The first hint of the mule deer was a gnarled rope of vertebrae half-buried in sand and flecked with parched flesh.
Six teenage Boy Scouts exchanged glances and smiles. A desert ought to have bones, after all. We rounded the next bend.
These scouts and their three adult leaders had traveled three days before from their homes in Batesville, Indiana to the Double H High Adventure Base southwest of Albuquerque. Along with their gear, each carried a vision of how backpacking off-trail seven days across one of North America’s wildest stretches of high desert might feel.
Now the scouts were chest-deep in it, their senses wide as the New Mexican sky, recording every detail in youthful high fidelity. We trekked farther up the wash until piñons gave way to ponderosas and even a clump of aspen at the foot of a rock slide.
Our curly-haired, 17-year-old crew leader Chase was the first to spot the mule deer’s skull. He moved quickly to be the first to hoist it from the streambed by its thick antlers. “Check it out!” It was the first mule deer many in the group had ever seen. A tuft of scalp still clung to it, spurring one of the adult leaders to remark it looked awfully fresh.
Our guide Mark Shepard, himself only 19 but bearded and burly from weeks outdoors, explained this hardhorned 3x4 died awhile ago as this was high summer and bucks’ antlers were still covered in velvet. Any apparent freshness was the result of tortoise-slow decay in this scorched climate. Perhaps it was brought down last fall by a mountain lion or a hunter’s errant arrow.
Mark admitted he had seen it with a previous group, but up the drainage we stumbled onto something no one appeared to have laid eyes on in decades—perhaps even a century. As the canyon narrowed and filled in with brush, we had to crawl at times, eventually resting at the foot of a stout ponderosa pine. Suddenly one of the scouts let out a “Wow!” and pulled something rust-colored from the scrub oak leaves and pine needles.
It was an object all too familiar to Boy Scouts everywhere—a large cast iron pot called a Dutch oven. A two-inch wedge was broken from its rim and a hairline crack ran from there to its center. The oven looked to be much older than any of us present, and the always-competitive scouts were thrilled to be the apparent first to discover it.
The Double H not only holds 1,000-year-old relics of the Anasazi but more recent artifacts from 150 years of ranching, and visitors are asked to leave all evidence of human activity where it is found. We placed the iron pot back into the duff and scrambled up a rocky face to a high ridge for lunch.
From the top we could see for miles horizon-to-horizon with barely a sign of humanity anywhere. We didn’t linger long. Clouds were billowing high into the blue, and we began to hear distant rolls of thunder. We crossed into Forest Service land for a bit before dropping down to our camp through a recent prescribed burn. Weeks of rain had carpeted the blackened soil with green sprouts and wildflowers.
One Man's Dream
If these scouts felt like pioneers, they had good reason. The previous night, under a Milky Way as vibrant as I’ve ever seen it, we circled up to hear how the Double H had come to be, and how our very presence here was the fulfillment of one man’s dream and dying wish.
Bob Torstenson, the ranch’s previous owner, was light-footed and 51 when he was diagnosed with an aggressive stomach cancer in 2001. He had a zest for both hunting and conservation, and reflecting on a life filled with success, adventure and love of the outdoors, hoped he might leave a legacy that would inspire the same in others. He envisioned his ranch as a center for conservation education: a place to develop partnerships, test stewardship practices and, perhaps most importantly, generate enthusiasm in the hearts and minds of young people for taking care of the land. Upon his death Torstenson gifted his 95,000-acre Double H Ranch to an outfit he felt was ideal to carry out his vision: the Rocky Mountain Elk Foundation.
Our guide told us that the more we let this place and this experience take us over, the better we would honor Torstenson’s high hopes. As if on cue, coyotes sounded off in the blackness.
Mark then told us how, after receiving the ranch, the Elk Foundation renamed it the Torstenson Wildlife Center (TWC) and approached the Boy Scouts of America about providing a youth program as bright as that milky streak overhead. By 2004, scouts were lacing up their boots to trek the TWC, and more than 2,500 have experienced it since.
