God and nature, boys at one with the woods—this is the Philmont that makes its leaders swell with pride. Earlier in the week I'd spent a few days away from the trek and gotten a lift down to base camp with no less a personage than Philmont's general manager, Bill Spice, who took me bouncing down the mountain in a gigantic Chevy Suburban painted Boy Scout khaki. Spice himself was as khaki, and as oversize, as his vehicle.

We stopped off at an old hunting lodge built by Waite Phillips and now used to house well-connected guests. Its occupant that week was Congressman Pete Sessions, a Republican from Texas. "Pete and his family are good friends of Scouting," Spice told me. "His dad was actually a scoutmaster while he was director of the FBI under Bush and brought his troop on a trek here one summer. I think that was the only time you had assistant scoutmasters out on the trail with Uzis." The younger Sessions, blue-eyed and fair-haired, served coffee and made small talk on the porch of his cabin ("New Mexico is truly the Land of Enchantment..."). Back in the truck, as Spice lit up a cigar, he told me proudly that another congressman would be using the cabin the following week.

In fact, the Boy Scouts of America boasts that more than half of all members of Congress—plus most astronauts and airline pilots—were once Scouts. The ranks of former Eagle Scouts alone include an assortment of celebrity manhood ranging from Neil Armstrong to Gerald Ford to Ross Perot to John Tesh. And these days, Scouting needs all the friends it can get. While Troop 353 was out on the trail, the New Jersey Supreme Court ruled in favor of James Dale, a former Eagle Scout who'd been expelled as an assistant scoutmaster after officials discovered he was gay. Lawyers for the Boy Scouts of America were vowing to fight the decision in the U.S. Supreme Court.

Homosexuality is just one of the issues that has lately seemed to push the Boy Scouts, an ostensibly apolitical group, further into the camp of cultural conservatism. Within Scouting, people refer to its principal battles as "the three G's": gays, girls, and godlessness. The organization, which is not affiliated with the Girl Scouts, has been much slower than European scouting groups in allowing female participation. And along with gays, Scouts who say they don't believe in God are barred from membership. The organization's national leaders have recently taken a sharp turn toward the Baden-Powell tradition, proclaiming that Scouting isn't just about camping and hiking—it's about a particular brand of morality. The Boy Scout Handbook now includes a section recommending that Scouts abstain from sex before marriage.

This stems partly from the Boy Scouts' little-publicized institutional connections to conservative religious groups. Local troops are sponsored by affiliated organizations, often churches. In fact, nearly a quarter of all the scouting troops in America are under the aegis of the Mormon church. But even among parents who are not especially religious, Scouting is seen as a shelter from a hostile culture. And when I asked Bill Spice one afternoon what it was that still drew so many boys to Philmont, he had an immediate answer: "family values." We were sitting in his office, underneath a framed Norman Rockwell poster. "This is the place where they see it all coming together, out on the trail: moral and ethical decision-making, getting along with others, self-respect. And I really think you can't help but believe there's a Supreme Being after you've come out here and seen the New Mexico sky.

"When I hear politicians saying, 'Let's get back to family values,' I just say, the Boy Scouts never left them."

True, Spice said, there were occasional unpleasant decisions to be made. "There was a young man who worked here for several years—in a real leadership position on the ranch, actually. Great young guy. Well, he wrote to me one winter and said he'd decided he couldn't come back because it would violate the BSA policy on homosexuals. To tell the truth, I was sorry to see him go, because he's a good kid. But I believe we have a mandate from the clients who send their kids out here that they're going to be safe, out of harm's way, and not subjected to alternative lifestyles."

That was the official line. But I thought back to my first night in base camp, when I'd gone out to watch the meteor shower with Frank, a young staffer from the Midwest. Also joining us was Irma, a college-age Scout from Europe who was working at Philmont on a summer exchange program. (Frank and Irma are not their real names.) We drove in Frank's car out the main gate and down to a place where Route 21 swings in a high arcing loop eastward.

Here, at the top of the rise, Frank pointed out the constellations: Cassiopeia, Cygnus, Scorpius. Eventually he pulled a case of Coors out of the trunk, and then a bottle of bourbon. This spot was a popular one for Philmont staff to come and drink, it turned out, since it was just off ranch property and hence exempt from the rules. Before long a few other cars had pulled up. In the backseat of one, a staffer passed around a bong. Meanwhile, Frank and Irma had started making out against the hood of Frank's car.

Another car pulled up, and two more guys from base camp jumped out. The driver, a pale, lanky kid of 18 or 19, sat inside, smoking a cigarette. He wore one of the maroon Philmont staff polo shirts. He was very drunk.

"C'mon over here," he beckoned to me. He had a throaty southern accent. "Get closer. I wanna see your dick."

I stared at him, not sure I'd really heard him right: "What?"

"Yeah, c'mon, whip it out for me. I know you got a big one. Yer one of them tall, lean boys. Bet yer hung like a pony."

Then he called out to the two friends he'd arrived with. "Hey, I want somebody's dick in my face. Somebody whip it out and slap me with it."

"Yeah," said one of the guys, "let's all take our dicks out."

"Naw, let's get naked and run sprints again this time," his buddy said.

"So you guys are Boy Scouts, huh?" I joked.

"Yeah, Eagle Scouts. All three of us were."

"And hey, don' worry, we ain't fuckin' fairies or nothin'. We got girlfriends at college. We're just messin' around, y'know?"

"Hey c'mon, let's get naked. Let's get naked."

Soon their car and Frank's were the only two left on the hilltop. Frank detached himself from Irma and walked over. He was now drunk, too.

"Listen, man," he told me, "you're gonna have to ride back with these guys." He looked down. "I mean, sometimes you sort of just find a kindred soul and, well, shit, the flesh is weak. So, uh, anyway, I think we're staying up here tonight."

A few minutes later I was in the southern guys' old sedan, tearing down the road toward camp. They'd forgotten about getting naked, at least for the moment, but the pale, lanky kid was hanging out the window, hurling empty bottles of Bud Light against the road signs and whooping and hollering into the night.