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Thursday, June 2, 2011

Philmont 2011

So, I've been slacking on the blog. I've been in New Mexico for a little over 3 weeks now. The first week was a lot of paperwork type stuff with 5 of us crammed in a little office. Needless to say, we all got a little crazy cooped up in such a small room for so long that there was a lot of delusional laughs that were had! We also seemed to overdose quite a bit on coffee and cookies (thanks mom!)
I guess I should give a little rundown for those of you that don't really understand what I do. There are over 1,000 staff members at Philmont. I work in the Ranger Dept. There are about 200-250 rangers. We are the people that meet the crew when they first get to Philmont. We show them around base camp and prepare them for going on the trail by getting them food and gear and such. The next day we take them out for 2 days into the backcountry and show them how to hike, camp and all that fun stuff. On the 3rd day on the trail, the ranger leaves them and travels back to base camp, while the crew continues on for 8 more days. When the ranger comes back to base, they either have a day off, a work day (doing work helping other departments), or they pick up another crew and do it all over again.
In the ranger department, the chief ranger is the head of the department, under that is four associate chief rangers (this is my job this summer - we are called ACRs for short. The ACRs are in charge of approx. 6 ranger trainers (RT for short). There's 25 RTs and each of them are in charge of 6-8 rangers. When I say in charge of, I mean, they teach, observe, evaluate, and supervise.
My special duties this year are banquets and search and rescue.
I'm in charge of ordering food and organizing efforts for random banquets we have in our department throughout the summer. I'm also in charge of teaching search and rescue efforts to the ranger department. Because the ranger department is the largest on the ranch, we are used for any search and rescue efforts that are needed in the backcountry. I'm not going to go into all the details of that because it's kind of complicated. Anyway, here's some pictures of the beginning adventure of another summer in the fabulous New Mexico mountains.