[From the Philmanac - Ponil was the original base camp for the Philturn Rocky Mountain Scout Camp (the forerunner to Philmont), and was run as such during the summers from 1939 to 1941.  Ponil was named after the "Apache Plume," a knee-high bushy plant which has 5 points  just as five canyons converge at this point (South Ponil, Horse, Cedar, and both ends of Middle Ponil.)  Not surprisingly, this site was initially referred to as "Five Points."  The traditional program at Ponil has been Horseback Riding and Western Lore.  The camp was also the site of Philmont's original Rock Climbing Program, from 1967 to 1971, and is currently the host to a Commissary, a Trading Post and a Cantina, the latter of which was started in 1977.  A Chuckwagon Dinner was also started at Ponil in 1990, and a Flyfishing program added in 1996.  Campfire programs or Cantina shows have been featured some years.  Ponil has more cabins than any other camp at Philmont, about a dozen in all - some of which date back to the Philturn period.  Numerous historical artifacts and pictures of the early days of Ponil and nearby camps are located in the Trading Post, which doubles as a museum.]

[Note - There is no entry yet for Dean Cutoff in the Philmanac]

Woke up at 4:10 am, when our local coyote pack sounded off, and got up at 4:45.  Dressed in my Class A’s, and hit the bathroom.  Clear, 52 degrees, nice stars and a gentle breeze.  Woke the Crew at 5:00, demanding to “see a light”.  Collected the first six guys, and we headed over to the lockers for the food, with a last coyote chorus in the distance.  Geez, even after our meal-stripping, what a load of food!  Once we got back, we took the cots out of Hugh’s and my tents, and laid everything out.  Circled up to discuss the distribution (who has the next meal to eat, don’t crush the meal packets, weight distribution, amount of water to carry, etc.)  Finished the preliminary distribution at 6:10, put the packs and cots back in the tents, and headed over to the Dining Hall.  Got a verbal summary of everyones’ starting pack weights, and established who would take weight from whom.  Our average is 39 lbs. using our scale - a little heavy, but to be expected with a seventh tent, the excess Polar Pure in glass, and this year’s extra food.  Rene showed at 6:25, and we were first in the door at 6:35.  Ate quickly, and headed out at 6:50 for our Crew photos.  I had forgotten the photo ordering form, so had to jog back to my tent to get it.  Three or four other Crews showed up after we arrived.  The photographer (not Eileen, but another female I didn’t know) showed up at 7:03.  We were first in line, but we allowed another Crew ahead of us because they still had tons to do yet, and also had a scheduled 9 am bus.  As usual, the pictures were a waste of time - we were staring right into the morning sun again, and furthermore our photographer waited too long between asking us to look up and taking the shots.  She took two shots, plus another Advisor used my camera for two more.  Hopefully one of mine will be halfway decent, ‘cause the NPS versions were just a waste of film (yet again).  With that finally out of the way, we hustled back to the tents to change into our hiking clothes, finalize our carry-on for the lockers, and our small Totelocker for the Security Hut.  Rene got us three Security Hut tickets.  Sealed the tents again, and headed off to the lockers at about 7:45.  Stuffed them to the gills and locked them.  The Totelocker, White File Case, and my grey bag (and the seed bags for the packs) went into the Security Hut storage area.  Back to the tents by 8:10.  Mark’s pack had a problem with one of its mega clevis pins, so he and Hugh fixed it.  After sweeping them out, we sealed the tents for the last time, and headed over to the Welcome Center at 8:35.  We re-weighed our packs on the Welcome Center scale - which proved our little scale is accurate (or equally inaccurate, take your pick) - then stacked our packs in a line on one of the posts.  Then we watched as numerous other Scouts and Leaders weighed in much heavier - a significant number running up to 65 lbs.  Almost everyone was at or above 50 lbs. each, and our guys (finally) got a real appreciation for all the effort that they had put in getting their weights down.  39 pounds ain’t great, but we’re a lot better off than just about everyone else - and here’s where it starts to matter, especially when you’re a young Crew taking on one of Philmont’s toughest treks.  Five buses pulled in for the 9 am runs, and the Welcome Center exploded into activity; we’re in Bus 369 with Crew 893.  