When we put away as much food as we can possibly hold, Jeff tells us it's time to get the pack shakedown out of the way. So we return to the tents and, following his instructions, pick up our cots and move them from the tents to the dusty ground in front of the tents.

As Jeff reads from the Philmont "Guidebook to Adventure" and calls out the articles we should have, we produce those items from our packs and place them on our cots. The shakedown is an important process because it ensures that a hiker has the essential items but leaves behind those unnecessary things which only take up space and weight.

Actually, we did this on our own as a crew the Sunday before we left _ a step designed to ensure that those who discovered they had forgotten something would have time to do something about it.

We can see as the cots begin to fill with camping gear that we're doing well on backpacking stoves. We probably need no more than three but we've got six _ five MSR Whisperlites and a Coleman Peak-1. In addition, most everyone is carrying a fuel bottle. We'll have to fill these at central supply before we heard for the trail.

With the cots out of the tents, it's an easy matter to sweep out the tents, which we are required to do upon leaving tent city. Jeff gets a broom for us from the welcome center while we re-pack our packs and distribute our three-day food supply and cooking gear as equally as possible among ourselves. Sweeping done, we replace the cots, tie the tent flaps and take our packs to the welcome center, where they will remain until we catch the bus for the trailhead at 1 p.m. Meanwhile, we've got some time to kill and it's getting hot out here.

First, however, we've got to have the crew photograph made. The sun is at the correct angle, so we quickly take positions on the bench.

Here's our crew photo.

Front Row, Left to Right: Mitch Hollberg, Advisor Peter Hand, Ranger Jeff Hamilton, Advisor Richard Pettys, Daniel Keys.

Back Row, Left to Right: Thomas Daniel, Tim Crimmins, Ruben Rodriguez, Geoffrey Hand, Chip Pettys, Richard Palmer.

The photographer re-arranges us a bit and then - click - it's done. We'll have copies waiting for us here in 12 days when we come off the trail. Now we split up. Most members of the crew head for the lockers, where we will store gear and money that we don't want to take with us on the trail. This is also the time for most of us to buy white gas for our fuel bottles. After that, we're off for a tour of Villa Philmonte, which Jeff has previously arranged.

Chip and I head to the health lodge. He came to Philmont with the remnants of a stomach virus and now the old man isn't feeling so good, either.

Villa Philmonte, Waite Phillips' summer home, is an easy walk across the highway from base camp. Tours are given by reservation only, and visitors are required to take off their shoes before entering the house. A fellow could get used to living here. Ornate area rugs cover rich wood floors while stained-glass windows admit a richly-textured light. One such window, Richard recalled later, is said to feature a type of cactus not present in the region, an error on the part of the craftsman.

Some other features Richard recalled from the tour:

-The stylized bull that has come to serve as a Philmont symbol was inspired by a design in the hand-made, wrought iron fireplace screen in the Villa Philmonte Library.

-The Philmont Arrowhead patch, which we all hope to earn at the end of our trek, was inspired by a design in the fireplace screen in the villa's basement.

-What now is referred to as the "trophy room" of Villa Philmonte was actually Waite Phillips' poker room. During a game in 1927, Waite and his brothers all carved their initials in the card table. Mrs. Phillips angrily demanded that her husband cover the table with a rug after that. The Phillips brothers were the founders of the Phillips Petroleum Company.

-From an upstairs room, Waite Phillips could look out into the back country and see a rock outcropping that has since become known as Window Rock. This landmark lies on a ridge roughly between Cathedral Rock Camp and Cimarroncito Camp in Philmont's Central Country.

A visitor would be hard-pressed to come away from a tour without knowing this was Waite Phillips' home. The initials "WP" are incorporated in a ceiling fresco in the foyer. The initials of Phillips' children and treated in a similar fashion elsewhere in the house. On a basement fireplace, an artist has painted a fine coat of arms with the legend "UU Ranch." (Get the connection? Pronounce that as Double-U. What letter comes to mind? Phillips wanted to use the letter "W" in the name of his ranch, but found it was already in use. So he decided UU would accomplish the same thing.)

In the backyard, Phillips and his family had their choice of relaxing at a pond or a swimming pool. The pool has been filed in, but the pond remains as a tranquil oasis ringed with shade trees.

