Timberline: The Gold Beads

Timberline: The Gold Beads

(Timberline part 29)

Every year for well over 30 years now Dumont Hill and his wife have made the beads for Timberline. He has had help through the years from other men and women like Fred Erickson and his wife and several others. When it was first started they made a set of beads and put all of the beads onto the leather woggle along with the T and L used to distinguish them for Timberline.  When I came into the program around 1990 (this had been going on in the Utah National Parks Council since around 1973 or so) they still made a set of beads for every participant and members of the staffs. We were getting to the point by then in the council of holding over 20 courses per summer with an average participant attendance of 48 and staff sizes of around 15. One year in course directors conference, and I believe that year was 1993, we had a serious discussion about the beads and whether or not to continue them since it was getting a rather daunting task to complete each year for the 4 people who at that time were making all of them. They were also suggesting that staff members only use one set and not be given any additional ones each year. It became a very serious discussion since the Beads and T Shirt were the two distinguishing items that marked who had been to Timberline. The beads especially were a tradition started with Woodbadge  by Baden Powell when he gave the Wood Badge beads to the very first participants at Gilwell Field in England.  So the discussion was clear on the point that we would not stop the beads. Then there became the point of how many sets should a staff member have. I had been serving, by that time, as a staff member for several years with Hobble Creek and Palmyra districts for their Varsity Basic Training. We always just added an orange bead to our training staff fobs to designate how many years we had been on staff.  So I suggested that we just add a bead to the staff beads each year below the T or L and that way the staff would be given one set the first year that they served and then just add the bead each year after that. That way we would just have a bag of beads that we could give to the scoutmaster and then in the Sunday night staff meeting prior to the course he could hand them out to each member of his staff. It would require a little longer piece of leather but would be far less expensive and time consuming. I am not sure just how much money it saved since it was determined by the group to use gold beads which are like gold in the bead industry and cost a great deal more than regular beads of any other color. (That is due to the fact that they are plated with a gold colored material and all other beads are just molded with the color in the plastic.) In the years since we started that the gold beads have also become a very quick way to identify how much tenure staff members had in Timberline. Doug Binks and Bruce Palmer are around 20  or more by now I think. We also decided at that meeting to let the staff members put the beads together during their staff preparations on the mountain. The leather woggle, beads, T and L were all put into small zip lock bags and then assembled by the staff. There was one minor problem that we had to overcome but that was pretty easy when all was decided at the end of the discussion. The beads had to be put in a certain order on the leather strap and that was very critical from what I could tell. I didn’t know until then that they had originally been placed in a certain order to signify the 12 points of the scout law.  At one point in the history of Timberline the beads were broken off of the strap if a scout didn’t complete part of the items during the course that were required. It was pretty harsh and later (before I came on board) stopped because of the negative effects. I was personally quite glad to see that it was no longer in use. I have now traveled the council for 13 years taking pictures of men and women who are receiving the Silver Beaver awards from the councill and have seen a lot of sets of TL Beads on men with anywhere from 1 to 15 gold beads. I know instantly what it has done for them and what they have done for many young men in the council. Those with more than 7 beads are usually good friend from the past when I had worked with them on Timberline.