TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/121090/1210170.000

Text File | 1992-08-28 | 8.2 KB | 162 lines

                                                                                AMERICAN SCENE, Page 20

Cimarron, New Mexico

Bears, Bucks And Boy Scouts


At New Mexico's Philmont Scout Ranch, troops hit the wilderness
trail, with a few modern twists

By JAMES WILLWERTH


    In the shadow of New Mexico's Sangre de Cristo Mountains,
a buck with a velvet rack picks his way across a steep
hillside, followed by three does. Hearing a noise, the deer
turn toward a meadow filled with oak trees and sunflowers that
glisten like gold coins. A band of backpacking Boy Scouts stare
wide-eyed at this moment of natural theater.

    The scouts are from Troop 501 in La Canada-Flintridge,
Calif., a suburb of Los Angeles. They've begun the first day
of a trek at Philmont Scout Ranch, the 215-sq.-mi. wilderness
near Cimarron, N. Mex., that is scouting's premier "high
adventure" base. Months of training hikes, equipment checks and
dieting for obese adult advisers have preceded this day. The
hikers will trudge through dense forests, up and over
10,000-ft. mountain passes, pelted by daily thundershowers.
Staff members at backcountry camps are decked out as miners,
trappers and other frontier characters to provide history
lessons and entertainment. The trek's success is measured by
a unique scouting goal: Troop 501 must finish as a tight team
in step with its weakest hikers.

    Nationally, scouting faces an equally rugged journey. Like
the 17,500 hikers who passed through Philmont this past summer,
the highly traditional movement has been forced in recent years
to shed some flab and check its compass. Static enrollments
five years ago persuaded the national office in Irving, Texas,
to commission a marketing study, which concluded that the Boy
Scouts were dangerously out of step with post-1960s America;
the public still imagined uniformed do-gooders who tie knots
and help old folks across the street. One solution: the Scout
Handbook was revised to show more minority scouts in action and
offer advice on such off-campground problems as AIDS and other
sexually transmitted diseases, child abuse and how to resist
sexual molesters.

    A Philmont trek provides a deceptively casual scenario for
such transition. Changing history is evident in the area's
visitors. Spanish conquistadores and American pioneers passed
through. Trekkers carrying side arms have included Kit Carson
and, more recently, eagle scout and FBI Director William
Sessions, who brought along pistol-packing bodyguards. In
recent years women have become active in the formerly all-male
backcountry. Two of 501's adult leaders are female, as are 20
of Philmont's 185 rangers who hike for two days with each group
to help launch the trip successfully. Environmental pressures
are being felt as well. While scouting enjoys a proud heritage
of eco-awareness, Philmont was stunned to discover last year
that its landfill violated New Mexico's updated
waste-management laws. As a result, camping garbage now has to
be carted 60 miles to nearby Taos.

    Once in the mountains, Troop 501 discovers that trekking has
changed radically since Carson's day. "Low-impact camping"
rules mean skipping the traditional campfire unless the fire
pit is cleaned and the ashes buried. Opened food must be
consumed on the spot. An informal "30-second rule" applies to
spilled food: eat it fast. "Smellables" such as soap,
toothpaste and tomorrow's rations, all of which can attract
bears, are loaded into a burlap bag after dinner and strung over
a 20-ft.-high cable. Nighttime hygiene is discouraged; a
freshened-up camper in a sleeping bag is yet another smellable.
Breakfast is scheduled soon after a groggy, wet dawn so hikers
can cover ground before the occasionally terrifying
thunderstorms hit. Lightning killed scouts at Philmont in 1987
and 1988.

