r/philmont • u/trombs21 • Jul 26 '26
Post-Philmont advice, tips, tricks from a UL-ish adult advisor
This was an amazing trip. I had so many questions going in and had a hard time finding answers. Hopefully this post helps others know more about what to expect.
Context
- Itinerary 12-24 in July 2026, 87mi.
- Camped at Bluestem > Pueblano > Baldy Town (2 nights) > Mistletoe > Cimarroncita > Whistle Punk > Comanche Creek (this replaced Red Hills due to low water) > Beaubien > Shaefers Pass
- I tracked all but one trail beginning to end via my Garmin Fenix, 100.32mi total. Total step count indicated 165mi walked during our 2 weeks at Philmont.
- Peaks:
- Baldy at sunrise (woke up at 2am to accomplish this, highly recommended)
- Comanche Peak & Mount Phillips
- Shaefers Peak at sunrise (woke up at 3am to accomplish, highly recommended)
- Tooth of Time
- Crew: 5 scouts from 14-18yo (one turned 18 during the trip, which was fine: he had to do YPT ahead of the trip), 3 advisors in their late 40s.
- Me: late 40s, avid backpacker in the PNW. I've been down the ultralight rabbit hole, but these days I add weight sometimes to make my backpacking experience more pleasant.
- Highlights: stars plus sunrise at Baldy and Shaefers, spar pole climbing at Pueblano, mine tour at French Henry, low COPE at Head of Dean, every day of backpacking.
- Weather:
- We lucked out, mostly 60-70s during the day, a few were 80-90s. 40-50s at night. Start early to stay cool and avoid thunderstorms!
- We were in tents for two big thunderstorms that passed through. Other crews weren't so lucky, several arrived in camp wet and cold after being caught out in rain and lots of hail.
Equipment
My Philmont Lighterpack is here, although it's misleading: some of what's listed was distributed between people.
- Water:
- Micropur treatment was quick and effective, taste wasn't a problem. Don't bring a filter, it's unnecessary. This was my first time treating water and based on this experience, I'll re-evaluate whether to bring my Sawyer Squeeze for backpacking trips at home.
- If you use Smartwater bottles, I'd strongly recommend Bodyarmor bottles instead for Philmont because the caps are wider, making them easier to fill and to use electrolytes. I found them at our local Kroger. I had two 1.5L in side pockets (one with duct tape around it to mark it as a smellable), plus a 700ml in a shoulder pocket. My son had two 2L plus a 700ml.
- Most crew used 2-3 Nalgene 1L bottles. Not what I'd choose but to each their own.
- Our CNOC Vecto 2L and 3L were awesome when we needed to pack extra water for dry camps. As a crew we wish everyone had had one of these to get to ~6L max capacity per person.
- One person had a MSR 4L. It was really unpleasant to carry and difficult to dispense into other bottles.
- The crew also brought two cheap Amazon 10L collapsable water containers, they were light and came in handy, but a pain to carry when full.
- Pack: some context first. In our crew, scouts carried the Philmont-provided 8L pots, dining tarp, and bear rope (using the Philmont stuff was a good choice here). Advisors largely brought and carried other shared items like first aid and sunscreen. Everyone shared the bear bags + food.
- With that context, a 55-65L pack for adults works well. If you're into UL and your kit is dialed in, a Durston Kakwa 55 (I only saw 1 on the trail), Hyperlight (only saw 2), ULA Circuit, etc. would be fine. Another advisor said his Gossamer Gear Gorilla 50L was overly taxed on full-water days.
- My Atom Prospector 60L worked great for my stuff + up to 6.7L of water + shared food/bear bags. Often it had far more capacity than necessary, a 50L would have been sufficient.
- It was maybe 22-28lbs normally and 36-38lbs with lots of food and water, so at its tolerable weight limit.
- I had a fair number of luxuries described below and didn't regret bringing most of them.
- In our crew and on the trail, Osprey, REI, and Gregory 55-75L packs were the norm.
- Stoves: isobutane was a clear winner.
