Keeping a stiff upper lip: Greg, post-hailstorm, soldiers on

The rain had stopped by the time we shouldered our packs and made for the trailhead the next morning. Still, there were thick scarves of cloud below the Tooth of Time. We'd reached a swollen stream that Julie had made us walk through, ignoring an easy crossing a few yards upstream: "Hey, guys, that's why you have boots!" she merrily told us.

A few minutes later, Ken Davidson, the heft-iest of the adults, stopped halfway up a modest incline. Sweat trickled across his bald dome and dripped off the tip of his nose. "Oh, man, that's enough for me," he gasped. "That's about as much as I can stand."

Then the mosquitoes started biting. Corey looked mournfully down at his left arm. "I got bit five times just on this one," he said. He'd put on his hat, broad-brimmed, with a chin string; jammed down to just above his eyes, it made him look even more lemurlike. I helped him get his water bottle out of the side pocket of his pack, and he took a swig.

Corey grimaced. "Ewwwww!"

"You don't like it?" I asked.

"Disgusting!"

"You don't like water?"

"He doesn't like very much," explained Greg.

"He likes Mountain Dew," Sean said.

"No, I don't like that anymore," said Corey. "I don't really like eating."

By the time we reached our campsite, though, even trail food looked good. Dinner was a glutinous mass of salty noodles speckled with wizened little cubes of chicken—but each boy finished his portion, even Corey. Part of the Philmont ethos is an almost obsessive dedication to cleanliness, and so before we washed the dishes, Julie made us lick every last morsel out of our bowls, till they glistened with the faintest coating of yellow slime. Jeff manfully picked up the cooking pot, stuck his head in it, and licked that out too, till he emerged a few minutes later, red-faced and smiling gamely. Then he noticed some stew still adhering to the inside of my bowl, and so, barely pausing for breath, he went to work on that as well. I was starting to see why the rest of the troop thought he was leadership material.

The rules didn't stop with cleanliness. There were the Five W's of choosing a tent site. The Four C's of successful group bonding. The art of Making a Collective Decision. There would be no whittling. No washing in streams. No deodorant. Campfires—seemingly Scouting's raison d'être—were discouraged for safety reasons, although once out of sight of the rangers, nobody paid much attention.

There are some good reasons for such rules. One night back in the 1980s, two Scouts who had sprayed deodorant all over each other when they were horsing around were dragged from their tent and mauled by a black bear. And just a few years ago, a Scout won a large out-of-court settlement from Philmont after scalding himself by tipping over a cooking pot into his lap. Scouting officials have also gone all-out to rid the organization of its reputation as a magnet for pedophiles. At base camp, separate shower houses are marked "Adult Males" and "Male Youth." And the Boy Scouts' "two-deep rule" decrees that at least two adult leaders must be present whenever scoutmasters meet with their charges.

The disciplined approach clearly had its benefits. Looking around our campsite, it was hard to believe that thousands of teenagers tramped through here every summer. There was no graffiti carved on the trunks of the fir trees, no litter in the grass. In the fringes of the woods beyond our tents, a big mule deer buck moved, browsing, through the twilight.

But here we were around a fire circle with no fire in it, in a wilderness where wildness was kept at bay.