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Published: January 13th 2013
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I went to Philmont and Cimarron, in 1979. I was supposed to have gone to Iran. Iran, aka Persia, was to have hosted the 15th World Scout Jamboree, and I was on it representing the GLNW Troop. But given the dodginess regarding the Shah and the Ayatollah, along with the earthquake, the nobs with the poshest woggles decided that we’d all be safer doing our Jamboree thing in the USA. In Philmont. So we went there.
But before we got through Philmont's camp gate over which hung old hiking boots, we were given a last chance to load up on double cheeseburgers and half drowned ourselves in one litre buckets of Dr Pepper in Cimarron. Cimarron's the nearest town to the camp site at Philmont. Last place for an American fast food fix.
A century before we rolled into town Cimarron was a roughty toughty cowboy backwater. It grew in fits and starts as a handy stopover on the Santa Fe Trail; a Granada motorway service centre for roaming gold miners, loggers and Kit Carson types. It had stores for weekly provisions and a laundry for the bi-annual underpants wash. Pony Express riders strutted up and down in the high street mud with that three days in a saddle gait. Gamblers with crooked teeth, reeking of whisky, fell off their bar stools in quite a choice of saloons. Shady New Mexican characters sat in even shadier New Mexican corners wearing big straw hats, chewing cigars and muttering “el gringo” at the sound recordists.
Oh yes. Cimarron was definitely a “Magnificent Seven” squeaky sign swinging in the wind kinda town.
With all those earthy, lack of personal hygiene fellahs concentrated in one spot it probably comes as no surprise that Cimarron had a fair few testosterone “issues” particularly up at the Hotel end of the High Street. I read somewhere that the boarding house (cough) may not have been one hundred per cent Hotel California album subject matter, but it got pretty close. Twenty six "guests" checked in and found they would never leave. They got shot dead.
Later on, in the 1840s, this man Lucien Maxwell set up a ranch near Cimarron. It was a fragrant spot, where the air didn’t niff of unwashed armpits. But by 1870 Lucien was so fed up with the annual Thanksgiving Shooting in the hotel bar (and with uncouth people taking the mickey out of his daft first name) that he sold his ranch to Waite Phillips. Waite was a very rich man. And he bought up more New Mexico to add to his ranch. He ended up with a farm over 300,000 acres in size. Pretty pretty pretty pretty big. He named the ranch “Philmont”. “Phil,” the abbreviation for Phillip and “monte" for mountain.
After he died, in the 1940s, Waite’s ancestors gave some of his estate to the Boy Scouts of America to make a camp site. (Good job Luicen sold it t eh? Lucymont; a rather pants name for a Boy Scout camp site.)
300,000 acres. The Dr Pepper super size bucket equivalent of camp sites - for us English kids that is. In England a Scout (we don't say Boy Scout) camp site is a five acre field with a portacabin lav plonked in its wettest corner. A car park doubles up as a mud wrestling pit. A small shed sells outdated Mars Bars, Cold War era guide books on the local parish church, and, if you’re lucky, a selection of 1960s postcards - the faded kind with wavy edges and some amateur calligraphy printed over the best part of the pic.
America. For the Boy Scouts of America a campsite is a significant portion of the world’s crust, the size of North Wales, plonked way out on the edge of a half populated Mid-West State, with a ruddy great mountain range slapped through the middle of it. It also has a camp shop the size of an Asda on the ring road, and it contains a better assortment than Harrods.
The Waites lobbed into their gift a fair few other decent bits and pieces of New Mexico to really keep the Boy Scouts of America really happy and doing carthweels with delight. Remember, these were the charitable days of unconditional global giving. Before eBay.
Into the Boy Scouts' care package went the Villa Philmonte, Cimarroncito, Urraca Mesa, North Fork Urraca, House Canyon, Seally Canyon, Whiteman Vega, Sawmill, Comanche Peak, Crater Lake, Black Mountain, Beaubien, Tooth Ridge, Horse Ridge, Buffalo Ridge, and more besides. They are all such sumptious tasty names. They allude to interesting things, events and goings ons. Losing yourself in your map can be nearly as good as looking at the scenery with names as these.
There. Forty years on, my chums and I are rolling in though the Philmont’s camp site gates... ...picking burger pickle off our uniforms, feeling ill and belching.
We walked the little red line on the above map. And we kept walking the red line onto other red lines on other maps. It took us two weeks. We also did American rural back to the planet things. Native indian camping, scurries deep into deserted gold mines, hikes up peaks called The Tooth of Time and Baldy Mountain. Yul Brynner horse rides and black powder gun shooting. Lumberjacking and climbing up poles with spiked things on our boots. Overnighting in smoky log cabins, shtting ourselves when a brace of brown bears outside popped by to eat the Cheez Whizz in our bear bag. The camp head honchos even awarded us an Arrowhead Patch for working on campsite conservation projects, doing what we were asked, meeting other lads from around the world and completing our seventy mile trek. And not breaking our necks abseiling down “Lovers Leap.”
One day I will get to Iran. In the meantime, the memories of a trip to Philmont will do fine
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