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visitors since 7/12/03.Philmont Scout Ranch |
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| I tried to get these in chronological order, so you can have fun watching my American flag shirt get progressivly more dirty, and my face getting progressivly more hairy. Enjoy! | ||
 The night before we checked in base camp, we stayed at a Methodist church. They might want to rethink the wording on that sign... |
 Beautiful Crater Lake. It could hardly be considered a lake, however. The pond at the park near my house is bigger. The staff at the camp suggested we didn't drink out of it, unless we wanted a mouthful of mosquito larvae. |
 A typical bathroom at Philmont. This is the Pilot-to-Copilot model--where you and a buddy can sit side-by-side. The shadows make it a little tough to see, because this one has walls around it, which was more common as we got further North. Down South, however... |
 ...the Pilot-to-Bombadere model was seen a lot more, and those never had walls. Often they were in plain view of our campsite. So if you were the shy type, you were in trouble. |
 This is me near the top of the Tooth of Time. A storm forced us to turn back just before the saddle leading to the peak, but this picture was taking near the same elevation as the Tooth. |
 These are Philmont meals. Each of those bags will feed two people. Breakfast and lunch were usually snack food, but for dinner we had stuff like chili, black beans, macaroni and cheese, and chicken. The downside to this was we had to carry pots and a small propane canister to boil water. |
 On our fourth day on the trail, we went horseback riding at Clark's Fork. The wrangler who gave us a safety talk was named Ashley, and being the best looking girl we'd see in almost a week, some of the guys in the other crew became competely obsessed with her. Whenever I'd wander from my camp to theirs, they were usually talking about Ashley in some form or another. They even wrote a couple songs about her, and designated one of their bear bags the "Ashley bag". Further proof that 613I1 was clearly the superior crew. |
 Climbing rocks at Cimmaroncito... |
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 ...and coming back down |
 Our crew at Visto Grande. |
 Some of the guys caught a snake. My mom hates snakes, so I knew I had to get a picture for her. |
 It rained our first five or six days on the trail. At Visto Grande camp, we ran into our most violent storm. After the massive amounts of rain stopped, we could hear another sound off in the distance. We decided it wasn't rain... and it wasn't wind... so we went to investigate, and we found a flash flood not 20 feet from our camp. It was in a small trench that separated camp from the bear bags and the Pilot-to-Bombadere. It filled up this little clearing near our camp that we had been able to walk across when we first got there. |  In the trading post at base camp, Richi and I came across a frisbee made of rubber. Richi forked over $5 for it, knowing we'd need something to do after we set up camp everyday. It was $5 well spent, because it got a lot of use. The Squidgee became somewhat of a Tao or Zen to us. |
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 These pictures are from the Co-op course our crew did. In the first picture, a board is nailed to a tree and we have to get a guy up as high as we can. I'm on the left on the second tier. In the second picture, there's a series of intertwining ropes between two trees, forming a "spider web". We had to get our whole crew through it, but once we used a hole, we couldn't use it anymore. The last challenge was a high wall we had to get our whole crew over. The kicker was that we could only have two people up there at a time, and once you've helped two people up you had to come down, so we couldn't have our strong guys pull everyone up. We ended up having Richi jump as high as he could to grab my hand and Bear's hand, but we managed to finish it. | ||
 This is a sport called Mountainball. The guys that taught it to us claims baseball was derived from it. It's very similar to baseball, except that you pitch to yourself. And there's three teams. And there's five bases. And you can run to any base at anytime (but you have to run them in order to score a run). And you can have as many people on a base as you want. And if you're a base runner you can pick up the ball and throw it into the outfield. And the batter can keep running as long as the play is going and score as many runs as he can. You know what? It's nothing like baseball. |
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 When we hiked up Baldy Mountain, I had to find a way to carry my raingear and two meals with me (we were staying at the same camp that night so we weren't taking everything). I didn't have a daypack, so I tied up my raincoat into a neat little daypack. I may look dumb, but I feel smart. |
 On the way to Baldy Town our crew came across a deer grazing near the trail. Some of us got about 10-15 feet away from it and got some nice pictures. |
 The hike to Baldy Town. In a few hours we'll be at the top of that mountain. |
 Snow? In June? At 12,000 feet above sea level, why not? |  Baldy Mountain is 12,441 of pure steepness. But we all made it. The wind is about 50 mph at the top, so it's freezing cold. |
 Once again, me on Baldy. The red arrow points to the Tooth of Time, which you can see me on in a previous picture. If you look really closely, there's a really faint ridge just past the Tooth of Time ridge. We figure we started at the bottom of that ridge... just to give you an idea of how far we walked. And we still had 15 some odd miles to go. |
 This photo speaks for itself. If you don't get the joke, open a dang history book. |
 I borrowed my pack from someone that's taken this pack to Philmont twice, so it has a lot of mileage on it. So I shouldn't have been surprised when It started falling apart on me. The hip belt completely snapped, putting all the weight on my left on my shoulder. Suddenly my comfort rested on my ability to sew... not a good position to be in. But somehow I managed to get it back together. |
 Near the end we got a couple of burros to carry our crew gear for a couple of days. This one we named Eeyore, and he was really good to us. Very much unlike... |
 ...this jerk. We named him Scott, after a guy that was supposed to be in our crew but sprained his ankle the day before we left. He would constantly push the guy leading him off the road to get to food. And then I was feeding him some granola and the little jerk bit me. By the end we had renamed him Satan. Finally we found out that having someone on each side of him controlled him a little better. |
 Me climbing a sparpole. At least I think that's me. |
 The second to last day, we went through Ponil camp. Here they had a cantina with root beer. Against my better judgment, I had one. Then another one. Then a couple more. Then we had to hike another four or five miles, and I was feeling sick the whole time. I managed to keep it in, though, which is more than some people can say. |
 These are the bear bags. Every night we had to put everything an animal could smell up in these bags so we didn't get mauled by bears. On the first day I decided we were going to take a stand against the bears and drive them off the mountain so we wouldn't have to do this, but we never got around to it. |
 Dangit, Richi, put down my camera! |
 We had to do some conservation work on our last day. Apparently there was a devestating fire at Philmont in June 2002. An astounding 92,000 acres were burned. Being from Arizona, we told these guys that 92,000 acres is nothing. We lost 450,000 acres that same summer. Anyway, we had to spread seed, rake it, and spread hay over it. We worked with these losers from Chicago that had absolutely no idea how to work. |
 I mentioned earlier that we lost one of our crew members before we left. Well, we still got enough food for 12 people. And since everyone else paired off at the Meth church while I went shopping with some other guys, I was left alone, and ended up eating Scott's food along with my own. Thanks Scott! |
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