Philmont Scout Ranch
New Mexico
Hang your boots on this gateway sign and you have arrived at the largest youth camp in the world. Philmont Scout Ranch spreads across roughly one hundred forty thousand acres of the Sangre de Cristo Mountains near Cimarron. Its story begins with oilman Waite Phillips of the Phillips Sixty-Six company, who started buying up this rugged land in the early nineteen twenties.
He built a Spanish Mediterranean mansion, the Villa Philmonte, as a summer home in nineteen twenty-seven. Then in nineteen thirty-eight he gave the Boy Scouts of America almost thirty-six thousand acres. A second gift in nineteen forty-one brought his total donation past one hundred twenty-seven thousand acres.
Today tens of thousands of scouts hike its backcountry every summer, and the ranch hosts the national training center that Phillips himself first imagined.
