So the wild anarchy of adolescence couldn't be entirely tamed after all, not even in Bill Spice's kingdom of family values. Boys are more complicated creatures than Boy Scouts are, or than Scouts are meant to be. In fact, the boys who seemed to find the most meaning in Philmont weren't (to quote Seton) "little prigs," but the ones with the filthiest T-shirts and the scruffiest faces, the ones for whom Scouting itself was a form of youthful rebellion. The boys in Troop 353 told me they were embarrassed to wear their uniforms back home, but there was one Scout from another troop, an intense-eyed Oregonian, who said of the non-Scouts at his school, "They all wear uniforms, too—all those Abercrombie & Fitch clothes, the fancy outdoor gear that they never even go hiking in. That stuff just says how much money your parents make. But my Scout uniform stands for something."

Back at base camp that afternoon, the guys from Troop 353 seemed like ordinary, lazy teenagers again. They parked themselves at the picnic tables outside the Philmont trading post with cheeseburgers and sodas. Kevin brought out a portable CD player and flipped happily through a binder full of discs by Smash Mouth, Limp Bizkit, and Third Eye Blind. Over by the tents, Sean met some Scouts from Tennessee and traded T-shirts with them.

Something had happened out on the trail, though. I looked over at Corey, who was scarfing down a microwavable pizza. On the trek, the finicky eater had licked his bowl out after every meal. He'd even volunteered to enter a pancake-eating contest when no one else from our group would. He hadn't won, but he'd sat there wedged in between two enormous Scouts from Oklahoma, bravely stuffing the lumps of gummy flour into his mouth—all so that his friends could enjoy the prize, a chocolate cake he'd be too sick to taste. He'd climbed the spar pole at Crater Lake, soldiered on through the hailstorm, and led the ascent of Mount Phillips. Along the way, Camper Timmy had disappeared.

It was too soon to say, as the Scouts headed back home to their classes and soccer practices and food fights and first dates, what of Philmont would stick with them. Experience and memory are more complex than a group photograph of six boys and their fathers posed stiffly below the Tooth of Time. Long before Scouting or Philmont ever existed, societies were sending their adolescent boys into the woods to find themselves. Perhaps the contradictory project that Baden-Powell and Seton began owes its successes to that lost tradition, the idea that at a certain point in their lives young men must be trusted to navigate a world in which anything can happen.

Washington, D.C.–based writer Adam Goodheart reports frequently on travel and history. This is his first assignment for Outside.