Fort A.P. Hill had been hospitable but unmistakably borrowed - an Army base lent to the Scouts for ten days every four years. The Summit was the Scouts' own land, designed from the ground up around a Jamboree program. Organizers borrowed the World Jamboree model: subcamps arranged for maximum interaction rather than state-by-state isolation. The Summit Center stadium - a natural amphitheater carved into the reclaimed strip-mine landscape - anchored the big shows. Around it stretched purpose-built zip lines, BMX tracks, skate parks, climbing walls, and a 1,000-foot-long whitewater pool. The 2013 Jamboree was, in effect, a soft launch for a venue the Scouts would still be growing into for the next decade.

Two of the original musical acts withdrew in the months before the event over the Boy Scouts of America's then-policy banning openly gay youth members. Carly Rae Jepsen, scheduled for the opening show, announced her withdrawal on Twitter in March 2013: as an artist who believed in equality for all people, she wrote, she would not be participating. Pop-rock band Train pulled out of the closing show the same week, offering to return if BSA reversed course before the event. Teenage singer Sarah Centeno and country group Taylor Made stepped in for the opener; Mike Rowe of Dirty Jobs gave the closing keynote, with 3 Doors Down playing the music. The May 2013 BSA vote to admit openly gay youth members - taken two months before the Jamboree - did not move quickly enough to bring back the original headliners. The drama at the booking table reflected something larger that Scouting was being asked to negotiate in real time.

If the cultural argument got the headlines, the engineering got the bragging rights. The 2013 Jamboree was the first to ban all single-use water bottles - participants carried refillable canteens to filling stations across the site. Greywater from sinks and showers flushed the toilets; treated wastewater drip-irrigated the surrounding forest. The Summit advertised what it called zero-gallon water waste. Lumber for the shower houses and latrines came from the Reserve's own forests, untreated by paint or preservatives. The duffel bags every contingent received were officially licensed; tents and cooking gear were issued on-site to spare a thousand councils the cost of trailering their own equipment cross-country. The carbon math, organizers argued, was the whole point of a permanent venue.

For the first time at a National Jamboree, Scouts were encouraged to bring smartphones. AT&T sponsored cell-tower and Wi-Fi coverage across the site; an Esri-powered ArcGIS app delivered personalized schedules and pathfinding. Solar chargers waited in every subcamp. Three new merit badges debuted at the Jamboree - Game Design, Programming, and Sustainability - alongside a preview of the Mining in Society badge. Technology Quest, a half-day program every Scout cycled through, brought partners including NASA, National Geographic, Lego, Microsoft, the Franklin Institute, and West Virginia University, with hands-on stations on robotics, forensics, biotech, and chemistry. The shift was less about new toys than about a tacit acknowledgment that the Scouts arriving in 2013 had grown up holding a phone.

On July 20, a 50-year-old volunteer from Beavercreek, Ohio - Gene Schulz, who had been counseling merit badges and reenacting the Lewis and Clark Expedition - collapsed of a heart attack near a subcamp and could not be revived at Plateau Medical Center in nearby Oak Hill. He was the only fatality. Gill Clay, a granddaughter of Lord Robert Baden-Powell - the British soldier who founded the Scouting movement in 1907 - visited as a guest of honor, breakfasting with American Scouts whose great-grandparents had likely joined the movement her grandfather started. By the closing campfire on July 24, the Summit had proven it could host more than 40,000 people. Six years later, it would do it again with Scouts from 152 nations.

The Summit Bechtel Reserve sits at 37.93 N, 81.15 W, on a reclaimed coal plateau just north of the New River Gorge in Fayette County, West Virginia. The nearest commercial airport is Raleigh County Memorial (KBKW) at Beckley, about 25 nautical miles southwest. From altitude the site reads as a green plateau with the silver arc of the New River Gorge Bridge to the immediate south - the bridge is the best visual anchor. The Summit hosts large events on irregular years; airspace in the immediate vicinity may carry NOTAMs and TFRs during Jamboree weeks.