[Philmont]: Cut To The Chase Advise Part 2

Sleeping bags

If a Scout has the opportunity to borrow his uncles North Face Blue Kazoo down bag, for gosh sakes DO NOT tell the parents that if he gets it wet, he might sleep cold. Instead TEACH that Scout AND THE OTHERS how to keep their "POWDER DRY" I mean their sleeping bag dry.

Cooking

Yeah, you can cook PhilFood in turkey bags. Turkeys do it all the time (Grins Floyd!) Yes, you can eat your mush straight from the envelope. You can cook it all in one pot or a dozen pots or an individual pot for each person.

HOWERVER Try this. You are going to Philmont. You will have a well trained and throughly delightful Philmont Ranger with you the first few days. Let then show your crew the Philmont way of cooking. Let them use wellworn but throughly cleaned PhilPots and get to return the favor by CLEANING them when they return them. There is something to be said about doing that sort of thing instead of "let mom do it when wse get back home".

The absolute worst thing to teach your crew is that they don't have to do it like they do it at Philmont, but they can do it their way. All this does is foster an idea in their heads that they are special and they don't have to follow the the game plan like all the rest do. That is WRONG teaching. These youth have a really tough time fitting into society when they get out on their own.

Just hang back, let the crew sort it out, let them use PhilPots, PhilTents, rental packs, Polar Pure to purify their water and enjoy their new experiences at Philmont.

It will be the first time in their lives they do it the "Philmont way" for many of them. That was the case in 1959 when I first went at age 14. The things I learned at Philmont are the things that stuck with me all these years, not the shortcuts and "better way" the advisors taught us to the contrary of the Philmont Ranger.

And lastly.

The IDIOT advisor.

Trust me on this one. Don't be one.

On the trek I was on last summer we had an IDIOT advisor. I won't go into all the details, but he was a royal pain in the butt.

The youth still had a good time in spite of him, not because of him. He rode their backs and that in itself was inexcusable. It all started the first day BEFORE leaving CHQ when he shouted at three of the girls who were filling water bottles as he instructed them to do. That was his first mistake, telling them to fill them. He should have let the crew leader do his job himself. Then he shouted that they were going to "miss the bus, it's going to leave you".

Pholks, NOBODY misses the bus at Philmont.......NOBODY!

Philmont Transportation bus driver just simply DON'T DO THAT !!!!!!!!!!!!!!

And one of these girls just happened to live at Philmont and she knew that nobody gets left behind. The other two girls looked at this advisor like he was an idiot. They were right.

I spent an entire ten days keeping him off those kids backsides. Sometimes I had to get very stern with him. I never hit him in the jaw although I surely wanted to a time or two. I never helped him accidently fall off a cliff although I wanted to a time or two.

Halfway through the trek, with my blessings one of the youth, a female age fourteen, got really tired of his actions and sat him down on a log and gave him a very good talking to for about forty-five minutes one on one in the most adult manner I have ever seen a kid do. Thank goodness she was a member of the crew, for out of the mouths of youth come truth and consequence.

Did he learn? Some. Did he stop interfering with the operation of the crew? Again, some. In my opinion, not nearly enough. Any is too much.

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As you gather around this virtual campfire with fellow
Scouts and Scouters, do your best to be trustworthy,
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cheerful, thrifty, brave, clean and reverent.
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Received on Sat May 3 01:34:53 2003