The Double H is cut from the same pattern as the famed Philmont Scout Ranch. Set in north-central New Mexico’s Sangre de Cristo mountains and somewhat larger at 137,493 acres, Philmont is a much busier outfit, hosting 22,000 scouts last year and more than 700,000 scouts since getting its start nearly seven decades ago. Scouts at Philmont backpack a web of trails connecting more than 34 staffed backcountry camps and 74 unstaffed camps. It’s such a hit, in fact, that it is booked out two years with a waiting list of more than 20,000 scouts.
I was lucky enough to go on one of Philmont’s classic 10-day treks with my scout troop when I was 14. You can’t put a price on experiences that steer you right when you’re young. I entered that place a somewhat fragile and self-loathing kid and left filled with the feeling that I might just tackle life like I’d tackled those mountains.
Three years later I returned for their Rayado program, a 20-day trek that sends scouts to every corner of the Philmont Ranch with a crew they’ve only just met.
You can imagine my thrill when I learned of the Elk Foundation’s plans to host upwards of 1,000 scouts per summer on the TWC. Seven days hiking off-trail across rugged high desert canyons with just a single resupply, complete with a brain-straining challenge in route finding—it was Philmont on steroids. I knew young people from around the nation would be irresistibly drawn to it and some forever changed by it.
It’s just the sort of challenge Bob Torstenson loved, says his oldest son Brooke. “My father would like that the Double H isn’t a cake walk.”
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Scouts on the Double H take a crash course in navigation and, for at least one day of their trek, are responsible for laying out the day's route and guiding their group along it |
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Both of Torstenson’s sons agree their dad would be proud of what the Boy Scouts have started on the ranch. “I think he’d be thrilled,” Brooke says. “What a great opportunity.”
“He just wanted other people to experience it,” says Torstenson’s younger son Eric.
Torstenson’s hunting guide and close friend Bill Ferranti is now the TWC’s ranch manager, and along with his many other roles has been a key liaison to the Boy Scouts. “I think Bob would have been excited about what we are doing here,” Ferranti says.
TWC board chairman Tom Lewis concurs, saying he thinks it matches Torstenson’s hopes for conservation education, cementing invaluable connections to the outdoors for young people. “It’s a relationship that follows them throughout life.”
Eric says this was a cause near and dear to his father’s heart. Torstenson made it a point to get a fishing rod, bow or gun into the hands of his sons’ friends who might not have otherwise had such a chance.
“When he found out some of them had really never stepped foot in the outdoors, he was blown away,” Eric says.
The Double H sees to it that every scout is given such an opportunity as well. At Martin Camp at the midpoint of their trek scouts try their hand at muzzleloading and a half-mile, 3D archery course with 12 foam targets of North American wildlife species. They also learn all along the way about the North American Model of Wildlife Conservation and the role sportsmen play in it.
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At the midpoint of their adventure, crews arrive at the only staffed backcountry camp at the Double H and are treated to a chuck wagon dinner, muzzleloader shooting and a 3D archery course |
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Unfortunately for us, a thunderstorm rolled in just as we were about to shoot at the muzzleloader range, but sun broke through long enough for us to hit the 3D archery course with the ranch’s recurve bows. Many in our group had clearly shot bows before, and a few were dead-eye accurate. I’d managed to spout some tales from my bowhunting experiences, and the scouts were anxious to see me take up the stick and show my prowess. I warned them I was a compound shooter as I reluctantly stepped up to the mound to pull back the string at a foam antelope. My arrow struck perhaps nine feet shy of it. Worse still, being accustomed to the wrist strap on my compound, I dropped the bow. It met the baked earth with an awful clank. I’m not sure who cringed harder.
Hands-On Conservation
Whatever scouts take from the Double H, though, they give back with sweat and sometimes blood. Every crew completes a three-hour conservation work project, which for us involved construction of “one-rock dams,” so named because they stand one rock tall. Strategically placed to slow storm runoff along dry watercourses around the ranch, the dams not only slow erosion but dramatically raise the water table by giving rainwater time to soak into the ground. This in turn creates a flush of forage for wildlife. In the past three years, scouts have stacked upwards of 4,000 such dams.
