school situation offered little stability.
When you study the lives of America's founders—men like George Washington or John Paul Jones—you discover they were not born with extraordinary courage. They became courageous because they were tested.
Dawn came quietly to the Boundary Waters. Fog hovered low over the lake as Trailmen eased out of their tents and toward the shoreline. Tin mugs steamed in the cool air. Headlamps flicked on as damp maps were unfolded and routes were traced with cold fingers. Boots were wet. The gear was heavy. The…
“When I first met Titus, I think he probably would have rather poked himself in the eye with an ice pick than stand up and talk to people,” Darren, a Trail Life leader in Denton, Texas, recalls.
There are different kinds of strength. We tend to associate the word with big muscles and athletic prowess. Or maybe we think of inner strength, a kind of unshakable resilience that allows a man to weather life’s storms and accomplish something noteworthy. But whatever form it takes, masculine…
Masculinity. We can barely utter the word without adding qualifiers like: toxic, orhealthy, orbiblical, ortraditional. Alone, it is treated as a pathology: dangerous, outdated, or oppressive — something to be managed rather than modeled.
Some men walk well-worn paths. Others have to blaze the trail themselves. When Christopher first walked into his Trail Life Troop in upstate New York, there was no blueprint waiting for him. The Troop was new—still small, uncertain, and figuring things out. There were no older boys to follow, no…
