Roanoke Valley scouts obey the call to go West, young men

The din grew at the far end of the sloping, high-elevation meadow. In the distance, tiny figures - including a clutch of boys from Roanoke - dashed uphill beside the pointy-ear ed beasts of burden.

Soon they were upon the "grandstand," a long front porch of an old cabin where middle-aged Scoutmasters, positioned at angles of repose, sipped strong, just-brewed coffee from sierra cups above a painted sign on a green plank that reads "Burro Racing Assoc."

"C'mon Carl!" the Roanoke boys urged their burro on, as the donkey rounded a small post and loped back downhill to the stable. A minute later, victory - and a cherished bag of white-powdered doughnuts - was theirs in the Harlan Camp Burro Races.

So another evening wound down in a 12-day backpacking journey in northern New Mexico's Sangre de Cristo Mountains. Last month, teens from 14 to 18 years old from three Roanoke Valley Boy Scout troops trekked for 70-plus miles on the Philmont Scout Ranch, gaining a backcountry experience very different from our eastern Appalachian Mountains.

The adult advisers like myself - an Appalachian Trail thru-hiker who also has hiked hundreds of miles in the high Sierra in California and the Colorado Rockies - also had to learn some new tricks.

For some of the Scouts from Troops 2 and 50 in Raleigh and Grandin courts and 221 in Cave Spring, it marked a culmination of their Scouting years, a chance to put the camping and hiking skills developed since elementary school to use in a rugged Western landscape ranging from 6,500 to more than 12,000 feet in elevation.

Philmont, which hosts more than 20,000 hikers a season, this year is marking the 75th anniversary of Oklahoma oilman Waite Phillips' gift of the 214-square-mile ranch - just a little smaller than Roanoke County - to Scouting. Next year, the ranch expects to cross the 1 million mark in Scout visitors since 1938.

Boy Scouts and coed Venture Scouts hike in crews of up to 12 teens and adults, with three Scouts elected to leadership roles by their peers: a crew leader, a chaplain's assistant to tend to spiritual needs, and a guia, or guide to keep the crew mindful of low-impact camping practices.

Troop 2, which I lead as Scoutmaster, sent 14 teens (two of whom joined us from Troop 50) and six adults to Philmont this summer, evenly divided on separate treks. In the small-world category, one of our crews ended up having chosen the same itinerary as Troop 221's crew.

The journey really started in 2011, however, when Andre Howes, now our Troop Committee chairman, pitched the idea to me and other parents and to our Scouts, noting what a great experience it had been for his two older sons. We quickly assembled a list of families committed to the project and willing to put the time into preparing and fundraising.

Most of the Scouts had begun assembling their gear when they entered Scouting as 11-year-olds, so the primary financial expense was to cover Philmont's $770 registration fee and air and bus fare, for a total of about $1,500 per person.

Philmont is one of four High Adventure camps run by Scouting, the newest of which is the Summit near the New River Gorge in West Virginia, which just hosted the National Scout Jamboree last month. Philmont allots crew slots in a random drawing that takes place 18 months before the expedition. We learned we'd won our 12-day expedition slots in December 2011.

In June 2012, I led my Scout troop on a 50-mile trek on the Appalachian Trail, from just south of the James River to Daleville.

Our preparation accelerated this year. We went on monthly weekend shakedown hikes starting in March and culminating in a challenging 18-mile stretch of the AT including two 1,200-foot climbs in two June days.

By July, everyone knew his gear and how to pack it so the load didn't exceed 35 pounds without food, knew what not to bring (cotton clothing, electronics), and knew how to purify water, keep himself (relatively) clean and safe in the backcountry.

The first day two days on the trail at Philmont each crew hikes with a "ranger," a college-age counselor who teaches proper techniques for hanging the crew's food in bear bags at night, the best ways to field sanitize mess kits and prepare patrol meals, as well as reminders on first aid, map and compass use and basic trail courtesies. Again in the small-world department, our ranger, Preston Rogers, hails from Rustburg and attends Virginia Tech. The boys connected with his easy-going manner instantly.

The tenor of the remaining nine days on the trail is up to the crew and their leader. My troop's crew leaders are both driven young men.

David Kennedy, an Eagle Scout, is heading to Virginia Tech this month to study engineering. His crew made a point of breaking camp before dawn in order to complete most of the day's hike before the afternoon heat. That strategy also avoided the chance of being caught at high elevation, for example the ascent of wide-open Baldy Mountain at 12,441 feet, in the afternoon thundershowers that routinely blew in.

Brian Howell, a senior at Patrick Henry High and also an Eagle Scout, led the crew I advised. Brian took a more laid-back attitude toward morning reveille (I usually had time to rise at 5:45 and enjoy two cups of instant coffee before the Scouts stirred). But he led with enthusiasm and a Scout spirit of fun.

Take the burro races. Earlier in the day we'd spent hours at Harlan Camp learning to how to fill shotgun shells and then shooting skeet with fine Ruger Red Label 12-gauge over-and-under shotguns. Then we'd hiked nearly two miles and several hundred feet up in elevation to our camp at Deer Lake. It was Brian who led four other Scouts and me on an early evening hike back to Harlan camp on the quest for donkey glory.

Philmont has nearly three-dozen itineraries, ranging from "challenging" in the upper 50-mile length with lots of stops for activities, to "super strenuous" at 85 to 104 miles and more isolated stretches of backcountry. Our Scouts' trek was "rugged" at 71 miles and combined days of backpacking with stops at staffed backcountry camps for activities such as rock climbing and rappelling, horseback riding and .30-06 target shooting.

We also had a solemnly beautiful visit to the top of 10,250-foot Trail Peak and the still gleaming, scattered wreckage of a B24-D bomber that crashed there during a training mission in bad weather in the early months of U.S. fighting in World War II, killing seven men, including two who had been Boy Scouts. The stop had particular importance to our 18-year-old crew leader, who intends to enlist in the U.S. Marine Corps.

By journey's end, we had a final, tough hike of 11 miles up, along and descending from the Tooth of Time, a 9,003-foot barren, steep ridge that juts above the base camp and reminded me of Rockbridge County's Devil's Marbleyard rock scramble, or Old Rag Mountain in Madison County, just much bigger and steeper.

The last afternoon's hike descended from Tooth Ridge via more than a dozen switchbacks as we watched base camp - promising showers, a cot to sleep on and the next day's journey back to Roanoke - grow larger. Finally, the trail leveled as the ponderosa pine and spruce gave way to scrub oak and cactus. The Scouts posed for a photo beside a wooden gate bearing the words, "Welcome - You Made It!"

The Scouts learned how to trek in the southern Rockies, putting to use the woods wisdom they'd accumulated in three to seven years of Boy Scouting. They set their own agenda, cooked, served and cleaned up after their meals. They'd taken time for several from-the-heart devotionals led by our chaplain's aide, Graham Edwards, and enjoyed each other's company around the evening campfires.

The adults, myself especially, learned our own important lesson: let the Scouts take the lead.

Brian Kelley is a metro editor at The Roanoke Times.

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