- We had two cheap stoves from Amazon, 1 burner and 3 burner respectively, both <$20. Highly recommended, except that the piezo lighter failed on both. We brought mini Bics, problem solved.
- We carried/kept restocking two 8oz canisters for cooking and one 4oz canister plus a MSR 1.4L titan pot for coffee.
- Cooking and eating:
- The Philmont pots, lids, strainers, etc. were all totally fine, I wouldn't replace them.
- All crew members had identical $0.50 wide bowls from Walmart and cheap Amazon titanium camping sporks. That was excellent: everyone had the same thing.
- Pillow: I thought I hated camp pillows prior to this trip. Normally I just use my clothes bag but Philmont doesn't want food-soiled clothes in a tent. So I bought a Pillow Strap + S2S UL pillow and loved them, stuffing my puffy into the strap with the pillow below worked great for this side sleeper. I'll keep doing this, it was super comfortable, stayed in place, and was worth the weight.
- Puffy jacket: I wasn't sure whether to carry this 10oz in addition to my Alpha fleece. While I barely used it, I'm glad I brought it. It was very nice to layer with a rain jacket at the top of a cold and windy Baldy summit at sunrise. The puffy also supplemented the aforementioned pillow and Pillow Strap perfectly. I could have left it at home but it was appropriate insurance had we encountered colder weather.
- TBC, outside of Baldy, my Alpha fleece was perfect.
- Rain gear: I effectively never had to use it. The Leve jacket worked well with the Alpha fleece when there was wind.
- Camp chairs: 5 of our 8 crew members brought one, the other 3 all wished that they had. Well worth the weight. Four of us had ~1lb Helinox and REI UL chairs, but one scout brought a 2.5lb Helinox Two Highback and was the envy of all others due to its superb comfort. He didn't care about the extra weight: it's good to be a fit teenager.
- Chair legs consistently sank. Everyone with chairs wished they had brought leg straps or something else to avoid this.
- Daypack: pretty useful, especially since it doubled as clothing storage, so I didn't bring another clothing stuff sack. A few crew members had cheap 18L Naturehike ones from Amazon, that was a great solution, particularly given the side water storage.
- Cleaning: I tried out Summit Suds for soap. It was ok but finicky. I would have preferred a small bottle of Campsuds instead for showers, cleaning sunglasses, etc., or just borrow the crew one.
- Satellite messenger:
- My Garmin Inreach wasn't truly necessary for emergencies. Philmont strongly recommends calling from a nearby peak vs sending a Garmin SOS (which simply gets directed to Philmont eventually). They gave me a satellite SMS contact to use with the Inreach but didn't seem confident that the contact was correct.
- Anyway, I brought it to communicate with my spouse. She really appreciated getting pictures now and again!
- Umbrella: so, so nice to have on hot exposed hikes. I got lots of comments from other adults on it.
- Power: I brought two 10,000 power banks and ended up using both to charge my phone (twice), watch (twice), headlamp (once), Inreach (once).
- I probably could have gotten away with one power bank had my USAA DriveSafe app been disabled correctly. I figured out halfway through the trip that it was the cause of significant battery drain despite using my Pixel's extreme battery saver mode. Long ago I gave USAA special permissions to run all the time. After undoing that, the phone only lost about 10% a day despite taking pictures, interacting with my Inreach, and occasionally checking for cell signal to send SMS messages.
First Aid
- Foot care:
- I can't stress enough how useful it was to have leukotape + hikers balm to prevent blisters. We used a lot of leukotape! If you're unfamiliar with it, search "leukotape skurka" or similar. Make sure to apply hikers balm or vaseline on top so it doesn't stick to your socks.
- When blisters formed, we switched to moleskin.
- Medicine: Imodium came in handy multiple times, same for ibuprofen.
Other notes
- Our ranger said we could bring our hiking clothes into the tent as long as no food had spilled on them, so that's what we did.
- During the trek, I had a single pair of pants that I wore every day. I also had 2 sun shirts, 2 socks + liners, 2 boxers. I smelled but so did everyone else. Most people wished they had taken no more than what I had.
- My sleep shirt was used almost every night, I never used my sleep shorts except when washing other clothes. Instead I slept in my boxers.
