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This adventure began back in 2007
when Terry Dunn and his committee
were tasked with the responsibility of taking our destiny back
and seeing if we couldn't find a place and a home
for our new Jamboree and other things.
Terry couldn't have done better than to pick Jack Furst
to head up this project
and Jack surrounded himself with a wonderful committee called the Project Arrow team
and went on a great adventure of a site selection journey
that has led us to this stage today.
In the process, Jack selected and identified Isaac Manning,
a world-class engineer and developer,
but more importantly a passionate volunteer in Scouting in the Longhorn Council.
Together they have led the journey to where we are today
and rather than I talk about this let me introduce to you Jack Furst and Isaac Manning
who are going to tell you about this marvelous adventure, Project Arrow.
In February of 2009
we met with the group and indicated that we had,
out of the site selection, come up with two sites.
One in Virginia and one in West Virginia.
As we walk through, in August of 2009
we concluded that
we could throw the Jamboree, a summer camp, a high-adventure base and a leadership center on one property.
That property would be West Virginia, and therefore
would be highly economic and the best investment for the Boy Scouts of America
This is the site. It's a 10,600 acre site.
It's adjacent to the New River Gorge and the New River Gorge National Park
which is about 78,000 to 80,000 acres.
With our site being adjacent, we'll be able to have our kids
in and out of the park.
So this basically enables us to acquire 10,600 acres
but get the use of close to 100,000 acres.
We believe that when this site is fully developed
given its location, 10 hours away from 70% of our constituency,
that this will become a high-utilization site.
It's our hope and dream that we'll serve 50,000 to 100,000 kids a summer.
When you go up to the top of Garden Ground Mountain,
which is the ridge that runs for basically a mile up here,
and you begin to look at the topo maps and begin to start digging into this site
where the flat land is, is where everything has been strip-mined.
The tops of the mountains have been removed, the coal has been extracted
and what's been left is this fabulous structure of flat, highland trails
and ridge tops where the coal has been extracted.
So what the miners have done over the last 100 years
is basically do all of the rough grading work for us to make this site feasible
So everything that we're putting on this site,
all of our road alignments, all of our road beds,
are going on old, abandoned strip-mine benches.
The structure of the site, and the re-utilization of what's been left through 100 years of industrial development
is where we're putting things and it's working out tremendously well for us.
Our site is just outside of Mount Hope.
One of the things that is really interesting about this is we looked for sites that had great freeway access.
I-64 that runs from Richmond west ties into I-77 here.
I-77 takes you on out to Charleston, WV.
From there you either go north to Pittsburgh or west to Cincinnati
and on to Lexington, Ky.
I-77 South gets you to Charlotte, Atlanta, and down to I-40 and I-81.
Our connectedness here from major airports is critical.
We're three hours away from Charlotte, three hours away from Pittsburgh.
three hours away from Cincinnati all coming into this site.
One of the things that attracted us to this site -
we were looking for land areas where we could leverage up.
So our 10,600 acres becomes 90,000 plus acres
because of the relationship with the Park Service.
The Park Service has been phenomenal to work with
and is one of the reasons we're here in West Virginia.
One of the things we were looking for when we were going through the site selection process,
was a site that would give us things that we don't have in the system right now.
In the New River Gorge National River they have Class III, IV, and V whitewater.
They have some of the world's greatest technical climbing
on the Endless Wall that climbers from all over the world come to climb.
Working through the Park Service we're currently working on a program
where we can start doing, on their through the park trail,
have a 100 mile loop from our site going into the park
that takes you from Hawk's Nest all the way down to Hinton.
So the availability on this site to do anything you can imagine outdoors
from caving, climbing, whitewater rafting, mountain biking and just regular hiking and backpacking.
This site affords us the luxury of having 100,000 acres at our disposal
to be able to provide programs on the East Coast
similar to what we do in our three other National High Adventure Bases.
From the view in the valley what we're now going to do is take a cross section
through the Leadership Center across the lake to the arena.
From the ridge where the Leadership Center and Administrative Headquarters is
going down into the subcamp,
we're basically getting into the lower bowl into the flatter part of the site.
We're coming across the lake and our passages will be across a series of signature bridges
and across dams.
Getting into the permanent arena area which will seat about 6,000 to 8,000 people,
and the lower bowl for the total arena for about 80,000 folks.
Our action areas, Merit Badge Midway and all of our traditional core areas
will be all focused around the lake.
In our Phase 1 Jamboree,
our longest walking distance is 1.35 miles,
a little over a mile and a quarter.
What we wanted to do was to get everyone on a similar elevation
so that we don't have more than a couple hundred feet of vertical
between the campsites to the core.
But because of the mining activities that occurred,
we're basically able to follow the topo and
use bridges and dams to get to the core,
so that Scouts can spend more time doing and less time walking.
We have a great piece of land
and now it is time to put program on top of that land.
The model we want to use for this project is a corporate, for-profit model.
This is a capital investment that will serve us well for the next 100 years.
It is going to pay huge dividends.
We're going to be able to serve kids on this property for the next 100 years.
They're going to come here once every four years for the Jamboree,
they're going to come here every year for a summer camp,
they're going to come here every year for a high adventure experience,
we're going to have a leadership center for excellence.
We can put the museum here and there is a myriad of other programs
that we can throw on this property.
We're only limited by our creativity and our own ingenuity.
The key to this project is, from an operating perspective,
once the capital investment has been made is that it will sustain itself
economically in perpetuity.
We're on the eve of our 100th anniversary.
It is time for this generation of Scouts
to invest in our future.
The West Virginia property enables us to obtain a property
located where the heart of our customer, our constituents live.
This is an opportunity for the great outdoors to come to life
with program that complimentary to existing program that we throw all across the country.
We're going to be able to serve more kids on this site than any other property we have in the system.
This site's utilization will be off the charts
with the Jamboree, a summer camp, high adventure, and a leadership center.
and much, much more.
This is timed to act
Join the journey, it's going to be great.