MY TEN-YEAR-OLD SON, Austin, likes to hike, camp, and climb. He toddled across the Alaskan tundra at age two, hiked to the bottom of the Grand Canyon at four, and floated the Green River at six. In other words, he's a perfect candidate for the Boy Scouts of America. In some corners of the country it would be considered unpatriotic not to sign him up. But here's the truth: I'd rather see Austin pierce his tongue than earn a merit badge.

My distrust of the Scouts reached a tipping point in March, when 12-year-old Michael Auberry, from Greensboro, North Carolina's Troop 230, disappeared while on a camping trip in the Blue Ridge Parkway. Fortunately, after a four-day search, Auberry was found alive and well. He'd wandered away from camp, it was later reported, and gotten lost.

I was relieved, of course, that Auberry emerged unhurt. But then I got angry. What irked me wasn't the incident itself but the way Scout leaders reacted. I had followed the Auberry story on the Associated Press news wire, reading regional and national coverage of the search. Instead of apologies—a kid had been lost, after all—what I saw was a round of collective back-patting by Scout leaders across the country who proudly recounted how the wayward boy had used his Scout-taught survival skills. "Preparing kids—that's our motto. That's what we do," Ely Brewer, of the Mid-Iowa Council of Boy Scouts, told Des Moines TV station KCCI. Fine. Auberry knew how to make a bed out of leaves. But here's a thought: How about making sure he doesn't wander off in the first place?

Auberry's epic actually had a much brighter ending than at least a dozen incidents over the past decade in which Scouts have died or nearly died. Most infamously, in 2005, two Scouts and five leaders were killed in two separate lightning incidents and one power-line mishap. In unrelated BSA accidents that same summer, Chase Hathenbruck, 15, drowned in New Mexico's Animas River, and Luke Sanburg, 13, drowned in the Yellowstone. The year before, Kristoffer Jones, 14, died when he fell 1,000 feet from a sheer cliff while hiking in Utah's Zion National Park. But even these tragedies wouldn't be so tragic if not for the hubris that still managed to pervade the Boy Scout leadership. In March 2006, nine Scouts and three leaders were backpacking in Arizona's Superstition Mountains when they became stranded by a snowstorm. Unprepared for the conditions, they had to be rescued by helicopter. "The boys proved themselves to be men," leader David Perkins told Phoenix TV stations. Or the leaders proved themselves to be inexperienced: A severe winter storm had been forecast days before. I live in Flagstaff, Arizona, and had planned a trek in the Superstitions that same weekend, but I postponed it after a routine weather check. The typical response from Scout leaders to all of the above? Freak accidents.

Tell that to the parents who've sued the Scouts in recent years. One case concerns Matthew Tresca, 16, who was killed in August 2002 by lightning at a Pennsylvania Scout camp. Even though a severe thunderstorm warning was in effect for the area and lightning was visible in the sky, Tresca and other boys were sent by Scout leaders from the safety of the dining hall to their tents, where Tresca died after a bolt struck a metal tent spike. In 2004, in testimony for a lawsuit brought by Tresca's parents against the BSA in New Jersey Superior Court, meteorologist Ronald Holle, a lightning expert formerly with the National Severe Storms Laboratory in Norman, Oklahoma, concluded, "The national and local levels of the Boy Scouts of America failed completely to take into account any recent or current information on the impacts of lightning. The management of the risk of lightning was extraordinarily poor and at an extremely low level of understanding compared to similar organizations. … If planning had been emphasized at the national level, and local individuals had used this information correctly, the completely preventable death of Matthew Tresca would have been avoided." The BSA reached an undisclosed settlement with the Trescas, part of which prohibited the family from talking to the media.