On this page you will find the official requirements for the merit badge and advice from a camping merit badge counselor. The requirements include the changes from 2024 and 2025 to requirement 9, which are shown in red highlights. Also, since your counselor might not be on a camping trip when you do a requirement, here is an insert to your Scout Handbook that records your accomplishments.
Many of the requirements involve making written plans before a camping trip. To help in this regard, the "Patrol Leader's Campout Planning Booklet (Oct. 2025)" contains a basic planning worksheet, a leave no trace form, a duty roster form, and sufficient menu planning forms to complete the merit badge requirements.
1. Do the following:
(a) Explain to your counselor the most likely hazards you may encounter while participating in camping activities and what you should do to anticipate, help prevent, mitigate, and respond to these hazards.
(b) Discuss with your counselor why it is important to be aware of weather conditions before and during your camping activities. Tell how you can prepare should the weather turn bad during your campouts.
(c) Show that you know first aid for and how to prevent injuries or illnesses that could occur while camping, including hypothermia, frostbite, heat reactions, dehydration, altitude sickness, insect stings, tick bites, snakebite, blisters, and hyperventilation.
Counselor’s Advice:
(a) For (a), draw on your experience and imagination. What have you seen go wrong? What can you imagine might go wrong? Notice that there are four points to discuss for each hazard you identify: anticipate, prevent, mitigate, and respond.
(b) How do you become aware of weather conditions? And how should you prepare? Hint: Think of a range of preparations, from prevention to … what?
(c) Do not assume that passing First Aid Merit Badge or rank requirements means that you meet the Camping Merit Badge Requirement 1.(c). Why? The BSA Guide to Advancement states that a counselor “should be satisfied the Scout remembers what was learned from the previous experience.” Guide to Advancement, at 25, § 4.2.3.6.
2. Learn the Leave No Trace Seven Principles and the Outdoor Code, and explain what they mean. Write a personal and group plan for implementing these principles on your next outing.
Counselor’s Advice:
Does your Scout Handbook contain the LNT principles and the Outdoor Code?
Here is a LNT planning form. It is also in the Troop 128 Patrol Leader’s Campout Planning Booklet (Oct. 2025).
3. Make a written plan for an overnight trek and show how to get to your camping spot by using a topographical map and one of the following:
(a) A compass
(b) A GPS receiver
(c) A smartphone with a GPS app.
Counselor’s Advice:
The BSA provides a form you can use for this plan. Click here. It is also in the Troop 128 Patrol Leader’s Campout Planning Booklet (Oct. 2025). Importantly, you might need to add extra pages to fully describe your specific plan.
Notice that this requirement says “trek.” This is requirement, therefore, will not be satisfied using car camping. Bike camping, backpacking, or canoe/raft camping will work.
The best way to “show” how to get to the campsite is to actually do it. Volunteer to be the navigator on a real trek, and have a Scoutmaster or Assistant Scoutmaster sign a note if your counselor is not on the trek.
4. Do the following:
(a) Make a duty roster showing how your patrol is organized for an actual overnight campout. List assignments for each member.
(b) Help a Scout patrol or a Webelos Scout unit in your area prepare for an actual campout, including creating the duty roster, menu planning, equipment needs, general planning, and setting up camp.
Counselor’s Advice:
(a) Duty rosters can vary depending on level of detail and nature of the trip. You need to imagine your trip and anticipate the duties that can be distributed fairly among patrol members. Consider whether you should you make a general duty roster for the trip, or a duty roster for each meal. See a simple example of a duty roster. A similar roster form is in the Troop 128 Patrol Leader’s Campout Planning Booklet (Oct. 2025).
(b) A good patrol leader should do all these tasks for every patrol campout. Again, a helpful tool is Troop 128 Patrol Leader’s Campout Planning Booklet (Oct. 2025).
5. Do the following:
(a) Prepare a list of clothing you would need for overnight campouts in both warm and cold weather. Explain the term "layering."
(b) Discuss footwear for different kinds of weather and how the right footwear is important for protecting your feet.
(c) Explain the proper care and storage of camping equipment (clothing, footwear, bedding).
(d) List the outdoor essentials necessary for any campout, and explain why each item is needed.
(e) Present yourself to your Scoutmaster with your pack for inspection. Be correctly clothed and equipped for an overnight campout.
Counselor’s Advice:
(a) and (d): You can consult various lists, but these require you to make your own lists of clothing and essential items. You can submit a list that combines your clothing (req. 5(a)), your outdoor essentials (req. 5(c)), and personnel and patrol gear (req. 7(a)). Useful lists are found in:
Your Scout Handbook
Troop 128's patrol box inventory form
(e) This is essentially the same as Tenderfoot Req. 1a., if it was signed-off by a Scoutmaster.
