Back in God's Country

Well for those of you who have been following along for the past few years, this marks the start of my fourth summer on staff here at Philmont. I'll be a Ranger Trainer (RT) this year which means that I'll be teaching other staff members to do the same job that I've been doing the past few years. It's a bit of a daunting experience and I have to say that I'm more than a little nervous about all the responsibility that comes with the job. I'm sure the training over the next few days will help me do just fine and it will be one more awesome summer.

As far as the website goes, I've done a little work to improve the look of everything. It basically has the best parts of what came from the last two years with a few organizational improvements. Some of the features are in a somewhat temporary phase, such as the photo album and map pages, while I work on ways to improve what's there. The photos are returning slowly as I reassemble the old albums and I'll be adding more as time goes on. Also during at least the summer months, you can access this site at either www.iwgbtp.com or www.drewbuck.com.

As usual, things are busy for me around here and the internet is slow so we'll just have to see what happens to this site. The ranch has been cold and wet since I got here, although Mark Anderson says that they've gotten less than 1/2" of rain since November. That means that it could be pretty dry in the backcountry. There's aparently not much snow this year and there's a bit of a fire danger. Not what I was expecting to hear after my drive down here. I took the northern route through Colorado Springs again and hit some pretty hard thunderstorms just north of Trinidad. It dropped almost a foot of hail on the highway in under five minutes. I had to pull off for a while and let it pass.

Anyway, I hit the trail tomorrow for my special RT training. That should last about four days and then it will be time to meet all the new rangers. I'm nervous and excited, but if all things go well, it should be a fun summer.

- Drew