Philmont 727-E1-1994 – 2 August 1994
Philmont Expedition 727-E1-1994 – 2 August 1994: Tower Inferno / Day 6: Highway to Nowhere
Tower Inferno
Much like how my father wouldn’t let me join Cub Scouts, my brother wouldn’t let me join his troop. Troop 258 had been one of the top troops in the region. At its peak, few could compare to it in terms of demonstrated skills. They placed well in competitions and attended several invitation-only campouts that most Scouts didn’t even know existed.
By the time I was ready to join, leadership had changed, skills had eroded, and the exodus had begun. They were special, so they needed a bus. They needed to attend a summer camp in a different state. And in this case, it really was because they thought they were too good for the other troops in the council. Or at least that’s what the leaders thought.
But they no longer had the skills to back it up. By 1992, they had 6 Scouts left. Today, there’s barely any trace that Troop 258 ever existed.
As I neared age ten and a half, my mother saw in the local paper that there was a troop that met nearby. That was Troop 118. My brother and I went to check it out and he liked what he saw. It wasn’t elite like his troop had been, but it had solid leadership. And it could be more. He came up with a plan in 1992 to start my troop on the path to the next level.
I saw what an elite troop was like at my first spring camporee. Troop 27 was set up next to our site. While we were pitching our tents, they built a tower and a monkey bridge. All for a weekend campout. It seemed unreal to us. But that’s what my brother’s troop had been. It was possible, but it had to start somewhere.
Poles. It started with poles. It’s just not possible to build anything of any complexity in a short amount of time if you have to source the materials as well. So you need a set of poles prepared ahead of time that you can use. Then it’s just a matter of practice.
Pioneering merit badge would be the first test. The toughest requirement is to take part in a big project. And our troop didn’t have a good track record when it came to providing opportunities for this project. This year would be different – we would bring all of the materials for a 20-foot tower with us and it just needed to be assembled. Simple.
Your standard 20-foot tower has more than two dozen structural components, not counting decking for the top and rungs for a ladder, ranging in length from 10 feet to more than 20 feet. So my brother and I got to work in the spring finding small trees, some live, some recently fallen but still solid, that would make suitable poles. I got the task of stripping the bark from all of them. It took all spring, but the set was ready just in time for camp.
For transport, Lee’s father came over in his van on a rainy afternoon. We put what we could inside and strapped the rest to the roof. It would be tricky navigating through the woods with long poles sticking off the back, but he made it to camp and unloaded everything in our site. The tower was one step closer to completion.
But there was a slight catch. My brother had to work during the week, so he wouldn’t be there to oversee construction. And I wasn’t taking Pioneering merit badge, so my involvement with the project ended when the poles were loaded up for transport. A random father who would be there for the week volunteered to take charge, so my brother left it in his hands.
That may have been a mistake. At the unveiling on Friday, the 20-foot tower was revealed to be… 10 feet tall. Probably for the best, because it wasn’t all that solid. And instead of a fixed ladder, it had a rope ladder made from twine and random sticks. You were probably better off just jumping off the top than climbing back down that thing. But it was still a tower, so there’s that.
In his defense, the project overseer said that he only had a few younger kids to work with, so a 20-foot tower was out of the question. And on that point, the result seems reasonable. It’s not a bad start, maybe a stepping stone toward a 20-foot tower. At least we had the poles for one…
Now, you may be wondering how you make a 10-foot tower out of the parts for a 20-foot tower. If you guessed that you would repurpose some of the unneeded bracing as the corner posts or just source new corner posts entirely and set the longer poles aside for later projects, then you should have been in charge of this project because that’s not at all what happened. No, they made smaller poles by cutting all of the longer poles into pieces. So about that 20-foot tower…
My brother did not take it well when he saw the finished tower. No, that’s an understatement. The whole point of making a set of poles was to reuse them for future projects. If you cut them down every time you had a smaller project, it wouldn’t be long until you had a pile of firewood. As it turns out, it would only take a few hours.
He enlisted the help of one of the other kids and set to work finishing the job of destroying the poles. John’s father salvaged a few to use as hiking staffs, but the bulk of the tower was shredded in a flurry of activity in the woodcutting area. Then came the fun part.
Fires were always my brother’s specialty. I suppose I shouldn’t have been surprised to see the remains of a bonfire in camp when we returned from our annual canoe trip. Most of it had been burned down to coals by then, ready for some dutch oven cooking. At least we would get cobbler out of this.
That night, I was on grub detail along with Keith, Neil, and a few others. As we walked down to the commissary, Keith unloaded on me. He thought my brother was way out of line and directed his anger toward me, as if I had anything to do with it. The poles ceased to be my problem on that afternoon in the rain. What happened to them afterward was none of my concern.
But it sure wasn’t his either. He had nothing invested in those poles. He put in none of the work. In fact, not a single other member of my troop had anything to do with the project until the poles were strapped to a van. If anyone had the right to be angry about what happened, it was me.
But I wasn’t. The damage had already been done before my brother came back. If anything, I felt guilty that I hadn’t been able to stop the poles from being cut in the first place. Maybe this showed that the troop wasn’t ready for this sort of responsibility. I sure wasn’t going to help them get more poles. But I was already over what happened to these. By morning, they would all be ash.
So I remained silent as Keith’s barrage continued. Finally, having heard enough, Neil put an end to it. He shut Keith up and I never heard another word from him on the subject. Nobody else had any business getting upset over this. Not Keith, not Neil, not even Ron. If this was anyone’s business, it was my own.
Day 6: Highway to Nowhere
The trail out of Ute Springs took us back to Ute Gulch, this time for the trading post. This was our first opportunity since day one to stock up on snacks. Not finding my usual peanut butter chocolate chip cookies, I loaded up on candy. It wasn’t much, but just a little treat every day makes everything a bit easier.
Our destination on this day was Cimarron River camp, a trail camp located, as the name implies, on the Cimarron River. On the other side of the river was the one highway that runs through the middle of Philmont. This would be our last day south of the river/highway.
We arrived at camp without incident, passing other crews as we surveyed the available sites. We kept going until we reached the end and made camp at the edge closest to the exit trail. While this would make our hike the next day a few feet shorter, we had other reasons for picking that location. Very important reasons…
Cimarron River camp was unique in that mere purification was not sufficient to make the plentiful water nearby drinkable. Due to the pollution from the highway, all water needed to be boiled before it could be used for cooking or drinking. The highway represented human society and its impact on nature. It was a reminder of what we had left behind and how we can never truly escape the impact of our past.
Just when you think you understand the ways Philmont can challenge you, it comes up with new ways to mess with your head.
For some of the other kids, the downtime that evening was the perfect opportunity to break out their… History textbook? Two thousand miles from home and far from civilization (the neighboring highway aside), they still couldn’t escape from a summer homework assignment. They had been tasked with outlining their textbook for the AP American History class they would start in the fall. And the summer was already more than halfway over.
Later that evening, I saw Keith at the edge of camp overlooking the highway, staring into the distance as if the glimpse of passing trucks could bring him home. That connection to everything we didn’t have was so tantalizingly close. It would be easy to mock someone for staring off like that, longing to be anywhere else. But I think we all understood the pull of the familiar in the state that we were in. Whatever Keith was feeling, that was nobody’s business but his own.