Each summer 20,000 shining paragons of American boyhood march into the wilderness of Philmont Scout Ranch to confront an age-old question: Can the anarchy of adolescence be tamed?

By Adam Goodheart
Photographs by Craig Cameron Olsen

Say hello to Troop 266, from Peebles, Ohio

The very first ones I saw, out of all the thousands, were like this: a little platoon of eight or ten, coming along the edge of a field in ragged single file, lit by the peculiar flaring light of a summer rainstorm. As they skirted the muddy ditch by the roadside—arms swinging, faces wet and pale—they looked, in their old-fashioned campaign hats and capelike ponchos, like something not from the end of this century, but from its beginning, a faded photo taken at Ypres or the Somme. Then they swung out of sight, leaving me with the distinct feeling that I had entered a foreign country—one bordered not so much by place as by time.

In the America that most of us inhabit, the Boy Scouts seem an anachronism, a quaint holdover from sepia-toned decades past. And if the Boy Scout movement is one of the closest things to a folk religion that our century has produced, then the Philmont Scout Ranch is its Promised Land.

Like many sacred places, Philmont, situated in the cattle country of northeast New Mexico, straddles a boundary between two worlds. To the west, the Sangre de Cristo Mountains rear up, wild and gray: a wall. Immediately on the other side of New Mexico 21, which borders the ranch, the country flattens into vast prairies, vanishing into distant golds and greens among the scattered mesas. Philmont's base camp is sudden and incongruous, a scatter of sprawling single-story buildings and then, just beyond them, row upon row of identical tents, boxy and olive-drab.

Every summer, nearly 20,000 Boy Scouts pass through those tents on their way out to 12-day treks through an immense wilderness. At any given time between June and August, 4,500 Scouts are rambling around the mountains and canyons. Philmont is not just a camp, then. It's a self-contained little empire, with more acreage than certain European countries, its own bustling capital, isolated outposts, and strange provincial subcultures—all of it ruled by paunchy men in khaki uniforms, beribboned like Paraguayan generalissimos. Philmont, its managers say, purchases more freeze-dried food annually than any other single entity in America, including the Department of Defense. Each summer its campers go through 300,000 sticks of beef jerky, a quarter-million packets of Swiss Miss, and 90,000 PowerBars. Its wranglers handle more than 350 head of cattle; its buffalo herd numbers 130. Philmont receives more mail on a summer day than the nearby town of Cimarron does in a week.

The man who gave this empire to the Boy Scouts was never a Scout himself. An Iowan who came west at the turn of the century, Waite Phillips roamed the mountain states before settling down to make a fortune in the oil business. He was a great outdoorsman and, though no intellectual, a serious-minded moralist who composed epigrams for his friends. ("A life without plans results in aimless inefficiency.") By 1941 Phillips had deeded his entire sprawling ranch to the Boy Scouts of America, along with an endowment so generous that a full Philmont program still costs just $375 per Scout.

Each morning from June through August, a stream of buses pours through the big wooden arch that says, "Welcome to Philmont," disgorging hundreds of Scouts. Base camp, I saw as I walked around on the first day of my visit, is an anthology of American boyhood, circa 1999: midwestern troops with the cropped blond hair and perfectly pressed uniforms of an elite military unit; goateed, Teva-shod guys hanging around the snack bar playing Hacky Sack; boys with silver rings through their eyebrows.

Scouting's traditional credos—"thrifty, brave, clean, and reverent" and all the rest of them—might seem of dubious relevance, uncool even, to today's plugged-in adolescents. But oddly enough, in a nation with an ever-increasing number of youth soccer leagues, sports camps, and outdoor-education courses, not to mention the countless electronic distractions that kids can choose from, Philmont has a two-year waiting list. When the camp opened its phone lines last spring to take registrations for the 2001 season, all the slots—plus a 20,000-name waiting list—filled up within four hours.

And Scouting itself manages to steadily increase its ranks every year. In the 1970s the movement was in deep trouble. It stood for everything that American youth was shrugging off, and membership dropped precipitously. In response, the organization moved away from its antiquated-seeming emphasis on hiking and camping, adding new merit badges in things like American Cultures and Disabilities Awareness, and it hired Oscar de la Renta to bring the Boer War–era Scout uniform into the leisure-suit age. But it wasn't until the 1980s that Scouting began to rebound—partly because of the country's turn back toward conservatism, but also because of the increasing popularity of adventure sports. Boy Scouts started earning merit badges for things like whitewater rafting. And Scouting's "high adventure bases," of which Philmont is the largest, grew more and more popular.

Philmont's 12-day treks are no ordinary camping trips. Participants are supposed to train intensively for at least a year before they arrive. For the first two days of their treks, the troops are accompanied by college-age guides, of both sexes, known as rangers—most of the males Eagle Scouts. But after that, for the next ten days, the boys are on their own in more than 200 square miles of wilderness. (Adult scoutmasters accompany them, but merely as "advisers," a title that pointedly reminds them to let the Scouts take charge.)

The ranch's vast backcountry is part Yosemite and part Disney World, with a touch of Colonial Williamsburg thrown in. Each troop follows one of 30 different itineraries that take them to campsites offering activities like rock climbing, mountain biking, and horseback riding. They visit "interpretive camps," where staff members dress and live like characters from the Old West, teaching the Scouts to shoot Civil War–era rifles, pack burros, and pan for gold. All of this has a moral purpose, too: As a bronze plaque near the camp trading post puts it, Philmont's goal is "to encourage the perpetuation of self reliance, courage, faith, [and] justice, on which this great country was built by the American pioneer." It's an experience designed to test what the participants have learned as Boy Scouts—not just the fire-building and knot-tying, but the other stuff, too, all those litanies that seem so strangely archaic: "On my honor I will do my best to do my duty..." "Do a good turn daily." And in the process, the Scouts themselves test, each summer, whether those unlikely articles of faith still hold.