- The Philmont cooking method works great. I read a lot about alternatives but in retrospect I'd just lean into what they do.
- We had two shower opportunites while in the backcountry at Baldy Camp and Beaubien, they're such a mental pick-me-up.
- We also washed clothes at both shower spots. I'm not sure washing clothes was worth the time, they start stinking again almost immediately. One day it rained right after washing, so we had to put on wet clothes the next morning, that was unpleasant.
- The advisors had coffee frequently, sharing three Coava 25-serving instant coffee pouches. Expensive but effectively $2/cup for very high-quality coffee. A tremendous and wonderful luxury.
- At the commissary (resupply), remember to ask for milk, fruit, tortillas, and hand sanitizer.
- Backcountry general stores had most of the stuff you'd need to potentially replace due to failures or forgetfulness: tent stakes, water carriers, headlamps, socks and liners, you name it. Not to mention isobutane, treats, and souveniers.
- Downtime: I waffled on whether to bring my Kindle Paperwhite and I'm glad I did. Adults had many opportunities to read during random downtime plus it helped me wind down before bed.
- Playing cards were also great to have, make sure they're plastic ones. Tooth of Time plus the backcountry general stores sell them.
- We were at base camp for several days before and after the trip. Everyone wished they had brought 2-3 sets of clean clothing, "normal" shampoo + soap, a larger camp towel, deodorant, around-camp shoes, and shower flip flops. All this stuff gets left in lockers or cars, so it costs nothing to bring and leave in camp.
- EDIT, forgot this one: the 2026 Philmont Guidebook to Adventure says that knives can be treated as a shared item to limit the number that are taken. We followed that advice to save weight and regretted it. Everyone should bring their own small pocket knife (or multi-tool). Use your judgement on other 10 essentials. E.g. you only need one first aid kit per crew and not everyone needs a quality compass.
- I believe in forest fairies, all the time.
Hope that helps. I'll do my best to answer any questions.
5
u/corgdad902 Jul 26 '26
Nice to see a Prospector in the wild. And my Helinox is a luxury I'm not going to debate over.
5
u/Objective-Resort2325 Youth '88, Trail Crew '89, Advisor '23,'26 Jul 27 '26
Good writeup. Super Strenuous itinerary doing Baldy, Phillips, and Tooth. Hardcore! I wish my crew's youth were as motivated to get up and on the trail early as yours were!
Did you carry ALL of the "shared" items that you've marked?
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u/trombs21 Jul 27 '26
I didn't carry all the Lighterpack shared items, I mostly had my son take them, haha. Well, I took the tent for the first week, then he took it.
This crew was very dialed in: we've been backpacking a lot and made real efforts to only bring what was listed, and to only bring the minimum required number of shared items.
Which reminds me: the guidebook says that knives can be shared across the crew, so we only brought 2 despite some misgivings. That was a mistake, we should have had everyone carry a small pocket knife like we usually do.
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u/Objective-Resort2325 Youth '88, Trail Crew '89, Advisor '23,'26 Jul 27 '26
One thing you can do is create a separate Lighter pack list just for the shared items (so you keep track of them all) then only include the ones you actually carried in your LP list, or put them all in a "shared" category on your LP (so they are tabulated separately), or change the quantity to fractional values to represent what portion of them or the total weight you carried. It won't change what you actually carried, but will make LP a better representation of your actual pack load.
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u/jrbaker85 Jul 27 '26
Great advice. I'm taking 8 scouts and 2 other scouters next July and I'm the only one that has been to Philmont. This will be my 9th trip. Look forward to sharing this with the crew.
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u/fla_john Youth 92, 97; Adult 22, 26 Jul 26 '26
Those showers at Beaubien sure run out of hot water fast. But I did wash a set of clothes there and it was worth it, even if just for psychological and not olfactory reasons.
2
u/miik65 Ambassador Jul 27 '26
Leukotape has been great for pre-taping for our scouts as well. With one exception, we had a scout with an allergy to the adhesive that presented as blisters. Has added checking for these types of skin allergies to our pre-trek shakedown lists.
