With Halloween rapidly approaching, now's the time to plan for a spooky-themed party! From setting up a craft table to a snack crafting station, these five Halloween-themed camping ideas give you the option to assign roles to attendees and divvy up the work to make things super easy. Perfect for your unit or family, you can incorporate these five ideas into a spooktacular overnight camping trip or pick a few of your favorite ones and head to a park to do them during a scheduled meeting. 

1. Have a Decorating Contest
2. Cook a Halloween-Themed Dinner
3. Set Up Fun Activity Stations
4. Put Up a Craft Table
5. Organize a Snack Crafting Station

For this Halloween-themed party idea, pick a local campground, reserve a few tent sites next to each other, and remember to set up your campground with extra care! You can bring decorations like cobwebs and fun lights. There are plenty of battery-operated string lights, or you can head to a campground with power and put up more elaborate displays if you'd like. If your pack or troop loves a good competition, each tent site can set up its own display. The winner(s) get to opt out of dinner clean-up duty! Just be sure to pack out all the decor when you leave because #leavenotrace.

These will cook faster if you make a few “individual" mummies. Please, try to keep the bacon layers to single layers! I learned the hard way that the bacon wraps will peel if they are multiple layers (haha). Put them side-by-side in your Dutch oven, then layer the lid with coals and set it on top of a bed of coals. You could also do fun veggie snacks by putting out raw vegetables and adding a couple of drops of red food coloring to ranch dressing - voila, now you can dip your veggies in “blood." 

These stations will give everyone something to do and spread out the activities so that everyone has a chance to be doing something. You can have a mini corn hole station, table tennis, a quick scavenger hunt, and pumpkin painting; the options are endless.

• Bobbing for apples is a fun game no matter what your age, and if you have a younger group (we see you, Tiger Scouts, and siblings!), have a regular spoon or ladle on hand to help them out. The regular spoon is still challenging because of the balance needed to lift the apple. The ladle is great for little siblings that are just beginning to learn hand-eye coordination! And yes, this can TOTALLY be adapted to be safe - grab some individual buckets so that each person can have their own, and use one per person!
• Set up giant Jenga. So much fun every time!
• Create a nerf gun target shooting game! As one of the crafts (see next bullet point!), have the kids make a target to put up, and then see who can hit the most! Be sure to check out the Shooting Sports Manual for training and resources as well.

Let everyone get involved in making a take-home goodie! Nothing is better than making a good, old-fashioned ghost to hang from a doorway or make a bucket of spider slime. Also, have paper plates and construction paper set out for kids to make their targets for the Nerf Gun station.

• Use small white trash bags and ribbons to make the ghosts more durable for outdoor use—any filling works, including blown-up white balloons. Don’t forget the fishing line to hang all of your creations around the site! Again, be sure to pack out all decor thoroughly!

Not only will you curtail the number of times you hear, “I’m hungry,” but you also get to give everyone a chance to make something else (yay, crafts!). Caramel apples (using the apples from the Bobbing for apple station) are always a hit, or try making some Apple Teeth (again, how handy that there was a Bobbing for apple station).

• For the caramel apples, it is suggested to refrigerate the apples to help firm up the caramel. We put all of ours on a small baking sheet and then put the whole baking sheet in a cooler that we had on standby for this purpose, so it had a flat space on top of a bag of ice.
• Another note for the caramel apples, it is so hard for little ones to bite off pieces! I cut mine up into smaller chunks and then proceeded with the recipe.
  When you are cutting the apple pieces for these Apple Teeth, try to make your apple slices more flat than wedge-shaped. 

Whether it's a Dutch oven to make Meatloaf Mummies or a mini corn hole set to keep the fun going at camp, Scout Shop has everything you need to make the most of all your outdoor adventures. Find camping equipment, hiking gear, Scout uniforms, and much more at ScoutShop.org—the official online retail store of the Scouting America!