Torstenson’s son Eric says his father, a consummate businessman, would have smiled at such a setup. “He’d say ‘Good job. Free labor!’”
We split into groups of three and attacked the chore with fervor on the third day of our hike, carrying, rolling and throwing rocks and small boulders from the surrounding banks into the streambed. We then set about puzzling them into one of three shapes to best match the bends of the stream. Along the way we repaired older washed-out dams, hoping our engineering might weather longer.
Our zeal for the project was further proof we, like every other organism in these canyons, had become certified water worshipers. Most hikers carry a gallon and a half—12 pounds—of water. I carried the bare minimum single gallon, but often wished I had the capacity to carry more. I normally sweat like a soda can in Shreveport, yet I stayed eerily dry as I hiked, the parched air sucking up all I could perspire. I was often out of water before we reached a water source, our guide’s dire warnings about dehydration chattering in my head.
After two hours placing rocks, Jimmy, a sharp 17-year-old scout, pointed out we had already built 18 structures, or roughly one every seven minutes. “We should take a picture!” Chase said. “Yeah!” 14-year-old David added, “It would be so cool to see what these look like in a few years.” I couldn’t help but smile. These kids were proud, jammed fingers and all. We knew we had become a force to reckon with.
Preperation
I’d met up with the group as they arrived at base camp the first morning and would have understood if they were reluctant to have a camera-and notebook-toting writer tagging along, but they welcomed me without hesitation. We soon met our guide and went about getting our meals—granola, Pop Tarts and the like for breakfast; crackers, cheese, meat sticks and dried fruit for lunch; and noodle- and rice-based meals like beef stroganoff and spaghetti for dinner. I must confess I really took to the jalapeño squeeze cheese in some of the lunches. Lying in the shade with some Ritz crackers atop a 1,000-foot climb, that stuff might have been brie.
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Both 14, Will Pomeroy and Michael Howell are the minimum allowable age for hiking the Double H, yet may have gained the most from its challenges |
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But before any food entered our packs, everything had to come out. Our guide held up vital items so we could show our equivalent: tents, sleeping bags, rain jackets, etc. He collected the many items we could share—pocket knives, toothpaste, GPSs, first aid kits—into a large sack and passed the now 30-pound beast around, suggesting the crew carry only one or two of each item.
Then the maps came out. He showed us how to draw a grid and plot our route across the ranch. We marked the coordinates of 10 geocaches—hidden containers with a logbook and a “treasure” of one stripe or another scattered across the landscape. Most crews find at least five, but only a few crews have ever found all of them.
Two burgers and some potato salad later, we piled into vans for the ride to the trailhead. The enormity of this landscape became clear as our vehicles painted a line of dust across the geographic phenomenon that is the Plains of San Augustine, an ancient Pleistocene lake floor so perfectly flat that distance spins into a vortex. The only objects providing perspective were the occasional spooked pronghorn, some glorious bucks included.
Trekking the New Mexico Backcountry
Eventually we arrived at the trailhead and donned our packs. Our guide then taught us the technique of meadow walking—spreading out in a staggered line to keep from churning up trails in the delicate vegetation.
We soon climbed a rocky spine ridge to find our first geocache nestled into a pile of rocks just before the route cliffed out. A metal box held a logbook and a small plastic dinosaur left by a previous group. As is tradition, the scouts swapped the prize for one of their own, in this case a Japanese yen.
Descending toward our camp, the scouts found a hefty elk shed antler lying in the sagebrush. Having never seen an elk, they marveled at its beauty and rubbed its foreign texture like some sort of magic lamp. We counted its six tines, and I remarked on its interesting palmation (I was heartened the next morning when one of them mentioned that the antlers on the mule deer skull were palmated as well).
