As we approached Philmont you could see the antelope, cattle, and the horses. You also could easily notice the mountians, the tooth of time, and especially the altitude change. It choked me up. Jeff Schneider liked to use his "patented" phrase "At this present moment" to describe the scenery to us. Jeff Schneider is our Philmont coordinator.
We than went to the Welcome Center where we met our Ranger for the week. His name was Alexander McCausland. (I would like to thank him for all his work he did.) We than did a medical recheck. We all checked out fine. That is about the time we met Ryan.
We then went and had lunch in the dining hall. It was "organized" chaos. The staff sang a song, in which the only words we understood were yada yada PHILMONT!!!. Then we lined up very wierd and ate your normal cafeteria food.
Once that was finished we went to Logistics and Supplies and here is where the staffs attitudes showed. They were in a hurry and were very impolite. We checked our gear, picked up our food and went back to our tents. The breeze and the 90 degree heat had been great.
Dinner was awful. It was Salisbury steak (I think!!!) but we were less stressed and were ready to go. I just wanted to go, go, go. After dinner we had a shakedown with our Ranger, and we all left a few things behind. Some good some bad, you will hear about the bad a little later on in the recantation.
We then had a church service in their outside chapel. From there we went to the opening campfire. It was VERY well done. The acting was not as cheesy as I felt it might be. It really told the history of Philmont.
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