Pack 673 is the only all-girls Cub Scout pack in Santa Cruz County! Girls, grades K-5, are welcome to join our pack and share the fun of building life-long female friendships, going on awesome adventures, and learning how to contribute to their community in a positive way.

Throughout the year we learn about nature through group hikes and camping trips, engage in STEM activities, like the Pinewood Derby, contribute to the community with beach clean-ups and collecting food for local food banks, and so much more!

The girls meet regularly with the other girls in their age groups (called Dens), and as a larger group (all age groups - called the Pack) once a month.

Our dens started off the year by working on their Bobcat adventures.  These adventures help introduce and reinforce scouting concepts, facilitate meeting new friends, and are designed to be the first adventure worked on each year.

Earning AOL rank is a great honor and it's one of the only cub scout awards that can be worn after bridging to Scouts BSA.  In our district there are usually about the same number of cubs who earn AOL and Scouts who earn Eagle.  We are so proud of how hard they worked for this honor! All of the girls who moved up from the pack also earned their Scout Rank in the troop!  Way to go girls!

*To earn AOL a cub must be active in the pack for at least 6 months

"The change was made to reflect the organization’s ongoing commitment to welcoming every youth in America to experience the benefits of Scouting.

Scouting America is the reflection of years of work to create an organization where we prepare every youth in America to lead a life of purpose and impact. Our new name is representative of the path we want Scouting to chart for the next century. Our organization welcomes all youth. Scouting is an environment where everyone should feel respected and valued.

We recently celebrated the five-year anniversary of welcoming girls into the Cub Scouts and Scouts BSA programs. (Scouts BSA was formerly known as “Boy Scouts.”) There are currently 176,234 girls and young women across all BSA programs, including more than 6,000 who have earned the rank of Eagle Scout.

In 2021, we celebrated our inaugural class of female Eagle Scouts. The incredible group of nearly 1,000 women collectively earned more than 30,000 merit badges, and they provided an estimated 130,000 hours of community service – even amid a pandemic."

https://blog.scoutingmagazine.org/2024/05/07/what-our-organizations-name-change-means-and-doesnt-mean-to-scouts-and-leaders/

The bears did a great job planning a carnival with many fun games and yummy treats.

Fun day for a hike in Wilder Ranch with the pack! Congrats to our cub scouts who earned the Monterey Bay Trekkers patch for this 3 mile loop hike with a stop to explore the cave in the Fern Grotto. Our Webelos completed the Webelos Walkabout adventure and took turns leading the group, and our Tigers earned their Tigers in the Wild. We reviewed the Outdoor Code and practiced the Leave No Trace principles on the hike. 

I'm so proud of our cubs we had 20 cubs attend this event despite the cold rainy weather and we collected 123 pounds of trash!  Thank you to Save Our Shores for hosting this event and to the anonymous benefactor who funded it!  Our cubs learned about ocean trash, ways they could prevent trash and how their efforts will benefit wildlife!

Pack leadership had a great time at the district awards dinner where we collected awards for:
#1 selling popcorn unit in the district

2 of our volunteers earned unit scouter of the year awards

Perfect roundtable attendance

 100% trained leadership.  We're particularly proud of this one because every scout deserves a trained leader.  We let the cubs go collect the ribbon, which they were very excited about.

We want to thank all our amazing district volunteers for putting on a great event and providing great food.  we'd also like the thank all the scouts who volunteered!

It was our honor to join scouts from several local units in placing flags on veteran's graves at two cemeteries in Santa Cruz.  Our scouts were even in the Sentinel!  Thank you troop 614 and 2614 for all your hard work in planning and organizing this event!
https://www.santacruzsentinel.com/2023/11/10/photos-scouts-honor-vets-on-veterans-day-in-santa-cruz/

Photo Credit: Shmuel Thaler – Santa Cruz Sentinel

Our November Pack meeting focused on different games that required focuses on one of the 5 senses.  The blind taste test was very popular!  

