Day three of our trek ends with us setting up camp in a beautiful spot at the top of a ridge. The camp was named Aspen Spring because of the many aspens that grew there and the fresh water spring that ran near by. There were these giant boulders all around that were perfect for climbing. We had a good time doing that and washing ourselves in the spring. I had been several days since our last shower plus we weren’t allowed to wear deodorant. While exploring, Drew and several others happened upon a rare treasure. It wasn’t gold or a valuable artifact, no it was a plastic toilet. A plastic toilet was a treasure because every other toilet in Philmount was made out of rough wood. Plastic is much more comfortable. Everyone was excited to use the “Airplane Toilet” as it was dubbed because it kind of looked like a plane taking flight.
That day happened to be Sunday and because we were all of the same religion we had a religious service or sacrament meeting as we call it in the LDS church. This was a new experience for me since sacrament meetings are usually held in a church building. I was nice to be able to worship God while enjoying his many creations in nature.
When night came it was time for our most awesome game of ultimate frizz bee yet. At the trading post we had all pitched in to buy a frizz bee that lit up in the dark! We also had on head lamps that could either shine with a red light or a white light. The teams were divided between reds and whites. When I had the disk all I could do was throw it at another light that was on my team and hope that they would be able to catch it. It was really cool to see the different lights moving around and light up disk passing between them through the air. I’m sure from above it would have looked like some kind of bizarre form of the old computer game Bong.
From that Sunday I learned that I don’t have to be in a church to feel Heavenly Fathers presence. Outside, inside, or anywhere He is there anytime.

After being lost for several hours we were able to retrace our steps and find our way back the correct path. The forest was beautiful around this time. The mid-morning sun was shining softly through the leafy canopy and the cool air was calm and clear.

Presently I began to sing the Ants Go Marching. The tune is rousing and with most the group joining in we hiked at such a pace that we partially made up for the lost time. In this way we discovered singing to be an excellent way to past the time on the long hikes we made each day. Though from then on we mostly stuck to pop culture songs.

Soon the trail lead us down into the steep valley we had looked into the night before. On our way down we could see the outpost we were headed to. Most of our food had been eaten and we were due to to get a refill at the outpost.

As we traveled along the valley floor a conversation began in our group that soon turned into an argument. The argument was pretty juvenile, but it got quit heated towards the end. We were trying to decide what was better for steak, BBQ sauce or steak sauce. Many cases were made for both sauces but we could not come to and agreement.

In the midst of this war of words and taste bud opinions Rex shouted that there was a bear on the trail up ahead. Because of our argument no one was paying that much attention to the surroundings, so that by the time anyone noticed the beast we were nearly on top of it.

Luckily the bear kept it's distance and we were able to get a close up look at him (I'm assuming the bear was male........... also I assumed his name was Paul[I don't know why he just looked like a Paul]).

At the outpost we got our food (and toilet paper) and took our mid-day rest. Here we also collectively bought a nice friz-bee. It was big, flexible, and with the touch of a button could light up for an interesting night game.

I sent a postcard home from here telling my parents of my adventures so far. I was careful to mention how I hit more clay-pigeons than Rex the day before.

You know some times in life you can get caught up in the little things. You can get so caught up that you don't notice the big things. We were so focused on our discussion of steak flavoring that we almost walked into a bear. I doubt that this would have had many real dangerous consequences, but it makes for a good analogy if you imagine Paul eating our faces off.

The next part of my story concerns our guide Tim. I didn’t really take the time to introduce him thoroughly before so I guess that I’ll do that now. Tim is a young man in this early 20’s and he is deaf. Well not completely deaf, he had hearing aids and with his lip reading skills he managed to operate quit efficiently. He could hear most everything we said except when we didn’t let him see our lips or if we talked too softly.

At Philmount each group is required to be accompanied by a guide for the first two days of their trek. Tim’s short time with us was pretty interesting because his relationship with our group went from not liking each other to being friendly in rapid progression. At first he did not appreciate our goofiness and rebellious attitudes.

One part of our rebelliousness was our desire to take short-cuts that were not approved of by our guide. Tim kept us on the right paths though and we didn’t get lost for the first two days.

So this is where the story of day three begins. Tim leaves early from Devil’s Basin and we are able to guide ourselves using a map to get to our next campsite. Unfortunately my older brother Rex was in charge of the map and he convinced us to follow a fake short-cut trail into the forest least than a mile after we left camp.

To make along story short we ended up lost for a good three hours. We had to sit around while a couple of the others hiked around to get our bearings figured out.

 This just goes to say that it ‘s not always good to take short-cuts. Remember that in life.

