Lessons of Preparation:

I was worried about my feet.

Before I came to Philmont, I had bought a pair of hiking boots online at www.REIoutlet.com for $65. Now as a rule of thumb, one should never buy boots online if they haven’t first tried them on in a store and know how they fit, but coming from a suburb of Tulsa, OK, it was my only option.

I bought size 10, since that is the size of my Asics running shoes, and I figured that if they ran big, I’d just fill them in with thick boot socks. And, of course, they were.

But my socks were an entirely different issue.

This summer being my first time at Philmont, I soon realized my plethora socks were inferior to the ever-popular wool. Fortunately, I received two pairs of promotional Fox Rivers hiking socks from the trading post for a review in the Philnews.

They didn’t ask for them back.

So boots or socks, I was worried about my feet, because I was about to hike across Philmont in one day, from Dan Beard to Carson Meadows, with NPS Manager Dave Counts. I was about to do the Ranger Marathon.

But really, my story isn’t about the marathon at all, in fact, I finished it last Saturday in 18 hours and 35 minutes. My story starts before that; the three lessons I learned which prepared me for the challenge.

And all of them can be summed up in these few words:

“It isn’t about your physical condition, it is about your mental condition,” RT Seth Jones told me. “You have to be mentally prepared.”

Lesson #1: My New Shoes

It was Thursday, the day of Crater Lake’s Phil Fiesta. Seth Jones and I had planned on hiking from Lover’s Turnaround together and partying down. But first I needed new shoes, or so I thought.

After my hike a few weeks ago, in which I trekked from Miranda over Baldy Mt. and through a thunderstorm to French Henry, I didn’t want to go another step in my ill-fitting hiking boots. With the Ranger Marathon only two days away, and bent on buying hiking shoes, I was running out of time. It was now or never.

Around 11:30am, I met up with Jones near the staff parking lot, tossed my pack into the back of his blue Jeep Wrangler convertible, and took shotgun, handing him $5 gas-money. Before we went to the turnaround, we were driving to town so I could pull some money out of the ATM.

Coming back into base camp, however, he passed the staff parking lot. Looking over at his focused face, lost in the midst of some daydream, I knew he wasn’t stopping.

“He forgot,” I thought.

“Hey!” I said, “I still have to buy shoes!” We were passing base-camp fast.

“Aw, hot-dang!” he said, “Well hurry up!”

Pulling in to the camper’s parking lot, we began quickly closing up the convertible.

“It won’t take long,” I thought, knowing exactly which shoes I wanted.

Getting out of the car, Jones looked at the green-digit clock in his dashboard: 12:10pm.

“Well heck, you can’t buy shoes now!” he exclaimed, “It’s lunch time; the trading post is closed!”

“Are you sure?” I asked him.

“Yeah, they’ve got to eat lunch too,” he shrugged, starring at me inquisitively.

I consider it fate--he thought the Trading Post was closed during lunch; and even more fatalistic--I believed him.

Puzzled, I pondered my options. There was no way we were going to wait around till 1:00.

“Well, what are you going to do?” Jones asked, as perplexed as myself.

I was wearing cotton ankle socks and my beat-up Asics running shoes; both of which I was hoping to replace before our hike.

At that moment, I “zipped up my man-suit.”

Jumping back into the Jeep, I slammed the door shut and re-buckled my seatbelt. Turning to Jones, his face grinning with approval, I said with a large smirk of my own, “Let’s go to Crater!”

Lesson #2: Keeping up with Seth Jones

Jones was sick-as-a-dog that day; some sort of sinus infection. And when we got to the turnaround, he told me that he had left his pack up at Crater Lake the day before so he wouldn’t have to carry it back up.

“But just so that I’m not a jerk,” he said, and grabbed his yellow daypack.

My pack was full, and extra-heavy with my djembe (hand drum) strapped to the back with twine. So I handed Jones some of my food.

“Here, take this,” I said, looking at his empty pack.

After he put it in his bag, I handed him my two-liter jug of water.

“Carry your own pooh!” he said.

After some final adjustments, we were on the trail.

We walked a good pace and it wasn’t long before we had come in sight of the crossroads, where the trails merge into the main road. Decisions are made at roads like these.

Just then, we met RT Kelly Boulter going the other direction.

“Come up to Crater with us,” Jones said.

“No,” she relied, “It might be vulgar.”

“Aw, Moose is a gentleman,” Jones relied. Then, raising his eyebrows and showing that big grin of his, he added, “Especially around the ladies.”

Well, he couldn’t convince her to come with us, but she said she might come up later with one of her friends.

That’s when the conversation shifted gears, as it dove into a heartfelt discussion about finding one’s place in life.

