Philmont Scout Ranch

Today, more than a century later, scouts and explorers in ever greater numbers range this same spacious and rugged area-Explorers of the Boy Scouts of America, who camp, hike, and ride, learn the ways of outdoor living, and relish the zest of outdoor fun on the 127,000 acres of Philmont Scout Ranch.

Lying along the Santa Fe Trail and nurturing the vigorous traditions of that long-abandoned track, Philmont is the largest camp of its kind in the world.

When I went West last summer to spend three weeks with Philmont's Explorers in camp and on the trail, I learned of the happy stroke of fortune by which the Boy Scouts fell heir to this outdoor empire.

In 1922-23 Mr. Waite Phillips, developer of oil properties in the West, bought a third of a million acres in the vicinity of Cimarron, New Mexico, for a cattle ranch. Through the mountainous back country he strung a chain of fishing and hunting camps for himself and his guests.

Later, recognizing scouting as an outstanding boon to the youth of America, Mr. Phillips in two gifts-in 1938 and 1941-gave more than a third of his broad domain to the Boy Scouts. The balance, mostly rangeland, he sold.

As an endowment to help run the ranch Mr. Phillips in 1941 also presented the Philtower Building in Tulsa, Oklahoma. The "Phil" in Philmont and Philtower is, of course, the first syllable of Phillips.

The National Council of the Boy Scouts of America promptly set aside the New Mexico windfall as the national camping area for Explorers, who are the oldest group of Scouts, youths between 14 and 18.

Since 1938 nearly 75,000 boys and young men have profited from Philmont's training-by-doing programs. At the same time they have enjoyed a rare experience of western high adventure.

Philmont remains even today an operating ranch, with 1,000 Hereford cattle, and some 1,100 acres of cultivated land under irrigation.

But most of the property is lofty and rough-a wild land of mountain and mesa, here stark and arid, there lush and verdant with moss-draped evergreen forests, banks of fern, and dense brush cover.

Cold brawling streams lace the hills, and the air is aromatic with sage and pine. Unsullied skies arch high and blue in the still mornings and mount black turbulent thunderheads in dramatic panoply during the windy afternoons.

Summer storms send flash floods racing down streams in the thinly vegetated northern sector of the ranch. Of Ponil Creek I heard a Scout say, "After a rain the crick gets so silted up the fish swim backwards to keep the mud out of their eyes."

Philmont's western boundary follows the backbone of the Cimarron and Agua Fria Mountains, offshoots of the Sangre de Cristo range. Here Clear Creek Mountain, highest on the ranch, humps up to 11,600 feet.

"You can walk out of Camping Headquarters in the morning," Felix Knauth, a Philmont program counselor, told me, "and reach the subarctic regions by late afternoon. You simply go a mile up instead of thousands of miles north. Clear Creek Mountain's plant and animal life are similar to Hudson Bay's."

On almost any summer day as many as…"