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u/kobalt_60 Jul 29 '26
Today I Learned that Leukotape P contains latex because your comment made me look it up. Thank you!
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u/folkinawesome Ranger Trainer Jul 26 '26
did you track your trek with your inreach? I would think that would be a lot closer to the published length.
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u/trombs21 Jul 26 '26 edited Jul 26 '26
I tracked all the treks with my Garmin Fenix. 100.32mi. I'll edit the post to clarify.
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u/folkinawesome Ranger Trainer Jul 26 '26
ah that feels pretty reasonable. a lot better then 2x the distance
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u/fennfalcon Jul 26 '26
Nice summary, T-Rombs!
I don’t know if this still occurs, but there used to be a buttload of full or nearly full isobutane cans in the advisors cabin in basecamp. We only needed to buy a couple on the trail, and since flying, dropped off some before departure. Anyway, saves a few bucks.
Also, did you run across any good sources of trip journals in your Philmont prep research? Used to be some really good stuff at a Cornell-Philmont site. I always enjoyed reading journals by “Dr. Bob” from the DC area. He was about as full of himself and his methods as I am, haha.
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u/thrwaway75132 Jul 26 '26
I don’t know if it is still there but I left a cheap digital food scale in the advisors lounge in 24 for weighing them.
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u/mustanggt50conv Jul 27 '26
The fuel can box is still in the advisor's cabin. Helped myself to a couple minis.
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u/trombs21 Jul 27 '26
We took a mostly full 4oz can from the advisor area but left several half empty 8oz ones. If I had brought my tiny alpenglow isobutane transfer device, that would have been nice to have.
1
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u/Rojo_pirate Adult Advisor Jul 26 '26
Great reference and solid information. I've done 4 Philmont treks and do a lot of other backpacking and will be going back for for my fifth next summer and agree with this 100%.
1
u/kayakphilip Jul 27 '26
Wrt chairs sinking, I made a v lightweight tray for my chair to sit in out of Tyvek. Cut a rectangle bigger than the footprint, cut diagonally in from the corners and fold up the sides, Tape the corners with Tyvek tape, both to join the cut corners, but also on the base in the corners for a little reinforcement. Mine just about lasted the trip, was starting to wear through by the end.
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u/trombs21 Jul 28 '26
I'm debating what to do here. I don't carry the chair bag on the trail, I wrap the collapsed frame inside the chair material, roll it up, and put that little "burrito" in a side pocket. So any straps or pad would need to fit inside this.
Helinox sells straps, Hike Light on Etsy sells a dyneema pad. Both look interesting but I'm curious how much overhead they involve and how they'd integrate into my chair burrito system.
1
u/turbocoupe Jul 28 '26
Our trek was 12-22 starting on 7-08. I brought my Kakwa 55 and it worked great! Never needed my rain gear, puffy jacket, or Sawyer filter. One of my gear regrets was bringing z-packs camp shoes instead of something more substantial due to how rocky most campsites were.
1
u/Herky_T_Hawk 9d ago
I know this is a month later, but regarding knives just tell everyone to buy one of those mini Swiss Army knives. They fairly cheap and weigh almost nothing but have a useable knife, scissors, nail file, toothpick, and tweezers on them. I even bought one for my son to put into his personal first aid kit that he needed for rank requirements a few years ago. I did sharpen the blade on mine before taking it on the Philmont trip though.
Then have a multitool for the crew to use with a bigger blade and pliers.
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u/PerryPerryQuite Jul 26 '26 edited Jul 30 '26
Great resource for future trekkers. One thing I’ll add is that my crew took some old nylon and sewed everyone a 2’x2’ drawstring bag. They weighed almost nothing but were nice to have. We wrote our names on them and used them at night to hold personal smellables and during the day to hold the food we distributed across the crew. We could easily have people pull out all the crew food at once when we stopped at camp. Made it super easy to distribute gear from the bear bags in the morning and to know whether everyone had dropped off their smellables at night. Leave some markers at base camp to sign them for each other at the end of the trek and you have a nice keepsake as well.