Philmont! Or, There and Back Again

“He’s baaaaaack…”

Hey, hello, welcome back to your regularly scheduled program.  It’s been quite a while since I had a post that wasn’t one of my short stories, huh?  Like, three months of something like that.  I have been gone a long time.  All summer, in fact, and that’s why I had all those stories instead of regular posts; because I was going to be without internet access for that entire time.  Like I mentioned way long ago, back in May.  And where was I, anyway?  Philmont, of course.

It might take me a bit to get back into the swing of things and remember how to write these blogs and also how to use the internet and how to interact with regular people, but I’ll get there eventually.  I’ve been home for a couple of weeks now, and I’m already back to classes at the U of I.  There ain’t no rest for the wicked, apparently, because life never takes a break.  So you’ll have to excuse me if these coming weeks have shorter blogs than perhaps I’m used to, and also make less sense.  But maybe that’s a good thing.  No one seems to be sure how long blogs should be, anyway.

But that’s all just me talking.  I should probably explain where and why I was gone for so long, if not for myself then for everyone else.  At the rate that I’ve been gone, I practically need to reintroduce myself to my own family, let alone strangers on the internet.  So let me get right down to it.

Hi, I’m Andy.  I went to Boy Scout camp this summer.  But it wasn’t like I was there to get the underwater basket-weaving merit badge.  No, I was there to actually work at the summer camp.  And it wasn’t just any summer camp, either.  It was the summer camp.  The camp of camps, the place of places, the ranch of ranches, Philmont Scout Ranch.

Like I think I maybe said in a previous post, everything is bigger at Philmont.  The mountains, the plains, the trees, the animals, sometimes the people, it’s wild.  But I don’t know how in-depth I went about what Philmont actually is.  And believe me, I got plenty up close and personal with the inner workings of the largest Boy Scout camp in the United States, and I think I’m qualified to talk about it.

The way it works is this; throughout the months of June, July, and August, crews of Boy Scouts, Girl Scouts, Venture Crews, Mormon youth, and random kids will come to the backwaters of New Mexico and gather at Philmont Base Camp, which during the summer is apparently the third-largest infirmary in New Mexico and one of the largest consumers of Toblerone on the planet?  Or so I’ve been told. 

Anyway, scouts, usually but not always middle-class suburban white boys between the ages of 13 and 18, will come to Philmont in crews of anywhere between 8 and 16 people.  They’re here for the express purpose of pooping in holes and carrying their lives on their backs; they are going backpacking through the Sangre de Cristo mountains of New Mexico.  There are a couple adult advisors with them, and they’re all going on a twelve-day trek from campsite to campsite all around this mountainous region, and they’re going to love it whether they want to or not because we can’t get a refund now, Kevin.

The main program at Philmont is the hiking, and crews of scouts hike from camp to camp.  And it sounds weird to say it, but there are many camps within the one big camp of Philmont.  Spread out across the 140,000+ acres of wilderness, there are some 36 campsites which have staff (like me) working at them 24/7, and there are some 30 or 40 more other campsites that don’t have any staff working at them.  These are called, respectively, staffed camps and trail camps.  Scouts hike from one of the many camps to one of the other many camps, stopping at a new one (or several) every day for their twelve day journey.

You can kind of thinking of it like rooms in a building, with each camp being a different room and Philmont being the whole building.  Each staffed camp has something special about it.  For example, the camp that I worked at, Hunting Lodge, was an old cabin built by Philmont’s benefactor, oilman Waite Phillips.  We gave tours of the rustic cabin and did not sing Big Rock Candy Mountain, but to my surprise we also taught kids how to fish in the nearby reservoir.  Other camps have old gold mines, or have old logging sites.  Some camps are dedicated to search and rescue, or rock climbing, or things like that.  Each camp is different, each has something new to offer, and each day on the trek, scouts will be at a new camp with new programs.  It’s a revolving door of adventure.

