Glorious week five

One of the many strange phenomena at Philmont is our bizarre need for time off. Granted, even God needs a day off every once in a while, but there's just something weird about the way people count down to the weekend here. I understand that there are a lot of people out there that will say things like "only four more days" on Monday morning, but the difference is that we genuinely love our jobs. Case in point: My trailblazers this week were amazing. They did as they were told, they positively loved museums and songs and they hiked faster than most staff. We got back to our turnaround a half an hour ahead of schedule. If every group were as good as these boys, or staff would never leave. And still, I am glad the week is over.

It really doesn't make any sense; it's not like I'm taking the time off to rest. A group of us is heading out for Urraca Mesa in about half an hour and tomorrow I'm going whitewater rafting. There's no way I'm going to get another group this well behaved this summer. I think what it comes down to is that we just need time to be that part of ourselves that the kids shouldn't see.

In other news, we hiked Trail Peak last week. It seems I have a regular hiking group now: Jenny and Chris and Pam and Cameron seem to go everywhere with me. Trail Peak stands at 10,200 feet, and the last thousand of that came in over about .7 lateral miles, so the hike was a bit grueling, and of course the peak is well known for not having a view. So why go to this God-forsaken lump in the landscape? In 1942 a B-24 crashed just below the top and remains there in pieces to this day.

We went up the mountain the day after independence day, and I think it put me in a kind of whimsical mood. The tradition on Trail Peak is to urinate off the wing and go home claiming that you peed off an airplane at 10,000 feet, but I abstained. So much of patriotism is pointless bravado these days, and here I was on July fifth in a place where six men died for their country. They had been testing a new kind of radar for the war effort and an equipment malfunction left them flying blind. They weren't killed by the ill will of other men, or in some heroic effort to save lives. They were simply doing a job and something went wrong. It would be easy to make them angry in the mind's eye for the scouts that disrespected their final rest, but the top of the peak is such a peaceful place that it would be hard to put a ghost there. Besides, we wandered about twenty yards from the crash site and found an overlook of a dozen nameless hills and, in the distance, Baldy mountain. I could only hope for such a resting place.