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At the suggestion of a leader from another crew, I'm going to try starting a crew journal. I'll have each crew member write something each day. Their thoughts and memories should be a good memento of the trip. [They were. I've added the crew journal entries (with only minimal editing) to the end of each day in this account.]
We've made up a lot of our lost time. We're only 15 minutes late out of Lamar, CO.
We actually arrived in La Junta ahead of schedule, so we had a short layover. The guys jumped off the train and ran across the street to buy sodas to avoid the high prices in the train. They didn't realize that the sodas were actually cheaper in the station. They just barely made it back for the departure. Unfortunately, as soon as we left there was a problem with one of the track signals. We had to stop and then proceed "at reduced speed" for a while until we got to a working signal.
We arrived at Raton, NM just 10 minutes late, pretty much on time for Amtrak.
We loaded into the bus, planning to stop at a fast food joint for lunch. The Scouts on the train filled a whole fleet of buses, 5-6 of them. However, the other crew assigned to our bus had planned to have lunch at Philmont. Pretty bad planning, if you ask me, since lunch in the dining hall is over by 12:15, the train is scheduled to arrive at 11:00, and it's a 45+ minute drive after everything is loaded. And of course the train is often late. They trust Amtrak much more than I do. So anyway, we made a quick stop at a grocery store that had a deli and grabbed lunch makings, then headed for Philmont (6700 ft). That turned out to be a good decision. It meant that we were ahead of all of all of the other train crews in the Philmont lines. It made things much easier.
At camp, we went through all of the base camp stuff; medical recheck, equipment checkout, itinerary check. Being early and ahead of the lines, we got thru things in good order.
Philmont is just coming off of an 8-day period when they never saw the sun. It rained every day. It has been so wet that they are allowing back-country campfires for the first time in years. We are supposed to be heading into a more normal pattern, however, with mostly nice weather but afternoon thunderstorms. Today was much like that, except the thunderstorm started about dinner time. It rained for an hour or so, but stopped in time for the "Philmont Story" opening campfire.
The evening was pleasant. I was comfortable in my bag, but I had a bit of an altitude headache (I think) and didn't sleep too well. 6600 ft isn't all that high, but it's more than a mile higher than we're used to.
After a nice send off from some sleepy parents, sibs and wives, we had a great weather day in Chicago. Amtrak baggage people were very nice. Last night was awful short, but we are getting excited to see base camp.
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