Philmont 2: Electric Boogaloo

“That joke never gets old”

Our Story So Far… is basically that I recently got back from working at the coolest Boy Scout camp in the United States, maybe the world.  I worked there for the entire summer as both a historian/giver of tours and a certified angling instructor, and hopefully helped thousands of kids to have a life-changing experience at one of my favorite places on Earth.  Now let me tell you why it’s one of my favorite places on Earth.

Besides working there over the summer from late May to mid-August, I’d been to Philmont twice before as a Boy Scout, as one of the many bright-eyed, flabby-armed kids that hike through the backcountry camps of Philmont.  So, in total, I’ve been to Philmont three times.  And this seems like a lot to normal people, but to true Philmont diehards, this is nothing.  I knew people who had worked there for five entire summers, let alone just being there five times.  I knew people who had been there for like two or three years straight.  I met a few people on their 8^th working summer or more, and I met someone who had been on over two dozen treks.  And then there’s the famous Unit 41, who’s been working at Philmont for 35 freaking years.  I haven’t even been alive that long.

But three times at Philmont is more than enough to make lifelong memories and learn the camp like the back of my hand.  I went as a Boy Scout in 2013, again as a scout in 2016, and finally worked there as staff this summer, in 2019.  Much like cicadas, I keep coming back every few years.  If I’m consistent, the next time I’ll be back there is in 2022.  I’ll keep you all posted.

I was a very different person living in a very different world back in 2013, on my first trek.  I had just finished junior high school.  I hadn’t yet had the bittersweet taste of heartbreak or the sickening lump-caught-in-my-throat of depression and anxiety.  But I was still pretty goofy, pretty smart (if I may say so myself), and pretty awkward.  For the most part, none of that’s changed. 

In some regards, that first trek is a bit of a turning point in my development; I was the youngest person in our crew of people by at least two years, and I still managed to finish it all without getting taken off the trail.  Going to Philmont at that age gave me a confidence boost, I think.  It showed me that I could overcome challenges, both physical and mental, if I prepared and put my mind to it.  And if I got a little help from my friends and family, of course.  My mom was with me on the trek, which definitely made a world of difference for the better.

But I’m not really here to wax poetic about the character building that can be done at Philmont, because there’s plenty of that out there already.  I want to talk about the fun, funny, and memorable experiences that I acquired at Philmont, the things that I still think about to this day.  And for that first trek, the one that comes most readily to mind is when I fell off a cliff.

That’s a bit of a dramatic overstatement, as I didn’t really fall off a cliff.  We were rock climbing at Dean Cow camp (rest in melted pieces), and after you got to the top of the wall, you had to rappel back down.   I’d rappelled before, but didn’t really know that much about it, so when I started to walk my way back down the wall, I came a ledge that dropped about two feet or so before returning to flat rock.  I thought that maybe if I lowered myself far enough I would be able to get a better vantage point to put my feet down.  It didn’t work like that.

I lowered myself too far and my center of gravity must have slipped below my feet, because before I knew what was happening, I was hanging upside down against a rock wall by my harness.  And I flipped my shit, internally.  I was terrified that I was going to fall on my head and die.  Externally, apparently all I did was say “Oh boy” over and over again, like a broken record.  Of course, I was never in any real danger; I was tied into about three backup safety ropes, so the worst that could have happened was that I would bang my head against the rocks a little.  And I did that, but I had a helmet on so I was fine.

I ended up having to right myself and rappel the rest of the way back down, instead of just being lowered manually, which I guess is a good example of strength in adversity or something like that.  But I’m still kind of terrified of rappelling to this day.  My legs get all wobbly when I think about having to back down more rocks.  I don’t mind the going up, it’s just the coming down that bothers me.  I’ve actually ended up skipping rock climbing on several occasions for that express reason, that I physically lock up at the thought of rappelling.  But I’ll get over that, one of these days.  It’s mostly an irrational fear, I think.

That was all in my first trek, and there were a few other incidents in that trek that were interesting.  I had an allergy attack while hiking one of our hardest days, and then had to stop every twenty feet to catch my breath.  I kept a journal in my pocket the whole time, and the other scouts joked (good-naturedly) that my journal was actually a hit list where I was listing all the reasons that I was going to execute each of them in the middle of the night.  It was pretty funny at the time, but when I put it that way, it sounds kind of sinister.  But I was the kind of kid who didn’t even like to kill spiders, so it was all good fun.  I hope.

There was the night that one of the advisers in our sister crew thought he heard mountain lions, so he made his entire crew form a protective barrier around the poor guy washing dishes since they had got into camp really late and it was already night.  So you’ve got this big circle of scouts holding trekking poles like a Roman phalanx, peering into the darkness to see if there are any eyes staring back at the them, and this other random kid crouched in the middle trying to scrub the schmutz out of metal pans by firelight, all orchestrated by a grown man who kind of looked like Ron Swanson.  That’s… pretty common behavior for some advisers, actually.  And also comedy gold. Please don’t hate me.

