Philmont Council Contingents

Itinerary Selection Process

For your Philmont trek, you will follow an assigned "itinerary."  This itinerary defines which campsites you will go to each night, the programs you will participate in, where you will pick up food, and where water may be found.  The itinerary will also have side hikes -- these are generally nearby peaks you can climb.

For the summer of 2009, there are 35 itineraries defined by Philmont.

Your crew has to select its itinerary from one of the defined itineraries.  This process begins in March when the Philmont TREKS 2009 Itinerary Guide books are received.  This book includes a postcard that your crew uses to indicate the top five choices of itineraries that it wants.  The postcard is then returned to Philmont.  They will assign your crews itinerary and send an e-mail telling you which one it is.

When picking your itinerary, it is recommended that you try to best fit the itinerary to your crew's interests and abilities.  You should accurately judge the capability and experience of your crew and select an itinerary that is not too aggressive for them.  For example, if you have very young, small Scouts in your crew, it is probably not a good idea to pick a "super-strenuous" itinerary.

You should try to fit the programs to your crew's interests.  Obviously, with a crew of twelve, there will be widely varying desires and interests so this is an inexact science at best!  By taking the list of programs available at Philmont and using this to survey the crew members you can find those programs that appeal to the majority of the crewmembers.

A spreadsheet is available that you can use to help select your itinerary.  It uses some preference information about what your crew would like to do and the results of the program survey.  It creates three outputs:

  1. a chart (and list) of the programs that your crew prefers
  2. a list of the itineraries that most closely match these programs and the crew preferences
  3. summary descriptions of itineraries including a campsite elevation graph. 

You can then use these results along with the TREKS 2009 book to make your final selection.

The Program Survey Form and Itinerary Selection Spreadsheet may be downloaded by clicking the buttons below:

Program survey form (Word for Office 2003)   Program Survey Form
     
Itinerary Selection spreadsheet (Excel for Office 2003 -- NOTE that this spreadsheet has macros that must be enabled to work properly.)   Itinerary Selection

The program survey and spreadsheet have been updated to reflect the itinerary definitions in the Philmont TREKS 2009 Itinerary Guide book. 

While these tools have been made available for your use, they do not take the place of in-depth discussion and study of the available itineraries by your crewmembers.  Since these are only tools, you have the ultimate responsibility for selecting the best itinerary for your crew.  If you have suggestions to making these tools more accurate, easier to use, or other improvements, please let Sid Covington know.   He would also be interested in knowing how useful these tools are to you.

Updated:  03/14/2009