We loaded up the packs, got on board [Photos: 1, 2, 3], and were on our way in short order.  Crew 893's Ranger was Blake, and he and Rene split the Ranger Tour as we headed off to Ponil, pointing out Villa Philmonte, the buffalo pasture, the polo grounds, the Arrowhead formation, and more, then the sights of Cimarron.  As we headed up the Ponil Canyon road, we got our first close-ups of some of the burned regions, mostly on the hillsides to the left.  Some areas looked to have experienced just a “ground creeper” fire, but in other areas the fires had clearly “crowned”.  Even though it’s all part of Nature’s way, it was sobering to see the extent of the damage - and both Rene and Blake said the official word was that it would take 50 or more years to recover.  Things grow slow out here, and the extended drought hasn’t been helping, either.  Since we were going all the way to Ponil camp, it was a little longer ride than usual, past the normal Trek 32 drop-off point at Six Mile Gate.  But we finally pulled in, along with the other four buses - guess now that the North Country was reopened, they were pumping everyone they could into it.  As we came to a stop, I reminded everyone on board not to get the famous Circle “O” brand from leaning against the exhaust pipe when unloading the packs.  Hot and sunny as we unloaded.  We set our pack lines on the split rail fences by one of the wrangler buildings.  Since Ponil had literally just reopened, there was no real program available (not even the Cantina, what a bummer) - only the Western Lore cowboy lecture if we wanted it (and the female wrangler we asked about it was not very enthused, so (not surprisingly) the guys passed).  So Rene did some more basic trail protocol and hiking instruction while I spent 20 minutes looking for an Anasazi Petroglyph I remembered being here from my previous visits (the wranglers in camp had no idea what I was talking about).  I went the wrong way at first, down to the corrals, but found it again when I came back up towards the Cantina.  Most of the other Crews had left in the meanwhile, so things were pretty quiet again as I returned to the Crew.  When Rene was done, we hiked up to the Petroglyph, and I gave a 15 minute description/explanation on it, also chiding the now distantly past “Scout” who had defaced this priceless artifact by deeply carving his Troop number next to it with a rock hammer.  The Petrogylph here is a “sun” or “power” symbol, and is very unusual because it was fully exposed to the weather (most Petroglyphs were carved under overhangs so that they would endure).  Knowing this, the artist had chipped this glyph in very deeply, but 800-plus years had had their inevitable effects, and now it was difficult to spot unless you knew it was there.  Rene then told us that the fires had uncovered another previously unknown set of glyphs nearby, which would soon be examined by Philmont’s staff archeologists.  That will be neat to see, when they finally open it up for tours.  So that was the program for the day - little enough, but better than nothing.  We headed back, refilled our water bottles, did some stretching exercises, and saddled up for Dean Cutoff, which I understood was an old camp that had been recently reopened to provide a replacement starter camp (since everything along and east of the Middle Ponil Creek were history).  It was located on the South Ponil Creek, about 1 ½ miles from Ponil camp (about halfway between Ponil and Flume Canyon camp).  Since we had all day, Rene took his time from the very get-go, using every opportunity to teach.  Todd and Luke started off with the map reading, after getting a smiling refusal from me on which way to go.  Once the proper trail was established, we hiked about 20 feet and stopped to learn stream crossing protocols (even though the creek was just a muddy rivulet here).  Then we got another brief hike before stopping to learn trail sign protocols, and soon again, for fence protocols.  But finally we got into some just plain trail and got moving a little bit, doing a couple of caterpillars as we hiked up some of the steeper sections.  The Crew almost went wrong at the Dean Skyline Trail intersection, but stopped and figured it out.  There were also no trail signs for the cutoff trail for Dean Cutoff, but they figured that one out too.  We pulled in around 11:30, and sent pairs up- and down-stream to check for the best campsite.  The downstream pair found the water buffalo and a brand new latrine, but no really good campsites, so we went with the upstream pair’s recommendation and hiked to the furthest upstream site - narrow but otherwise pretty decent, and not too far a hike to the bear bags.  