Quick Start: Get Up And Start Hiking!

 

There are many reasons to start your hike early in the morning:

1. More time to hike farther and more time to enjoy nature and the scenery.
2. You will see more wildlife before other hikers scare them away from the area around the trail.
3. It is the cooler part off the day.
4. You can avoid hiking during afternoon thunderstorms.
5. The best campsites on the trail are first come, first served.

You can sleep at home but you cannot explore the wilderness while you’re sleeping, so get up and start hiking. If you don’t eat in camp it will give your group only one purpose at the start of the day: to break camp and start hiking. This is especially important if you are hiking with a group because some will be trying to eat while others are putting up gear and still others are taking down their tents, plus a few are still in their sleeping bag.. This is very inefficient because the group is not working together.  If you just have one objective, to get out of camp, things will go much better. This does take some planning by the group and individuals. The group needs to have someone in charge of things like the bear bag and the dining fly, and individuals need to pack up the night before, except for their shelter and sleep system.

You and your group will take a long break on the trail anyway, so why not make it your breakfast? Snack as you hike and try to get a few miles in before you stop for breakfast. Look for an awesome location with a beautiful view; better yet, find a spot where you can also refill your water bottles.  This “Quick Start” will let you enjoy our great outdoors.

 Philmont Quick Start

All the above reasons apply at Philmont, but it is even more important to hike efficiently so that you can enjoy the programs. I had a discussion with a Scout at Philmont who did not like getting up early and he said, “It is not a race”, but I had to disagree.  The programs at Philmont are first come, first served, so it is to your crew’s advantage to get there first. For an example, our sister crew (they started the same day and had the same itinerary) missed out on black powder shooting because they were slow getting into the staff camp.  It was a day that we were to summit Mount Phillips, but we were to have programs at Clear Creek Camp on our way to our trail camp on top of Mt. Phillips. Our crew got up early and we were the first to arrive at Clear Creek, therefore  we were able to get the first shooting slot after lunch. We enjoyed the other programs offered at the camp while waiting and we cooked our lunch (with no water available at our future campsite on Mt. Phillips). Our sister crew arrived after us and found that the only slot available for black powder shooting was so late in the day that it would make it difficult for them to reach their trail camp on Mt. Phillip,. They had to pass on doing the shooting, so because they got a late start they missed a cool program at Philmont.

The reasons I mentioned earlier about hiking in the cool of the day and avoiding the thunderstorms especially apply at Philmont.  There are many great vistas at Philmont to take long breaks and enjoy the view, so give your crew time to enjoy and still get into camp early to experience the programs.

Philmont Light Gear List

Backpacking Light Philmont Gear List

This article helped me reexamine what I was going to take to Philmont, and maybe the most important part was to understand that the official Philmont gear list is the maximum that you should take with you. It is about what you need not what you want. Your crew needs to take advantage of the fact that it is going as a group. So do you need 12 pocketknives, how many tubes of toothpaste, would one first aid kit be enough? Use the crew to divide the load and split the seldom-to-almost-never used stuff (who brushes their teeth at Philmont?). Keep your own TP, but the crew should have the group supply.

I took a second shirt because I wanted to have a dry shirt to put on if it rained. If it is the mid 50’s or above I don’t put on a raincoat while I’m hiking in the rain. It is too hot inside any “breathable” shell that I have ever worn if I’m trudging up a trail, so the heat and sweat would make me more uncomfortable then just being wet. That being said, if you can hike early in the day at Philmont and avoid the afternoon thunderstorms you can often avoid the hiking in the rain problem. I want to have a dry shirt to keep my core warm after I stop hiking, plus I can wash a shirt and have a dry one to put on. Mostly I used one shirt as my hiking shirt and the other as my camp shirt. My camp shirt was a Columbia long sleeved shirt with the air vents in the back, while my hiking shirt was a merino t-shirt (Icebreaker). If you want to keep the stench down then you need to go with merino because the synthetic shirts will become nasty in a day or 2. I also carried no underwear, just like the author of the article. I used the built-in briefs of running shorts with pockets and the same zipoff pants that author used. You need long pants for many of the programs that Philmont provides and I use a rain skirt instead of rain pants, so I needed another pair of pants. I love hiking in my running shorts and the extra airflow provided by the built in briefs helps to make it more comfortable to hike, there is a reason that hiking kilts have a popularity with some long distance backpackers.

Philmont requires separate sleep clothes so that you have no smellables in your tent. I used a merino shirt and the lightest running shorts I could find (with no built in briefs) to get as much air flow as possible.

I would recommend the Dri ducks rain suits for most Scouts because they are light and cheap. They can be your pants and windshirt, but they are just Tyveks so they are not bombproof.

Use your shakedown hikes to work out what is best for you.

I wanna go back to Philmont.