6. Do the following:
(a) Describe the features of four types of tents, when and where they could be used, and how to care for tents. Working with another Scout, pitch a tent.
(b) Discuss the importance of camp sanitation and tell why water treatment is essential. Then demonstrate two ways to treat water.
(c) Describe the factors to be considered in deciding where to pitch your tent.
(d) Tell the difference between internal- and external-frame packs. Discuss the advantages and disadvantages of each.
(e) Discuss the types of sleeping bags and what kind would be suitable for different conditions. Explain the proper care of your sleeping bag and how to keep it dry. Make a comfortable ground bed.
Counselor’s Advice:
The Camping Merit Badge pamphlet discusses all of these.
7. Prepare for an overnight campout with your patrol by doing the following:
(a) Make a checklist of personal and patrol gear that will be needed.
(b) Pack your own gear and your share of the patrol equipment and food for proper carrying. Show that your pack is right for quickly getting what is needed first, and that it has been assembled properly for comfort, weight, balance, size, and neatness.
Counselor’s Advice:
(a) You can submit a list that combines your clothing (req. 5(a)), your outdoor essentials (req. 5(c)), and personnel and patrol gear (req. 7(a).
(b) This is like Tenderfoot Requirement 1(a), but with more details and higher expectations. They are not the same.
8. Do the following:
(a) Explain the safety procedures for:
Using a propane or butane/propane stove
Using a liquid fuel stove
Proper storage of extra fuel.
(b) Discuss the advantages and disadvantages of different types of lightweight cooking stoves.
(c) Prepare a camp menu. Explain how the menu would differ from a menu for a backpacking or float trip. Give recipes and make a food list for your patrol. Plan two breakfasts, three lunches, and two suppers. Discuss how to protect your food against bad weather, animals, and contamination.
(d) While camping in the outdoors, cook at least one breakfast, one lunch, and one dinner for your patrol from the meals you have planned for requirement 8(c). At least one of those meals must be a trail meal requiring the use of a lightweight stove.
Counselor’s Advice:
(a), (b): The Camping Merit Badge pamphlet discusses all of these.
(c) You can use the troop menu planning form. Since two forms are needed for three days, the Troop 128 Patrol Leader’s Campout Planning Booklet (Oct. 2025) contains several forms.
(d) Notice that you must “cook” the three meals. Cooking means “to prepare for eating by applying heat.” American Heritage Dictionary, 2nd ed. Strive to learn more than how to boil water. Also:
The requirement does not say you have to cook all meals on the same campout.
One meal may be the meal you cooked for Second Class requirement 2e.
As the Cooking Merit Badge requirements explain in a note to requirement 3, no meal cooked for that merit badge may count toward Camping Merit Badge.
9. Show experience in camping by doing the following:
(a) Camp for at least 20 nights at designated Scouting activities or events. One long-term camping experience of up to six consecutive nights may be applied toward this requirement. Two nights may be counted toward the total for each additional long-term camping trip. Each night must be spent either under the sky, in a tent you have pitched yourself (if a tent is provided and already set up, you do not need to pitch your own), in a hammock that is safely strung outdoors, in a lean-to, or other three-sided shelter with an open front. Nights spent in indoor lock-in events, cabin camping, hotel stays, or other covered accommodations do not count toward the 20 nights.
(b) On any of these camping experiences, you must do TWO of the following, only with proper preparation and under qualified supervision.
(1) Hike up a mountain, gaining at least 1,000 vertical feet.
(2) Backpack, snowshoe, or cross-country ski for at least 4 miles.
(3) Take a bike trip of at least 15 miles or at least four hours.
(4) Take a nonmotorized trip on the water of at least four hours or 5 miles.
(5) Plan and carry out an overnight snow camping experience.
(6) Rappel down a rappel route of 30 feet or more.
(c) On any of these camping experiences, perform a conservation project approved by the landowner or land managing agency. This can be done alone or with others.
Counselor’s Advice:
(a) The changes to 9(a) resolve many of the questions regarding how to receive credit for multiple long term camping trips.
(b)(1) The official Goshen Scout Reservation map shows that from the Moore Trail on Lake Merriweather to Viewing Rock is 300 meters. Going to Jump Rock is 440 meters. Which satisfies the 1,000-feet requirement? Where should you go if you don’t start from the Moore Trail?
(c) A service project must involve conservation of natural resources. These are not always available, so double counting of service hours used for other advancement requirements might be allowed on a case-by-case basis. Guide to Advancement, at 24, § 4.2.3.6.
10. Discuss how the things you did to earn this badge have taught you about personal health and safety, survival, public health, conservation, and good citizenship. In your discussion, tell how Scout spirit and the Scout Oath and Scout Law apply to camping and outdoor ethics.
Counselor’s Advice:
This requirement cannot really be finished until you have completed the other nine requirements.