Editorial: Scouts need to put future first as camp choice made

Few experiences evoke more memories of summers past than camp.

The Inland Northwest has dozens of these retreats, enjoyed by thousands of kids who might never learn to swim, canoe or shoot an arrow except for that interlude away from the city and – oh, boy – parents.

For generations of Boy Scouts, that haven has been Camp Easton. More than 1,500, some from outside the region, swarm its 383 acres and splash on its broad, sloping waterfront each year, returning home with many of the same tales to tell their parents that their parents told their parents.

Now, a potential sale of the property might break that chain.

Discovery Land Co. has offered to purchase 270 acres on the west side of Lake Coeur d’Alene, and swap the land for Camp Easton’s site on the east shore. Discovery would build a new camp facility, and provide an endowment for its upkeep as part of the bargain or, as some would characterize it, deal with the devil.

Terms have not been disclosed.

Discovery owns Gozzer Ranch, one of the gated communities for the mostly out-of-the-area rich that irk those who remember a more egalitarian lakefront. Buying the camp would give Gozzer residents access to a highly desirable deep, sandy beach near the golf community. One of the big knocks against the alternative location is its long but narrow, rocky beach, wedged into the foot of a steep slope.

But that’s just one of the trade-offs being weighed by the Inland Northwest Council of Boy Scouts, of which the publisher of The Spokesman-Review is a board member.

Camp Easton is showing its age. Signs of wear are part of a camp’s charm, enhanced each summer by Scouts who put pocketknife to wood the way politicians put words to truth.

But there’s nothing charming about outdated water and septic systems. The camp needs more than $2 million in infrastructure improvements, including a tunnel that would allow campers to walk under a highway increasingly busy with traffic generated by new developments like Gozzer. Over the next decade, the total cost of replacing aging buildings could raise expenditures to as high as $6 million.

Raising money to pay for improvements has been slow going in this economic environment.

Past donors are among the many stakeholders for whom selling Camp Easton would be breaking a covenant. Add neighbors who have pitched in to help maintain the camp, officials who have worked with the council on needed changes and, most of all, Scouts past for whom the camp experience is bound up with long-ago sunsets mirrored in the broad lake.

Among them are a few who see in the potential sale a confirmation that the Spokane-based council has been up to no good since it and councils based in Coeur d’Alene and Lewiston were consolidated into one organization.

Weighing complex transaction details, a sandy beach and tradition against the chance for new, expanded facilities in a new setting is a daunting task. Ultimately, it’s the Scouts of the future who should come first.

Now, it’s up to the council’s Scouts, board members and staff to join hands and agree on how best to serve them.