Crew 893 and another Crew were in the next site down.  Dean Cutoff is at the bottom of the South Ponil Canyon, and the canyon road was visible through the trees.  The creekbed was not running, but there was some dark seepage here and there - nothing anyone would care to drink, though.  As usual, I asked Rene to watch while the guys handled the tarp, bear bags, water, and basic campsite organization (no tents yet).  He agreed, and later claimed to be favorably impressed.  Once that was taken care of, we grabbed lunch.  Since this was a new camp, there were various artifacts laying about, including a horseshoe (that we placed on a rock for future Crews), and a small animal skull.  Then Rene continued on with more instructions, running til about 3:30 or so.  Somewhat surprisingly, there were a fair number of new procedures and protocols, all instituted since 2000, and in most cases reflecting the past two seasons increased problems with bears.  These included the now mandatory use of an “oops” mini-bear-bag, storage of all packs within the bear-muda triangle, storage of even more stuff in the bear bags, leaving all cookware and dishes at the sumps overnight, placing the tents a minimum of 50 feet outside the bear-muda triangle (and all grouped together, no-one isolated), and still more.  At 3:30, he called it a lecture, and the guys had some downtime to nap or play cards.  We started dinner at 4:30, learning additional new protocols for cooking and even eating.  Meanwhile, the non-cooks handled tent setup, since with still a clear sky overhead we clearly had zero chance of rain.  Rene asked if he could share my tent (“Sure thing”), which saved him some hassle.  Prior to dinner, we heard about some problems with another Crew at the far end of the campsite, throwing large rocks at the new latrine (for funsies) and allegedly also having broken into and cleaned their clothes inside the water buffalo; this latter situation had everyone in the entire camp upset, and Rene and the other Rangers went down to check things out and talk with this Crew’s Ranger (who was apparently unaware of what was going on).  After thinking about it, I went ahead and purified our latest batch of water, “just in case”.  [Many months later, I found out that they had indeed done the dirty deed, so I was glad I practiced “better safe than sorry”.]  Ate dinner about 5:15, and went ahead and demo’d our more rigorous cleaning protocol to Rene (he approved).  Rene and one or two of the other Rangers then intercepted the Ponil Camp Director and several of his staff members, who were riding by, and talked with them for about 20 minutes about our miscreant neighboring Crew, while we finished cleanup and did a basic camp breakdown to get ready for a quicker getaway tomorrow morning (take the tarp down, fill two canteens, pre-pack as much gear as possible, pre-position what couldn’t be packed, change into tomorrow hiking clothes, and decide on a wakeup time (consensus was 5:15)).  We put the bear bags up (we were first up), with the oops bag ready to go if needed.  One of the Scouts in our neighboring Crew (another Troop 796 (?) - not our Crew III, but the same Troop number) had brought a trail guitar, and he seemed eager to have me come and play it when I asked.  So I headed back to our site, where Rene was holding court with a card game (and later a ghost story), and got my picks and sheet music, plus a canteen.  Having already heard me about a thousand times in their careers to date, none of our guys were interested in another Bob songfest in lieu of a fresh ghost story from Rene, so I headed back down alone, with two last smellable items from Mark and Rene in my pocket.  This turned into a pretty good time, with about 25 Scouts and Advisors gathered around.  The Scout who owned the guitar (missed his name) was still learning how, so I sounded like Jimi Hendrix for a night.  Kind of made up for the lack of the Cantina show, too, at least for me!  Did 9 songs; The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down, Ramblin’ Man, and Ghost Riders were the most popular.  By the time we broke it up, it was well dark, with some great stars overhead.  Returned to the bear-bags to put those last two last smellable bits in the oops bag, and then hit the rack.  Rene was still finishing up his ghost story with an enraptured audience, so I tiptoed by.  Wrote diary for about 20 minutes, then Rene showed up and climbed on in.  We chatted til about 10:30 or so, on various topics Philmont and otherwise, then racked out.  A good first day on the trail - but tomorrow, the real fun starts.