A celebration will be held this Sunday for a Berrien County student who completed his Eagle Scout project this year.
If you’ve been to Grand Mere State Park in Stevensville in the past several months, you may have noticed new wooden posts with coordinates engraved on them. Eagle Scout Grant Wilson of St. Joseph Township is behind them.
“There is a total of 10 posts that are installed at various places around the park,” Wilson said. “They each have a set of latitude and longitude coordinates that are accurate to 10 meters on them, and at the main park entrance, there is a map with instructions for the base of how to use it.”
Wilson tells us they’re orienteering posts that can be used for navigation. He says orienteering is a game popular in Europe. It helps hikers improve their navigation skills.
“You can give people, say, a compass and a map, and then a ink pad, and say, ‘Maybe go to post 6, 4, 3, and then come back. And the faster that you can get there, the better.'”
Wilson learned about orienteering from a Scout leader and began planning the posts at Grand Mere. He says it wasn’t really hard to get approval from the Michigan Department of Natural Resources to install the posts along with a map of the park and information on the location of the posts.
Each post is a pressure-treated 4×4 painted with reflective paint and topped with a copper cap. Each is secured to the ground with 100 pounds of concrete at the frostline. Wilson says he worked with family friends to make the orienteering posts and then he installed them in May. He’s had a few people tell him they’ve noticed the posts and hopes future Scouts or other orienteering enthusiasts will find ways to improve them.
Wilson is now a freshman at Grand Valley State University who plans to major in engineering. He’s back home now to have his Eagle Scout celebration Sunday in Stevensville.