    Squabbling occurs during 501's damp, disorganized first
nights. Ranger Brad Wolgast, 21, an eagle scout and psychology
student from Kansas, observes privately that the troop's adults
and boys communicate poorly. "Things get left unsaid," he
explains. Staff members at base camp tell of a stressed-out
troop that tied one of its hikers to a tree earlier this year.
Philmont chaplain Rusty Cowden, 38, remembers his own trek in
1967: "We got lost. A bear ate our food, and it rained 11 out
of 12 days." But Cowden recalls the trip joyously. Coping with
blisters, bears and soggy meals somehow adds texture to the
chill of windy mountaintops and the sight of wildlife roaming
in ghostly aspen groves. Most of all, scouting's unstylish
traditions of group discipline and self-reliance provide a
powerful social cement. "Scouting comes down generations, from
my father to my brother to me," says 501's Morgan Browning, 14.
"It sticks with you."

    Since scouting is bound to such traditions, the movement
faces the challenge of joining the fast-paced '90s without
losing values that should endure. Quaint slogans like "Be
prepared" and "Do a good turn daily" may in fact be useful in
an age of Middle East crises and crack cocaine. Inner-city
scout troops now meet in welfare hotels, in juvenile halls,
even on ghetto street corners, where mobile homes serve as
assembly halls. "We're not using the Norman Rockwell image
anymore," says chief scout executive Ben Love, 60, who has
initiated campaigns to combat five "unacceptables": hunger,
illicit drugs, child abuse, youth unemployment and illiteracy.
During Love's tenure, scouting has also developed coeducational
"Career Awareness" Explorer posts, in which young people
contemplating such careers as medicine, law enforcement and
computers can meet professionals in those fields.

    In a 19th century mining camp, Troop 501 is eating
dehydrated lasagna softened by boiling water and the evening's
drizzle. It is oddly tasty. Bearded "miners" like Jedediah
Ezekial Springfield (eagle scout Trey Berlin, 21, of Richmond,
Ky.) offer to teach gold panning and to provide tours of the
abandoned mine shaft; they speak in twangy "interpretive
accents." After dinner, the miners put on a "stomp" with guitar
music and surprisingly pungent jokes. Another day's hike leads
to a cattle ranch set in a lush green valley. At that campfire,
a talented cowboy-guitarist nicknamed Fluffy performs the Oreo
Cookie Blues, which he describes as a "song of addiction." Next
morning the scouts heat irons to mark their hiking boots and
hats with Philmont's brand: a P and "crazy" (backward) S under
a bar.

    Just after a hailstorm, Mike Downhower, 17, leads the troop
down a mountain trail and suddenly notices a strange tree root.
It rattles! Downhower skids to a panicked stop and gives the
alarm. The rattlesnake simply slithers into the bushes. At a
19th century "Mexican" village whose cantina is stocked with
root beer, Dennis Meade, 18, finds a rare gas-fired outdoor
shower in a meadow. He also notices a barrel-shaped relocation
trap on rubber wheels awaiting an especially pesky local bear.
In the shower Meade hears a noise. The bear has walked into the
dressing enclosure; he and the animal stare at each other for
a tense moment until the bear leaves. In a narrow valley by
a trout stream, Tim Anderson, 13, is asked to describe his
favorite trekking moment. "The tall white trees [aspens] make
me think of fresh air and a clean world," he says. At a lunch
break, crusty former scoutmaster El Rey Ensch, 51, holds up his
wrist for everyone to see the butterfly lighting on it.

    A fat porcupine waddles along the wooded trail ahead,
perhaps wondering why humans make such a delighted fuss when
he encounters them. The mood has changed since that wet first
night; 501 has come together. Eric Johannesen, 14, once
desperately homesick and moody, has been asked to lead, and he
sets a rugged pace: "This feels like a family relationship now.
I'll get home eventually." Estelle Light, 42, a troop leader
who happens to be a nurse, has tended sore feet and wounded
egos all week. Assistant scoutmaster Don Browning, 51, hobbled
by a sprained knee, finds that the scouts around him walk as
slowly as he does. Crew leader Jason Servatius, 16, once an
aggressive prankster, moves among the hikers, offering advice
and checking equipment. It is raining again; nobody minds.