Scouting paradise: Jeff polishes off the pot of greasy chicken at the end of the rainbow

Since its beginning, Scouting has had something of a divided soul. Nothing illustrates that more clearly than the vastly different personalities of the two equally strange men who inspired it.

The worldwide movement started in England under the last great stiff-upper-lip hero of the Victorian age: Lt. General Sir Robert Baden-Powell. Baden-Powell won fame as a commander in the Boer War in 1900, when he'd held the town of Mafeking for seven months under siege by a much larger enemy force, all the while sending out incomparably cool messages to reassure Queen and citizenry: "All well. Four hours' bombardment. One dog killed." After the war he became concerned by what he perceived as the slackness and softness of modern British boys, whom he described as "pale, narrow-chested, hunched-up...smoking endless cigarettes."

A famous photograph of Baden-Powell at Mafeking shows an almost painfully dapper little man with waxed mustache-ends, a swagger-stick, and laced boots that seem to extend halfway to his shoulders. It is pretty much a caricature of a repressive personality, and Baden-Powell, in fact, was committed to the repression of sexual desires of almost every sort, in everyone: His original manuscript of the Boy Scout handbook included an extensive chapter warning Scouts against the terrible hazards of "self-abuse." By dressing up boys like junior officers in Her Majesty's African Rifles and haranguing them endlessly about character-building, Baden-Powell set the tone for a particular approach to Scouting that thrives to this day.

The crisp tents of base camp await the invasion of the boys

Seton met Baden-Powell in 1906 and, with typical impulsive enthusiasm, lent his support to Baden-Powell's Boy Scout movement, which the Englishman would soon establish in America. Seton was given the title of Chief Scout and invited to write the first edition of the famous Handbook for Boys. Soon he came to regret his decision. "My aim was to make a man," he later wrote, "Baden-Powell's to make a soldier." The Scouts' uniforms, he believed, imposed conformity; the endless codes turned the boys into "a lot of little prigs." But the Boy Scouts of America flourished, while the Woodcraft Indians withered away. Though today the organization honors Seton as one of its founding fathers—Philmont's library is named after him—it drummed him out publicly during World War I, a response to his allegedly pacifist and anarchist views.

If Philmont's base camp, with its uniforms and nightly chapel services, represents the Baden-Powell side of Scouting, in its backcountry the spirit of Seton lives on. There are no merit badges to earn out on the trail, no oaths to recite. Once the ranger assigned to a crew leaves, as Julie did on our third day, there's no outsider to nag them about following rules. And the trekking Scouts leave their Class A uniforms behind. Instead, most of them wear T-shirts that each troop has designed specially for its trip to Philmont. Troop 353's featured a migraine-inducing tie-dye pattern of hot fuchsia and piña-colada blue. Printed on top of this was the outline of what I first interpreted as a half-squashed chipmunk but turned out to be the Tooth of Time.

"Whoa...those shirts!" said the staffer who came out to greet us at Crater Lake, the first interpretive camp of our itinerary. He'd woken up not long before and looked unprepared for so much tie-dye so early in the day.

Troop 353 seemed equally nonplussed as they checked out his old-fashioned striped shirt, wool pants held up with suspenders, and dusty bowler hat. "Welcome to the home of the Continental Tie and Lumber Company!" he said. "We chop wood with all kindsa axes here: axes, broadaxes, and Conan the Barbarian axes. We climb spar poles, and if you don't know what those are, you'll find out. We're gonna saw wood with a crosscut saw, and if you feel like tossing the caber, we'll do some caber-tossing."

Philmont's backcountry staffers, especially at the interpretive camps, are often as eccentric—and as unwashed—as Seton himself was. Living by the light of kerosene lanterns, sleeping rolled up in buffalo hides inside log cabins, they defy the Eagle Scout stereotype. This is where you find the ski bums, the potheads, the vegans. Like the original pioneers, these staffers are fiercely clannish and independent-minded, scornful of the soft bureaucrats back in the decadent imperial capital of base camp. Theirs are the jobs at Philmont that nearly everyone wants.

Troop 353 was too tired for ax-swinging and log-sawing. Once they'd finished lunch and pitched their tents, most of them slept until midafternoon. They did make it down to climb the spar poles, though, pulling themselves up lumberjack-style. Even Corey ended up making it to the top. ("I can see Julian from here!" he shouted.) After dinner we had a campfire with a couple of other Scout crews: a real one this time, where the Crater Lake staffers strummed guitars and sang songs as the last glow of sunset faded.

The kids stumbled back to their tents, but the four Crater Lake lumbermen stayed on. They huddled around the campfire with some rowdy girls from one of Philmont's trail-building crews, belting out more music: some Dead, some Johnny Cash, Indigo Girls, John Prine.

I asked one of them—a guy named Rob who wore a vest and watch fob out of an old tintype—why the Scouts themselves never sang. "Honestly, it's kind of hard when they don't seem to know any songs," he sighed. "The kids who come through here now—I know it's a stereotype, but a lot of them really do just seem to have that Gameboy-generation thing. It's hard to get them roused up about anything some of the time. I remember a few years ago, when I started coming here, when the crews would come into a camp, they'd each have their own cheer to let you know they'd arrived, and they'd all have different songs they'd sing on the trail. Now it seems like a lot of them just want to get it over with and get home."