“Where do people like me fit in?” Jones asked her. “I can relate to General Sam Houston. He said, ‘I humble myself before God, and there the list ends!’”

Jones was posed in some sort of Shakespearean stance; arm outstretch, chest puffed-up, head held high.

There was a pause as his words settled in the stillness of the air.

We were having quite the enlightening conversation, when just then, another female RT walked up. She, too, was headed for Crater’s Phil-Fiesta.

Together, the three of us went on our way, Jones up in front, ready to puke, the Ranger in the middle and I in the back.

Taking to the trail, Jones picked up his pace. We were one stride short of a run.

“Dang,” I thought, “This pot-bellied, smoker, I-live-in-a-swamp RT Seth Jones is kicking my butt.”

He was now opening up a gap between the Ranger and I, and leaving us behind in the dust of the dry trail he was blazing.

“It’s the Tour de Crater,” I bellowed with sarcasm, underlying with agony, “and it’s Seth Jones in the lead by five seconds.”

He barely looked back, and sure didn’t slow down.

“Hey,” I half whispered to the girl in front of me, “let’s catch him.

“Go ahead,” she panted, and moved over.

But I fell back, deciding that if able-to-leap-over-tall-mountains-in-a-single-bound Seth Jones wanted to go off by himself, then he could. As for me, I wasn’t about to leave a girl behind to hike alone, even if she was a gung-ho Ranger.

Several minutes later, we stopped. Once again, Jones had outdone himself, and had to take a breather.

When we started back up, his pace didn’t slow down, and we continued on this way; hiking for 20 minutes and stopping for five.

Our final stop was at another crossroads, where the trail crosses over the one old road to Bear Caves, ten minutes outside Crater.

Here, Jones explained the markings on the trees; large holes in the bark.

“Some say Waite Phillips used those to mark the trail,” he said.

For a few minutes, we gawked at the silly markings.

Then, “Let’s hike to Crater, what do you say?”

Our response wouldn’t have mattered; it was more of an order than a suggestion.

With that, we hiked on, making it there in no time.

Coming into the spar-pole course before we reached the cabin, we stopped to talk to several of the staff, sitting on logs and dressed in interps. They were busy instructing crewmembers, dangling helplessly from slender ropes, high above us in the air.

“Go put your packs down at the cabin and get something to eat,” P.C. Dominic “BaDom” Alesandrini said.

“Gladly, my friend,” I thought

I was elated to have arrived. Like a fortuneteller, I foresaw good-times in my future.

And I no longer cared about what was on my feet. Besides, I had just kept up with quicker-than-lightening Seth Jones in my beat-up Asics.

Time to party.

Lesson #3: Lola

I knew there was something different about Lola from her first day at News and Photo Services, that crazy Californian girl with brown curly locks and curious chestnut eyes. There I was, eating breakfast out of a Styro-foam container in the office, avoiding eye contact, when she pulled up a stool.

“What if your peaches could talk?” she asked me, “would you still eat them?”

Slightly disturbed by the nature and complete randomness of the question, “No!” I replied, shoving a large chunk of golden ripe fruit in my mouth.

As if that wasn’t enough, I was not prepared for what she would do the day after Crater Lake’s Phil-Fiesta.

Together, Seth Jones, Lola and I were going to trek back to the turnaround. But it took us forever to leave, as I had to pry Jones away from a lengthy conversation he was having out on the porch with the cavalcade girls.

When we where finally ready to go, sometime in the early afternoon, I looked over at Lola: she was wearing sandals. Why was I surprised?

“Put your boots on!” I half shouted, totally thrown back. “You can’t hike in those!”

“But my boots hurt my feet,” she replied, holding them up in one hand.

What were once black Army boots with two-inch thick tread, had become faded grey uppers with holes on the sides and quarter-inch thick uneven soles.

“Here, wear my Asics,” I offered, “I’ll wear your boots.”

“I’m fine,” she shrugged, tilting her head to the side and staring at me quizzically.

“Well.” I thought, “It is true that many people do hike in Chacos, or the even worse Converse ‘Chucks’.”

And so we took to the trail, walking at a regular pace. Even Seth Jones didn’t want Lola to get hurt. But she never slipped once, while I nearly rolled my ankles four times.

“It’s you that needs to be careful,” she smugly declared, looking over her shoulder and bearing a proud smile as we walked down the narrow dirt trail, covered with deceivingly smooth-edged rocks.

Several hours later we had made it back to the turnaround. Yet, everything had been put into perspective. I had worried about hiking in worn out tennis shoes and cotton socks the day before, when Lola had just done the same hike of nearly eight miles in flimsy sandals.

I was humbled.

And together with the first two lessons, I was mentally prepared for the Ranger Marathon.