Today
dawned beautiful. There were enough clouds for a nice sunrise, then they
cleared to leave a beautiful blue bowl, with a nice breeze blowing. It
was a perfect day for drying out.
The plan this morning was to get up at 6, be at Baldy Town at 8 to pick up our food, head for Black Horse Camp to set up, then go to Miranda for the Mountain Man program there. It was after 6:30 by the time most people were up, and it took a long time to get going. We got to Baldy Town at 10:15, and we left at 11:00.
We arrived at Black Horse Camp (9720 ft) before noon. It is a very nice camp, and we have it to ourselves, I wonder what happened to our sister crew, which usually beats us by hours. It's in a small canyon next to a bubbling mountain stream.
The fire ring is unusual. It has logs piled around it to make a bench with a back. A nice addition.
It took well over an hour to get camp set up. The hike down to Miranda for the program wasn't bad, but was fairly steep. It will be fun tomorrow with packs. The canyon is pretty, with sandstone cliffs along the side.
We got to Miranda (8920 ft) a little after two, ate lunch, and heard a description of the life of the mountain men. We tried some tomahawk throwing. It's harder than it looks.
The program guy told us about a crew that had been through recently. One of the advisors was some kind of nut and made his crew do everything military-style. They all had military-issue rucksacks instead of pack frames, and all were in cammo outfits. When they neared a campsite, they would send scouts ahead to check the area and see if it was "secure." The director of the area kicked the advisor off of the trail because he was so far off the deep end. Back at base camp the guy was running around in a helmet with leaves stuck in it, jumping out at people. He got kicked out of base camp.
We decided to skip the black powder rifle shooting. It was getting late, and they were out of shot balls anyway, so we would have only been able to shoot blanks.
The crew decided early on in their trek that they wanted to learn the Philmont Hymn by heart for the "homebound" campfire. We've therefore been singing it through at least once each day, sometimes on the trail, and sometimes over dinner.
Back at Black Horse, Don and
I had dinner duty. We elected to cook the spaghetti dinner. It was pretty
good, but the blueberry cobbler was an involved process for a backpacking
meal. Cleanup was a mess. Joel had assigned himself to cleanup, so he couldn't
complain.
Shortly before we started dinner, our sister crew, also on itinerary 13, arrived in camp. They had elected to climb Baldy today instead of yesterday because the weather was so nice. They had a beautiful day for it, and I envy them. They had their camp sent up and were eating about the same time we ate. Their dinner was probably simpler than ours, but they are still an amazingly well organized group.
Jasper is a veritable juke box. He seems to know an incredible variety of songs, from hymns to popular songs. He's been entertaining us just about every night.
We learned from the crew that just entered camp that the Copper Park bear was finally killed not a long way from Black Horse Camp. It didn't make us feel good to realize how close we had come to being in camp with a bear that has been shown to be a problem.
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