We had another great pack camping trip!  We made hiking safety booklets with information on how much water we should bring hiking, what to do if we get lost, the Leave No Trace and Outdoor Code, what 6 essentials to bring hiking, and how to identify some dangerous plants.  We made paracord bracelets with a whistle and compass on them.  We had a campfire with songs and funny skits and we hiked to the top of Fremont Peak with it's incredible views.  We even got to see a presentation at the observatory, sadly the weather didn't cooperate for telescope viewing.  We had our first pack campout with rain!  

Every year we are proud to help collect food for the Valley Churches United food pantry.  Last year we collected 667 pounds of food and our goal is to top that this year!  We will be back after 9:00 am on Saturday Nov 4th to pick up bags in all the neighborhoods we dropped off in.  We distributed almost 350 bags!  Thank you to the community for your support!  Thank you Trader Joe's for donating the bags and the SV Postal Annex for giving us a discount on copying the fliers!

Look for us around Scotts Valley selling popcorn the next few weekends!!!  Popcorn funds over half of our pack's budget.  Thank you for your support!

Last year we were the number one selling popcorn unit in the district!  We raised about $3,400 from popcorn!  These sales help us keep our pack dues low and keep the cost of scouting affordable for our families.  This year to kick off popcorn season we rented a movie theatre.  After a quick presentation about popcorn to get all of our cubs excited and set up for another successful year we got our own movie screening!  We're super excited to try the new S'mores flavor!

Every year our 4th and 5th grade Webelos are invited to Webelos Woods where they get to experience what it is like to camp with a scouts BSA troop.  This amazing weekend is hosted by local troops and is youth lead with adult supervision.  The cubs set up their own tents, cook their own food and build this amazing tower and then climb it!  Last year one of our cubs wasn't ready to climb to the top of the tower.  This year she set the goal for herself to make it to the top.  She was so excited to try it again.  Then a week before the trip she broke her hand. She was extremely frustrated that she was going to miss her last chance to climb to the top.  Luckily our amazing scout leaders stepped up to ensure that all scouts have an opportunity to succeed.  The adult belaying the climbers told her to tuck her injured hand against her body and not use it and as long as she wanted to keep climbing he would help her get to the top.  This is what scouting is all about giving our scouts the tools they need and empowering them to succeed.  Not only did several of our cubs climb the tower they also won the campfire cooking competition with a fantastic homemade campfire chili.  Way to go cubs!

Our Bears and Webelos (going into 3rd - 5th) can attend cub scout resident camp where they camp for 4 nights and do fun activities and games.  We climbed the rock wall, did BBs and Archery, used tools and learned knots to make a walking stick, practiced outdoor cooking, played silly games, and more

Our Webelos (4th grade) den finished off the year with a bit of silly fun  We completed the Yo-yo adventure.  There are options for completing this adventure for every age.  Cubs learn about Yo-yo safety, how to knot a Yo-yo string, and some basic tricks, and of course we have a lot of fun!

We brought our award winning leave no trace race booth again this year and had a blast teaching people about the 7 leave no trace principles in this silly obstacle course

We held our last pack meeting of the year.  Cubs brought their favorite photos from the year and we created a scoutbook for the pack to comemorate our scouting year.  Each cub made their own Srapbook page

The weather finally chased us indoors.  We cancelled our trip to see the Monarchs at Natural Bridges and went roller-skating instead.  The girls had a ton of fun.  Many of them were new to skating, so there was a lot of falling and getting back up and trying again.  They exemplified a scout is cheerful, encouraging each other, laughing, and learning together.   Our cubmaster needs to improve her skating so she can take better photos.  

For our December Den meetings our dens worked on various age appropriate adventures.  Our lions (K) learned about taking care of their bodies and eating healthy snack and exercising.  Our tigers learned about being good sports and played some fun games.  Our wolves finished up some missing pieces from several adventures.  Our bears talked about their family traditions and values wile working on their duty to god adventure.  Our webelos learned how to fold origami as part of the Art explosion adventure started during our troop visit, we want to thank the scouts form troop 673 for supporting us in this adventure and leading this Webelos den meeting.