Tour over, the crew returns to base camp. At the health lodge, meanwhile, the medics have said Chip and I are okay for the trail if we feel like it. He does. I don't. I decide to hang back at the health lodge for a day and then try to catch up with the crew tomorrow at either Cimarroncito or Sawmill. So while he joins the rest of the crew for lunch, I take up residence for a while at the health lodge.

For the rest of the crew, today's lunch at the dining hall marks the last non-canned, non-freeze dried meal they will enjoy for the next 12 days. But they don't have time to linger over it. At 1 p.m., the yellow, Cimarron school district bus pulls up to the welcome center, loads 621-D-7 and three other crews and heads down the highway toward Cimarron.

While I wasn't with them for this part of the journey, they briefed me on it later so I could continue the journal.

A mile or so down the highway after leaving base camp, the bus turns left onto a jeep trail that leads past Webster Lake reservoir and then stops near the fork leading to Ute Gulch, one of the backcountry quartermaster stores. There, the bus driver offloads the crews that will be hiking to Cathedral Rock Camp. Since that includes us, our crew members hoist their packs and look around for the trail.

The first day's hike at Philmont is generally a short one because crews still are becoming acclimated to the high elevation and low oxygen content of the air. Base camp, which is one of the lower elevations at Philmont, is a mile higher than Atlanta and there is 20 percent to 30 percent less oxygen content than at sea level.

The foot trail to Cathedral Rock is not marked. Crews are left to rely on their Philmont topographic maps, their compasses, and their good judgment. It also helps to know what a foot trail at Philmont looks like, as opposed to - say - a wash or a jeep trail. Richard and Timmy, our veterans, have had some first-hand experience with such matters and quickly choose the proper route. As they lead 621-D-7 out, other crews fall in line behind.

Richard recalled that he and Timmy kept a close eye on the map and the features of the landscape, not wanting to get "caught" as we did last year. On that earlier trek, our first day's hike of two miles turned into four when we missed a subtle turn in the trail on Antelope Mesa in route to Vaca. It was no big deal, and we learned later that other crews missed it, too, but that made us all a little more careful after that.

The first part of the hike is steep as the trail winds from the high plains into the foothills of the Cimarron Mountains, but Cathedral Rock Camp is reached in just under an hour.

Camp is about a quarter-mile east of the massive cliff overlooking Cimarroncito Reservoir that gives Cathedral Rock its name. Our 1987 crew passed this way traveling between Cimarroncito and Clark's Fork, but did not have an opportunity to camp here. So this is new terrain.

The first order of business at camp is to set up the dining fly and erect the tents. The fly is almost always first priority because it can provide quick shelter for people and gear in case of rain. And guess what? The sky, in fact, is darkening.

Jeff, beginning the training course he must give each crew, shows the crew how to rig the fly low to keep out wind-blown rain and how to minimize strain on the fabric.

At Left: Cathedral Rock and Cimarroncito Reservoir

Now it is time for the tents. These light-weight backpacking tents don't weigh much to begin with, and weigh even less when divided between tenting partners. Chip and Thomas are partners for one tent; Richard and Ruben for another; Timmy and Daniel for a third; Mitch and Geoff for a fourth. Mr. Hand and I will share the fifth.

Camp is pretty much set up when the sky decides to unload. This is half-way to be expected, since rain and sometimes hail come often to Philmont in the early afternoon. Usually, it is over quickly and the day turns sunny again. Anticipating this, the crew members duck under the tarp. Ruben settles in so well that he is soon asleep. The others spend their time playing cards. The rain lasts and lasts, continuing well past the time it would be expected to let up. So at 5:30 p.m. or so, a decision is made to begin cooking under the tarp.

Philmont cooking essentially means boiling water. Virtually all of the food is freeze-dried, so crews must simply boil water, combine it with the ingredients in the freeze-dried packets, and then serve. Over the course of a few days, one supper becomes indistinguishable from another. It might have a different texture - spaghetti versus chicken and noodles versus beef stroganoff - but after a while it all sort of tastes the same. Which is not to say it's not nourishing. Far from it, we are assured that we are getting about 4,000 calories a day - about twice the normal amount - with the emphasis on carbohydrates. Even so, some of us will lose as much as 12 pounds by the end of the trek.

