7/3 - Thursday

Over the Tooth. THAT WAS TOUGH. Shafers Peak was nice but the Tooth was a steep climb and then fogged in. After a serious brush with weather on Baldy only a few days ago, I got everyone off the Tooth as quickly as I could.

Finally the switchbacks going down into Philmont base camp seemed to go on for 600 miles. We saw a rattlesnake on the trail. Richard says it would be 8 feet if you picked it up. My son, Chris says it was more like 3 feet. From where I was it looked like more than 4 feet, possibly 6 feet. I pulled up a digital photo and couldn't tell because in my picture the snake was coiled to strike. OUCH!

Once the snake went off the trail, we proceeded down into base camp and turned in all our stuff and prepared to go home. (snake pic added 7/8)

At the end of the afternoon, we went into Cimarron, NM for Simple Simon's pizza. Pizza never tasted so good. Then there was ice cream then back to camp.

I went to Mass and Father Steve had a wonderful sermon. I spoke with Chaplain Joe about the length of the announcements and he tried to cut them a little shorter. Joe is a seminarian in the diocese of Lubbock Texas. I will keep his vocation in my prayers. After Mass, I walked by and shook hands with Rabbi Rock then went to evening camp fire. A short nap and we were loading onto the bus (at 2:30 am!) for the trip to the Denver airport.

Philmont removes all masks and all of us showed our faults on the trail. There are some in our crew I would go back with tomorrow. Others, I could only go with as a missionary and pretty much only if God handed me the order in writing. I remember praying several times on the trail Col 1:24 ... "Now I rejoice in my sufferings for your sake and in my flesh I am filling up what is lacking in the allictions of Christ on behalf of his body which is the church." To me this relates to offering up the sore feet, sore back and interpersonal trials.

My son has "Cry the Beloved Country" assigned for summer reading. I read it on the trip. What a wonderful book. Well written. It is a tragic subject, the disenfranchisement of Africans of their mineral, land, labor and basic human rights. But it is told in a way that has mercy to go around on all sides. The book filled the time in base camp and on the planes and busses. I hope my son enjoys it as much as I did. I remember all the beauty we saw at Philmont and there is one passages in particular that I found meaningful, poetic and beautiful...

Cry the beloved country, for the unborn child that is the inheritor of our fear. Let him not love the earth too deeply. Let him not laugh too gladly when the water runs through his fingers, nor stand too silent when the setting sun makes red the veld with fire. Let him not be too moved when the birds of his land are singing, nor give too much of his heart to a mountain or a valley. For fear will rob him of all if he gives too much.

Just as Africans had to have hope in oppression, on our trek we had to focus on the positive. Glass half full. Don't be distracted by bickering. Don't be distracted by the difficulties of hanging food in bear bags 50 feet off the ground. Don't be put off by having to use outdoor toilets frequently without walls. Don't be distracted by an endless onslaught of powdered food, heavy packs, mud, dust, sweat, sweltering desert sun by day, cold wind by night and sloped camp sites where you wake up in the fetal position in the bottom 1/3 of your tent. Look to the beauty around you from the flowering cacti to the deer to the mountain streams. Nicole tried to force us to do this back at Cottonwood. I see her point now that we rushed through fast enough to "see everything" but I can't help but wonder if some of our crew members "saw nothing" beyond the superficial. In the panorama below (added 7/7), Nicole is seated in the lower right. We are on the ridge looking down into Cottonwood. The tiny white triangle is our dining fly.







Jeff H will be receiving a new pack from Philmont. They will mail it to him. There was no discussion about how to prevent such a thing in the future, but it is not professional to discuss personnel actions with anybody but the guy involved (the driver). I bet there will be some consequences for him even if the staff didn't tell us about it.

I forgot to clean my memory card before coming here but I still managed to snap over 1,100 7MP shots. I have added pictures to this blog that show what can be seen when you look past the glass half empty to see the glass God filled up for us millions of years ago here in the Sangre de Cristo Mountains.