Devil's Basin. That's the name of our second camp site. It's really just a small pond in the middle of a meadow. There was a slight decline down to the water's edge, so I guess that's why they called it a basin. As for the Devil part I have no idea why they named it that.

All of our gear and cloths were still wet from the storm the night before. Getting dry was the first priority on our list. I spread out my cloths, sleeping bag, and tent out in the sun and waited for them dry. Meanwhile our guide Tim gave us a speech about the safety procurers we needed to follow because of the many bears that live in the area of Philmount.

First of all, each night we had to string our entire supply of food up a tree, so it wouldn't attract any hungry bears. Also we weren't allowed to wear deodorant. Oddly enough the smell also attracted the bears for some reason. I got my stick confiscated, it was going to be a stinky two weeks.

One activity my group liked to do at Philmount was Ultimate Friz-bee, the game where players throw the friz-bee to their team mates passed the end of the field to score points. We liked to play it because friz-bees are light and easy to carry. Anyway this particular afternoon at Devil's Basin we decided to pass the time by starting a friendly game of Friz-bee in the meadow.

At first we divided the team by shirts verses skins. We were having a lot of fun, but everyone wanted to be on the skin's team because it was a warm, sunny day. It appeared that there was no one near the basin and all of us in the group were guys so we took off our pants and played shirts verses pants. It was weird, fun, and awkward all at the same time. The game went on for a good hour or so. Sometime amid our throwing and jumping in semi-nude conditions we noticed a group of older, female campers on the other side of the pond, half hidden by the trees. I don't know how long they had been there, but they were eying us with shocked looks on their faces. Needless to say we promptly dressed and went back to camp.

Latter on we hiked to the top of a near by ridge and looked at a sweeping view of the setting sun. Tim the guide was leaving us on our own in the morning, and he wanted to give us our final instruction. Each of us was given a card that had the Philmount code of conduct on it. Basically they said we should not step off the trail and leave the little critters alone. Most of the cards were lost or thrown away. I think Drew ended up burning his.

You know you never know who might be watching you. Just like those ladies that saw us running around with our pants off. In life you are constantly being watched by people around you. What they seen is a refection of your family and community. Do the right thing all the time, even if you don't thinks anyone is watching.

It's day 2 of our Philmount adventure and we are all soaking wet from the rain the night before, but we are having a good time for the most part. Cameron seemed to be the exception, he had developed a saying that let us all know how he was feeling, “ I am not a happy camper.” This became his trademark statement through out the following 9 days which he used whenever it was cold, wet, or he was hunger. Anyways we set out on the muddy trail that morning admiring the wet landscape and headed to our first activity that was planned for our group, skeet shooting. The headquarter for the skeet shooting range was a little, old cabin at end of a large, open valley. There we were given a through lecture on gun safety from the mean, “master of the shotgun range” as he preferred to be called . Before we could get to shooting we had to reload our own shell, this I had never done before. Each used shotgun shell had be filled with new powder, pellets, and a plunge (not necessarily in that order). All of this was accomplished by using a nifty, little machine apply named a reload station that measured out the correct amounts of powder and pellets appropriate for a 12 gauge shotgun. We each filled 5 shells and headed out to the range. The range was made up of several barriers that concealed the remote-controlled clay pigeon launchers at various distances from where the shooter was positioned. It was a sweet setup, a lot better the single hand-operated launcher that I was used to. We had a blast trying to see who could hit the most pigeons with the 5 shells we each had. I hit 4 while my

brother Rex only scored 1, a fact I still remind him of to this day. We had enough fun for some of us to pay a few extra bucks for 3 additional rounds.

Finally the last shot was fired and it was time for us to leave. The morning was about over and our camp site for that night was still 5 miles away. We ate our lunch and took off through the woods. The going was pretty smooth until we reach the longest, muddiest, most challenging stretch of steadily inclined trail that any of us had see before. There were no switch backs, just a solid mile of straight, uphill madness. Soon all of our shoes were caked with about 10 pounds of mud each. All efforts to clear them only resulted in more mud stinking to my shoe. The worse part was that if we weren't stepping forward we were sliding backwards. That made resting hard. I felt like the little engine that could, fighting to make it up that hill and pushing myself on with “ I think I can, I think I can”. My lungs and legs were on fire. It seem as if the hill had no end.............., but it did and looking back down made it all worth it. To know we had accomplished such a difficult task was a wonderful feel. The last leg of the day's journey was a breeze. Along the way I had an awkward conversation with Cameron, but that's not important so I'll just end by saying that we made it to our second camp site safely.

Life is like that long, muddy hill. If we are not constantly moving forward, constantly improving ourselves we are sliding backwards. You can't be satisfied with where you're at, whether it be mentally, physically, or spiritually. If you're not improving you're losing.

