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Tristan's Time at Philmont

My name is Tristan Borillo and my interests and hobbies encompass a wide range of activities, from indoor hobbies like video games and dungeons & dragons to outdoor adventures like snowboarding and camping.

Though I spend most of my time indoors, I'm actually a good outdoorsman as well.

I love to camp and hike, which stems from my youth in the Boy Scouts of America.

In fact, I even went to Philmont during my time in the scouts, towards the end of my scouting career.

Philmont is the West Point for Boy Scouts. 

In other words, it's the one of the premiere hiking destinations that almost any boy scout dreams of. 

It's a scout ranch in New Mexico with about 140,000 acres of rocky mountains and camping. 

You get your choice of either a one or two week trek in those mountains, with multiple itineraries that have different activities planned for your week or two week long trek.

Each itinerary has a wide range of activities like firing .30-06 rifles, , blacksmithing, branding, ATV riding and horseback riding, to name a few.

They also cover a wide range of difficulties when it comes to terrain.

While the easiest trek would have you go through about 3 mountains over the course of your week long trek, we decided to take a moderate trek, where we had to traverse 2 mountains in a single day.

Going to Philmont requires a lot of preparation and training, since it's a week long trek with your entire livelihood hitched onto your back.

It requires the ability to be efficient when setting up camp as well as the endurance to haul over a quarter of your body weight across rocky and difficult terrain over long distances.

Put simply, Philmont sucked.

While there where some truly breathtaking moments and views, it was not worth the agony of walking those rough trails and campsites while feeling rushed to get to the next campsite before nightfall.

Maybe we weren't prepared enough or I'm just not rugged enough for Philmont but it was nothing other than pure hype that was met with disappointment.

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