Dinners typically feature a main dish, a vegetable or dessert and drink mix. Sometimes there are bread sticks. Breakfasts vary quite a bit, ranging from omelettes to pancakes to milk and cereal with that most glorious of foods - pemmican - occasionally tossed in. More on pemmican later. Lunches needed no cooking. Often, they consisted of "spreadables" such as creamy tuna salads or chicken salads or the like, packed in tins. Often, a beef stick would be included, and sometimes a fruit-filled pastry or a wonderful concoction of honey, almonds and other natural goodies called a "Wah-Guru-Chew" and apparently made by some religious sect in Oregon.

Richard, whose tasks include making duty assignments throughout the week, decides that he and Ruben will cook tonight's supper. So stoves must be brought out from the packs, the three food packages containing tonight's supper must be located, and Mitch - who is carrying the billie pots on the outside of his pack - must retrieve those items.

The meal packs are numbered so there is no chance of mixing the wrong ingredients, but our packing is rarely so precise that one person winds up carrying all of the necessary packages for any one meal. What that means is, everyone must look through their backpacks in order to find the proper meal packs for the cooks.

While Richard and Ruben crank up the stoves, other crew members are loading the meal packs we will not use tonight into the bear bags, along with their personal "smellables." A smellable is anything that might have an odor _ toothpaste, deodorant, soap - and, thus, might attract a bear. Before we turn in at night, we hang our unused meal packs, our smellables and our garbage high in the air some distance from camp so that bears won't come prowling through our campsite. Philmont has periodically experienced mild trouble with black bears in the past. Grizzlies once roamed here, too, but that was a long time ago (or so they say.)

While cooking continues under the tarp, crew members go off with Jeff to raise the bear bags. Each camp at Philmont, whether unstaffed like this one or staffed by rangers who conduct program activities, has bear cables scattered throughout the area. These are steel cables strung between trees at heights of 15 or more feet above the ground. A crew doubles its 100-foot bear bag rope and tosses the looped end over the cable, holding the two loose ends securely so they don't fly off somewhere. The loop of the rope is then lowered to the ground and the bear bags are secured to it with clove hitches. Then, while several crew members hoist each bag off the ground, several other crew members grab the loose ends of the rope and pull mightily, thus raising the load high into the air. The two ends are then tied to separate trees. Jeff shows crew members how to tie the ends to the anchor trees using a chain knot, which takes up slack but also comes loose with a slight tug.

Supper is about ready now - spaghetti and applesauce. Also tonight, Jeff is supposed to cook us a cobbler - a Philmont tradition. But it's too wet to build a fire in the fire ring, so a little innovation is called for. The crew decides to mix three cans of sliced apples together with the applesauce and the leftover spaghetti. I don't know what you call that, but they insisted it was good.

Now it is clean-up time, a process intimately involved with something in each camp site known as a sump. A sump is a large drain pipe that has been sunk into the ground. A double layer of screening is fastened securely around the exposed end. This is the disposal area for cooking liquids. These things often are hard to locate because they are situated some distance from camp and rise only inches above the ground.

To prepare for clean-up, a billie pot is filled with water and placed on a stove to heat. A second billie pot is half-filled with water and set aside. When the water on the stove is hot, half of it is poured into the second pot to mix with the cold water. This gives you a luke-warm pot for washing and a very hot pot for rinsing. CampSuds are added to the lukewarm pot and half of an HTH tablet is added to the very hot pot to make a strong sanitizing rinse.

Food remaining on the plates or in the dirty cooking pots is removed using APP. That stands for "all-purpose-paper." Most people refer to it as toilet tissue. That gunk then is discarded in a plastic trash bag. A small amount of wash water then is dribbled on the plate or utensil, and that is then strained through the metal strainer held over the sump. Food particles collected in the strainer get tossed in the plastic bag. A dip into the sanitizing water completes the process. The utensils then are placed on a clean trash bag and left in the open air to dry.

There still is some daylight left after the trash bag is added to the collection on the bear cable, so the crew decides to hike the quarter-mile or so to the reservoir for a good look at Cathedral Rock.

There's almost no such thing as a bad picture at Cathedral Rock. Except for the Tooth of Time, it may be one of the most photographed locations at Philmont.

Two mule deer join the crew at the reservoir, the second deer-sighting of the day. Perhaps they are the same pair which wandered through the campsite earlier. The muleys haven't entirely lost their fear of man but many will come within 20 or 30 feet, or even closer.

It is beginning to darken now and the crew finds itself increasingly chilly. They head back to camp and hop in the sack. Bedtime at Philmont generally comes right after dark.