We left the elkhorn and continued on to camp, choosing a spot where tents hadn’t lain down the grass. Since trees are too short and sparse for a bear pole, campsites have a metal “bear box” to store food and other sweetsmelling items at night, mostly as a precaution since bears are a rare sight on the ranch.
Like Philmont, campsite latrines are known affectionately as "Pilot-to-Bombardiers,” since they are composed of two seats facing away from each other and sharing a common back (at Philmont, covered latrines with side-by-side seats are called either “Pilot-to-Copilots” or “Redroof Inns”). Since Pilot-to-Bombardiers have no roof or walls, their views are usually terrific.
Early the next morning we hiked to a team-building course of obstacles and games. Scouts passed themselves and their adult leaders through spiderwebs of rope, worked to balance the whole group on a pivoting platform, and played blindfolded bombardment. In this game the group split into pairs; and one partner wore a bandana over his eyes. His teammate then led him to a cordoned-off square scattered with foam balls and barked directions and distance to balls and other players, the object being to knock others out by striking them with the foam balls. “It’s like prehistoric videogames!” said 14-year-old Will.
I was continually amazed at what a smart and savvy bunch of kids we had on our hands. Sure, they had their MySpace pages and an extensive knowledge of which pop star was dating which, but they were also voracious readers (especially of Ray Bradbury), adored solving problems of navigation and mathematics, and their grumblings over hiking steep grades ceased quickly once they got their first multimile vista. Our guide Mark was himself a math major at Michigan Tech and up on his Ray Bradbury, so kept pace with these kids’ banter at every turn.
The last night I spent with the crew, we were all sent to bed without dinner. July and August are mating season for earth and sky in the Southwest as monsoon storms shed life-giving water and potentially life-taking lightning, often both in quantity. We had managed to thread the needle around a good number of storms, but pulling into camp that afternoon with black clouds bearing down, we knew our number was up. Mark split the group into dinner cooks and tent erectors, but a minute later and another glance skyward told us to shut the stoves off and take cover. Dazzling flash by earth-shaking boom, the storm closed in as we scampered every which way like scared jackrabbits. Fat drops of rain began tapping the soil and an icy gust carried dust through camp.
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July and August are mating season for earth and sky in New Mexico. Monsoon storms supply daily shows of sound and light, as well as much-needed moisture that can send the high desert into full bloom. |
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One forgets how loud thunder can be until all that separates you is a layer of nylon and a quarter mile of desert air. The scouts whooped and hollered from their tents with every flash and rumble. Many of them had come straight from a week at band camp to hike on the Double H, and after a while the group started singing a wild mix of tunes to the rhythm of the storm. Chase, apparently a tuba player, even yelled “Lower brass rules!” at one point.
Around 9:30 the excitement subsided along with the storm. Mark said we could come out and have a no-cook dinner of peanut butter and jelly with graham crackers. Only four of us emerged into the dark, the rest having fallen asleep despite ringing ears and empty stomachs.
The next morning singing began anew, as the scouts marched into Martin Camp knowing a chuckwagon dinner awaited them, they sang:
One evening as the sun went down
and the jungle fire was burning
Down the track came a hobo hiking
and he said boys I’m not turning
I’m headin for a land that’s far away
beside the crystal fountains
So come with me we’ll go and see
the Big Rock Candy Mountains.
In the Big Rock Candy Mountains
there’s a land that’s fair and bright
Where the handouts grow on bushes
and you sleep out every night
Where the boxcars are all empty
and the sun shines every day
On the birds and the bees and the cigarette trees
Where the lemonade springs
where the bluebird sings
In the Big Rock Candy Mountains.
There is no question in my mind that Bob Torstenson’s torch is still burning brightly at the Double H, fueled infinitely more the moment the Elk Foundation linked up with the Boy Scouts. These kids—and those that follow from every corner of the country—will carry the flame back to their hometowns, and perhaps within themselves for the rest of their lives.
That afternoon I parted ways wishing I could complete the trek with the group, but grateful for the time I had. I could see myself in every one of the scouts, especially Will, the youngest and least confident of the crew.
I have a hunch he left the place walking a little taller.