I woke up at about 3:40am, and got the crew up at 4:00am.  Due to a little grogginess and the early morning, the crew worked a little slow, but we did fine and started hiking at 5:20am.  The day’s hike included climbing up and over two major passes before a final decent into Fish Camp at the confluence of the Rayado River and the Aqua Fria Creek. 

The first climb, up Fowler Pass was a beautiful hike through mixed pine and aspen forest, but was pretty hard.  We caterpillared some of the way up to the top, and that gave me a chance to tell every crewmember that a crew conference was needed to try to fix a crew problem before we ate breakfast.  The crew conference was one of the most painful things I have ever been a part of,  but allowed the crew to air their  feelings and open an avenue to allow the crew to solidify together for the rest of the trip.  After the conference, the boys surprised me with Father’s Day cards from my wife and daughters.  All of the emotion of the morning caused many tears, some happy and some sad.

We ate breakfast there at Fowler Pass, then descended down into the Bonito Creek drainage meadow – wow, how beautiful – then began the second climb of the hike up Webster Pass.  This climb was not quite as hard as the first, and the boys were really fired up after our talk.  They were walking us old guys into the ground.  We reached the top of Webster Pass just before 9:00am, and I told them that I wanted to reach Fish Camp, another mile away, by 9:30am.  The boys just took off, leaving the advisors in their dust.  We caught up to them at Fish Camp after a fast, scary decent down Webster Pass at 9:20am.

We were assigned our camp and quickly set camp up so we could get into the fly tying and fly-casting programs before we had to do our conservation project at 1:00pm.   We had to wait while Crew 3 did fly tying first, so some of the guys went to fly-casting, and others just sat around journaling or enjoying a little free time.  After the crew finished fly tying, we went back to camp for a quick lunch and returned to the fly tying cabin at 1:00pm to report for conservation. 

This year, our conservation project was a totally new project for Philmont.  We participated in streambed reconstruction in the Aqua Fria creek.  After about 45 minutes was spent discussing the project, and the various tools we would be using (and being introduced to the Ed Pulaski by Ryan), the two crews were broken up into work groups doing different tasks.  Most of the work groups stayed in the area of the cabin, either working on re-direction dams in the river, or clearing the stream bank of brush for other re-direction dams to be placed.  One group went up the hill, way up the hill, to cut down and “peel” an 80 foot tall Ponderosa pine for a new dam.  The conservation guys, Ryan and “Big E” were great, and the project was a super change from doing trail construction.  We worked till 4:00pm, with little spatterings of rain falling on us from time to time.

After the conservation project, we went back to camp to begin dinner.  While dinner was cooking, we were given a beautiful sky view – a large cloud blocking the sun causing bright silver rays to radiate all around the cloud.  KP and crew gear was done by 7:00pm, once again an excellent job by the crew. 

While KP was going on, the advisors began looking at the maps and water situation for our next few days.  The stretch running from Clear Creek to Sawmill without water was beginning to worry us.  That stretch would force us to hike almost 2 full day’s hikes without any water other than what we could carry.  We went down to advisor’s coffee at 7:30pm, and discussed our concerns with the staff there, including our cons guy Ryan.  He was VERY helpful, radioing logistics a couple of times to ask questions for us, and gave us a possible water supply suggestion for the hike.  He did a great job and convinced us we could make the hike as it was set up.  We also got a quick tour of the Fishing Lodge while we were discussing the situation with Ryan.  It is beautiful in the cabin.  Staffers use oil-lamps as light after it gets dark.  Many were journaling, and a couple was playing checkers.