And there are different kinds of treks, too.  There’s the standard twelve-day Boy Scout trek, or a shortened seven-day trek, or a science-based trek, or the child labor trek where you pay to work for Philmont, or the bizarre frat-boy fever-dream that is the Rayado trek.  The special treks are all individual, and anyone between 13 and 21 can go, regardless of association, or lack thereof, with the Boy Scouts.  And that’s pretty cool, because maybe we’re getting to the point where association with the Boy Scouts is not a good thing.

That’s what it looks like from the campers’ perspectives, anyway.  From the perspective of the staff, the people who work there for their entire summer and get paid about three dollars an hour, it’s a serious of thousands of faces of thousands of kids as you do your absolute best to make sure they have a great, safe time while simultaneously trying not to strangle that one adviser who refuses to carry extra water or complains about the fishing poles.  Or you’re trying to cook dinner for yourself and your coworkers while someone yells something about the deer in the camp or how the latrines are full and the water tastes like shit.  Or there’s a straight-up bear in your campsite and it’s making the scouts anxious and where the hell is unit four he said he’d be here an hour ago and now there’s a kid with a broken foot and another kid who can’t stop shitting his pants and the Rayado rangers just showed up and peed in all our sinks to show dominance and I still haven’t taken the biscuits out of the oven and oh god the cabin’s on fire.

Long story short, it got pretty hectic at times.

But I wouldn’t trade it for anything else.  I had a fantastic summer, even if I had to stay in a one square mile radius for nine days straight and eat nothing but beans and green peppers every day.  Because everything else out there made up for the terrible pay, terrible hours, and terrible micromanaging that the Boy Scouts are famous for.

An average day would look like me getting up, giving several half-hour tours to crews of scouts, checking in crews of scouts to the camp and tending to first aid needs, eating breakfast, eating lunch, taking a crew down to the reservoir to fish, cooking dinner, cooking biscuits for the scouts, cleaning dishes, talking to the advisers for adviser’s coffee, then going to bed and doing it all again the next day, not necessarily in that order.  Each day was very much the same, frankly, and very busy.  But it isn’t the work that made this summer great, though it was part of it.  What made this summer unforgettable was the people I worked with and the location I worked in.

I had four coworkers, who are now my friends, and I got to know them incredibly well by the end of the summer.  When you live and work with someone for three months and get to see almost every part of their being, you’ll either grow to love them or hate them.  Thankfully, I grew to love everyone I worked with.  They’re all fantastic people, and they made working at Philmont a great time.  They got me through some hard times and made the bad times into good times.  We shared more laughs than I can count, and even cried together.  Teaching the scouts about western mammals and hiking injured kids down from the ridges was rewarding, yes, but even more rewarding was getting to know these complete strangers like family.

And then there’s the location.  God, the location, location, location.  Philmont is a beautiful place, unlike any other work environment in the world.  You’ve got mountains, you’ve got plains, you’ve got rivers, you’ve got trees, you’ve got birds, you’ve got deer, you’ve got bears, you’ve got mountain lions, you’ve got everything.  The stars are incredible, the sky is insanely blue, and everything smells like Ponderosa Pine.  There’s a reason that one of Philmont’s nicknames is Heaven on Earth, or HOmE.  Nowhere else that I can think of combines the incredible wonders of nature so seamlessly with the incredible wonders of friendship, other people, and new experiences.  And wow does that sound cliché.

Maybe it is cliché.  No, it definitely is.  But it’s also true.  Even as a college student who, spoiler alert, goes to parties and is not quite a model Boy Scout, Philmont is a place that I could see myself being drawn back to again and again.  If I have the time, I think I could work there another summer.  I think everyone who has any inkling of desire to hike should check it out.  Philmont treks are unlike anything else you can do, in or out of scouting, and I think everyone should have the opportunity.  I hope to take my own kids there one day, assuming it doesn’t burn down again.  I love Philmont, and I like to think that Philmont loves me.

And, next week, I’ll follow my creative writing teacher’s advice and give you specific examples as to why.  I’m back, baby.