We were hoping it wouldn’t happen. Today I got the email that Philmont will not open until July 1 at the earliest. We lost our 2018 trek due to fires. Nothing they could do about that. Now we have lost our 2020 trek due to Corona Virus. Again, not their fault. We will discuss our options and figure out what we will do.

Good luck to every one with similar issues.

Almost a month has gone by. More questions than answers at this point.

Will we be able to go to Philmont this year? We are supposed to go in early June. No word on travel restrictions yet or if the camp wil be open at that time.

Wilderness First Aid. Our first date was cancelled due to Stay at Home and all the schools closed. We are hoping to have it later in May. But, ECSI just came out with a 60 extension, so our certifications will just be good enough as they will expire midway through the trek.

No practice hikes yet. Have to get them started soon. Instead of large group hikes, may be smaller groups or on your own.

We normally would have had our 2nd meeting by now. Looking at using Zoom for an online meeting as we can’t get together.

Stay safe and stay in, for now.

Hope everyone is doing alright with all of the concerns about Covid-19. Stay safe.

We are continuing our planning, but it is difficult with the meeting restrictions. Our schools are closed for the better part of the next month, so no Troop meetings or activities.

We are supposed to have our Wilderness First Aid training next month. It could be moved to May if everything remains closed next month.

If the weather would cooperate, we could at least start the practice hikes. It looks like we will have a full crew.

Good luck to everyone who is in the planning stages.

We have train tickets for this summers’ trip. Amtrak was having a big sale. We were able to get round trip tickets at nearly 50% off! That was a great help to the budget.

Our Philmont trek is getting closer.

This weekend our crew got together and reviewed all the treks. They did an amazing job. After about an hour, the scouts took 35 treks, decreased them to 6 and got them ranked. We are ready to submit them for the trek lottery. Hope we get our first or second choice. Now to wait a month for the lottery.

It’s earlier than in the past, but the Itineraries have been released. Many of them seem much shorter than in previous years. this probably has to do with the fires and a large portion that still cannot be used.

There are a lot of relly fun treks with a lot to do.

Our scouts have filled out the activity survey and we”ve compiled their preferences.

Next will be narrowing down the 35 treks to about 10 for them to shoose from.

Submission is different this year as well. Probably more fair than in the past. Now you have amonth to submit and modify. Then they will run a program to decide on the trek you get. Should be interesting to see how this works.

We had our first Philmont planning meeting over the weekend. It was a great meeting with a lot of useful information shared by those who had been to Philmont in the past. It was great to have scouts who had just completed a Rayado trek this summe to tell the other scouts and adults what to expect. We had a nice mix of adults and scouts that had been to Philmont before and those who had never been there.

Tim went over the gear. What to bring and just as important or more important, what not to bring.

We used the 1st meeting outline that is available for download on this site. We went over the budget for the trek and showed the video from the 2016 trek. The scouts filled out the trek survey.

A great start for next years trek.