In June of 2009 my friends and I set out on the greatest adventure of our lives. We had been planning and saving for almost a year in order to go on this expensive and demanding excursion. Our excitement for this trip had been boiling over ever since we had first made reservations to Philmont back in 2008. In my mind it would be the perfect camping trip and I'm pretty sure that's what everyone one in our group was expecting. So it was just our luck that the first night on the trail we had to sleep right in the middle of a raging thunder storm! To make matters worse we really weren't that good at setting up our Philmont-issued tents yet. The ends of the tent were suppose to be staked into the ground to create the tension that held the whole thing up, but my tent buddy Caleb and I felt that there was no point in carrying around the extra weight for 2 weeks so we made due with several large rocks that were laying about the camp site. It wasn't the best idea cause the rocks slowly slide inward releasing the tension which resulted in a sad droopy tent.

So there we were at the bottom of a wooded ravine, it was the first of 8 camp sites that we would occupy over the next 10 days. Everyone was just settling in for the night when it happened. An earsplitting boom shock the night and almost made me jump out of my sleeping bag. It didn't feel like any thunderstorm I had ever experienced. It wasn't till the second lightening strike that I realized what was up. The sky was lighting up at the exact same moment as the thunder boom! The lightening was striking the top of the ravine!I don't think that I've been that scared since. Whenever I had been in a storm before that I could always count at least 6 seconds in between the light and the sound. That means that the actually lightening bolts were quite a few miles away and that the chances of getting struck were pretty slim. That night at Philmont I knew that my chances of getting struck were higher that ever so I did the only thing I could think of, I cured up in my sleeping bag and shut my eyes. I actually manged to get some sleep except for a few times when I accidentally kicked something hard and round.

In the morning everything was soaked. The thunder had brought with it a heavy rain that seeped into our poorly assembled tent which had miraculously withstood the wind and the rain. Unfortunately Drew and Cameron weren't so lucky. Their tent had collapsed some time in the night prompting Drew to seek refuge from the storm in mine and Caleb's tent. It turns out that it was Drew's head that I had been kicking in the night. As for Cameron we found him tangled inside the fallen tent we all of their stuff and a decent amount of rain water. Needless to say the day had started out crappy and their was a general feeling of misery in the air. Not only were our cloths and packs weighed down with rain water but we had a 9 mile hike through the mud to look forward to. It was in that moment when things were getting tough that we decided that we were gonna make the most of it. We realized that we had invested too much into this trip to go through it with poor attitudes. We decided to be happy then and not wait for things to get better and that made all the difference. I believe that's true in life too.

I love to camp. Camping is at the top of my list of favorites next to food and girls. It's not just the sleeping outdoors and enjoying nature aspect of it that I find appealing, but also the many activities that are available while roughen it in the backwoods. Exploring caves, climbing trees, and hunting small animals are all things I like to do while camping. There are also other things that require more time and equipment that make for great camp activities, like shooting firearms and rock climbing. Now I've been camping since as far back as I can remember, with the scouts, my family, or just a small group of my friends. Most of those trips only included a portion of the previously mentioned activities that I so enjoy......... except one. It's called Philmont Scout Ranch and it's the mother load of all camping destinations. It's the boy scout capitol of the world, located in the mountains of northern New Mexico that thousands of avid campers flock to each year. It takes all of the coolest parts of camping and rolls them into a two week backpacking adventure that would blow your mind! (Unless you don't love camping , in which case you can go ahead and stop reading this blog right now. Shun the nonbeliever!) It's so awesome that literally every third memory that pops into my brain is from my Philmont adventure three years ago. I had to throw out an entire year of 7^th grade social studies to make sure I keep those precious memories at the forefront of my mind. What made Philmont 251extra special to me were the people that were there with me. Rex Self, my older brother was there along with my two favorite cousins Drew Shumway and Cameron Allred plus one of my best friends Caleb Layden. I don't always get along with my brother but I'm sure glad that we were able to share in that fun experience together. I haven't hung out with any of those guys since and not reminisced about our time together at good o'Philmont. The stories never get old even though they've been retold countless time. You know when someone tells a story and then no one laughs so they say “ you had to be there”, well this isn't one of those times. These stories are funny and entertaining to anyone, unless you hate camping then I would ask that you please review the fine print above. I've been meaning to write down my experiences from Philmont for a while now but I could never find the time. Now I record these stories and share them with you at the same time as I receive college credit! And with all of these memories written down I can finally have room in my noggin for the Periodic Table of Elements or the names of books from the Canon of Literature. It can't get any better than this! Each week I plan on writing a few of my adventures and sharing them with you. I hope you enjoy.