And of course there were the views.  We got to climb Baldy, the highest peak on Philmont property, and the views were gorgeous from up there.  We also got to go into the Valle Vidal, which is still one of my favorite places on the ranch.  I got to see a T-rex track and native American petroglyphs.  We got to take a mine tour, climb trees, and hear staff cover what became my favorite folk song.  It was, overall, a pretty great trip.

My second trip was just as great, though I didn’t quite feel that at the time.  We went in 2016, the summer before my senior year in high school.  And if you’ve read my other blogs before, you’ll know what’s coming that September.  Hint: it’s the hospital.  That summer was perhaps one of the times when I was deepest in depression, anxiety, and stress, so I wasn’t exactly in the best mental state to be thrown into the New Mexican wilderness for two weeks.  But it was still an amazing trip.

I was the leader of my crew, which was nice.  There ended up being some crew dynamic issues, though, and a few problems regarding the weight of the packs, but it worked out for the best because it allowed my crew to hike with our sister crew.  So instead of being a team of eight we were a team of sixteen, and it was way more fun that way.  It helped that we all pretty much already knew each other anyway.

I got to hike with both my parents, my brother, some of my cousins, and a few of my closest friends on that trip, so I consider myself lucky that we got to combine our crews.  I consider myself lucky that I got to go at all, of course, but everything ended up working out for the best possible outcome, I believe.  More or less.

We did a lot that trip.  We climbed Baldy and the Tooth of Time, another scenic mountain at Philmont.  We got to take another mine tour and climb trees by taping knives to our feet.  We heard scary ghost stories, did team-building exercises, and shot rifles.  We got to play on what equated to a massive playground for big kids, where we were roped into harnesses and traversed across logs and rope walls fifty feet up in the air.  We even visited Hunting Lodge, the camp that I’d later work at.  Though, of course, I didn’t know it at the time.

One of the things I remember most clearly was getting to sit around the campfires with my friends.  These weren’t the program campfires put on by the staff, but rather just small, private campfires we made in our own campsites.  The parents would go off to adviser’s coffee or something like that, and us scouts would sit around the fire and talk for hours about nothing in particular.  It was an absolute blast, and also a fantastic bonding experience, just as powerful as any team-building program we did.

And there was that one day, coming down from Urraca, that we all decided to sing.  So, a few times on the trip we had tried to play music from a portable speaker to help get us through some especially challenging hikes.  So we’d dance as we hiked, and sing along to “I Will Survive,” “Thunderstruck,” songs like that.  One of the advisers didn’t like this, though, so after a while he put the kibosh on the whole thing.  We resented him for that, without a doubt.  But that had no bearing on the fact that we decided to sing our own songs after a while.

It was our second-to-last day, I think, and we were hiking down a hot, dusty road to our last camp.  We were all tired, since we had gotten up before dawn so we could take a sunrise hike, and we were exhausted from hiking for ten days.  We couldn’t play any music, none of us were in much of a mood to talk, and we were generally at the end of our rope.  So my brother started to sing to lighten the mood.  But it wasn’t just any song.  It was “The Star-Spangled Banner.”  But it wasn’t just in any key.  It was in the key of Waluigi.

Earlier that day, I had mentioned how my favorite Mario character was and always would be Waluigi, and my cousins got me to do an impression of the famous WAH.  I think I did a pretty good job, if I’m being honest.  But it became a running joke after that, where we’d just kind of WAH at each other from time to time.  And then my brother started to sing the national anthem, but every note was WAH.  And, without planning or being told what to do, every single one of us joined in.

I wonder what it would have been like, to see us from the outside.  To hear this chorus of high schoolers screaming WAH to the heavens, except it was all arranged into an actual song.  And to see all of them spontaneously join in, without even thinking about it.  It was a magical moment, and perhaps my favorite memory from that trip.  It was also one of the most disgusting sounds I’ve ever heard in my entire life, but that’s beside the point.

Interestingly enough, I retold this story to a couple crews of scouts over the summer.  At Hunting Lodge bonfire, we’d sometimes have the scouts relate their favorite Philmont experiences to us, and we’d tell them our favorite Philmont experiences.  I made the mistake of telling them about Waluigi, and opened a can of worms that I couldn’t unring.  All of the scouts, some forty or more, stood up around the fire and sang the national anthem to the tune of WAH.  It was horrendous.  I didn’t know what to do.  But it was probably something really special for all those kids. Kind of like how, earlier that day, they all spontaneously sang the Phineas and Ferb theme while playing frisbee. It was a weird day.

And speaking of all those stories, those are just tales from my treks to Philmont as a participant.  I haven’t even gotten to stories about this summer yet, and I have so many.  In fact, I think I have enough stories from this summer to fill an entire blog post.  Hmm, now that you mention it…

Alright, then it’s decided.  I’m going to have a three-part Philmont special!  Last week was my reintroduction.  This week was my treks.  And next week?  Next week will be when I actually worked at the dang place.  I’ll tell you all why I didn’t have any real posts this summer, or at least give you some anecdotes about what I did this summer instead of writing blog posts.  I hope you’re looking forward to it, because I sure as hell am.