Philmont Crew Gear and Personal Gear List Innovations

I was the adult advisor for the 2009 Philmont expedition number 628-T1. We took Trek 8 at Philmont Scout ranch in Cimmeron New Mexico. In preparing for this two week backpacking adventure, I designed tested, and built a number of new techniques. These ideas reduce impact on Philmont resources and improve crew safety. I also include some ideas about cloths washing and camp towels that I have pieced together from other sources. By describing them in more detail in the documents below, the next person will not have to reinvent the wheel.

All these innovations were run past our Ranger, the head Ranger, and Philmont upper management. Everything was approved for our use except the new bear bag system. Philmont liked the idea, but they wanted to try out the idea themselves during the off-season before allowing crews to use it. They did allow our use of the lightweight Amsteel Blue ropes. One 150' piece for the main bear bags and a second 150' piece for the oops bags. We had trained the boys in the standard "Philmont Way" for bear bags and used that. We did come up with a couple innovations when using the Amsteel ropes the Philmont Way. These are described in the article below our Bear bag system article.

• A super efficient meal preparation technique - Going beyond turkey bagging, which involves eating from (and cleaning) bowls, this new method uses the Philmont food packages themselves as the cooking bags and the bowls. The technique minimizes clean up and gray water produced (none), it also minimizes the amount of trash produced, the amount of fuel used (we used two 8oz canisters per week with some left over), and the amount of water needed (important in dry camps of which we had a couple). Our entire cook kit weighed only 24 oz, which is the weight of a single Philmont 8 quart pot.
• A bear rope system to minimize impact on the trees at Philmont - Philmont has cables strung 20 feet high, but requires each crew to throw and pull up their own food bags (often weighing 75-100 pounds). This system uses an innovative hook I invented that will hook and unhook from the cable with no moving parts.
• Using Amsteel Blue Rope at Philmont - Bear Bagging the Philmont Way we came up with a few clever ideas to make it easier for our boys to throw, tie, and handle the Amsteel Blue bear ropes.
• "Chair-e-it" backpack I created a lightweight backpack that converts to five different modes: backpack (seen above), camp chair, lounge chair (seen left), cot, and fanny pack. Yet only weighs 1 lb 15 oz. The article has pictures of all the modes and notes about its actual use during our Philmont trek. If you like to have something to sit on in camp other than the hard ground or wet rock, or a place to lay back and take an afternoon snooze, but don't want to carry the weight of a chair, check out this innovative backpack design.
      If you would like to build your own Chair-e-it backpack, I have written up a set of instructions
      describing how I did it – Part 1, Part 2, Part 3.   If you do build one, send me a picture.
• An 18 oz two man tent - Philmont encourages sharing tents to reduce impact to the ranch and take up less space in the camps. I came up with some non-traditional construction techniques to create a really lightweight tent using silvered polyethylene material, which is quiet, tough, easy to fold, totally waterproof, and adds thermal insulation to the tent. Not only is the tent lightweight, but it also allows a lighter sleeping bag to be used, saving even more weight.
  It has a 45 sq ft footprint yet only weighs 18 oz. Here is the tent set up at Lower Bonita Camp.
• Compact backpacking solar charger I built a compact solar charger after I was unable to find any commercial charger that could charge two 2500mah AA bateries in a single day. I took my GPS to Philmont and wanted to avoid carrying 14 days worth of batteries in my pack. Not to mention the impact to the landfills to throw all those dead batteries in the trash.
• Backpacking washing machine - This idea has been used at Philmont before, it is not my idea, but it is a good idea. I couldn't find it described anywhere so I wrote up a description for others to learn from and improve upon.
• Some thoughts on Bandanas and Wipes - This short article relays some ideas I saw kicked around on the multi-use gear forum at Backpackinglight.com. I tried these during our trek and found that they worked quite well.

I'll post more pictures when I get our crew pictures from Philmont. I have notes on how I built all these innovative Philmont gear list items, if you are interested in building your own send me email.

If you get a chance drop me an email and let me know what you think of these ideas.
enjoy!
Al