Baldy Mountain, Philmont Scout Ranch, Cimmaron, NM

PTViewer

Baldy Mountain (12,441') is the highest peak at Philmont Scout Ranch, near Cimmaron, NM. It is located at the far northwest corner of the Ranch.

Our trek included a dayhike from Miranda Camp up and over Baldy, back down by French Henry Camp for mine and blacksmithing activities, and back to Miranda via the commissary at Baldy Town to pick up the next four days' worth of food. Officially, that's about 13 miles but true to our crew's habit, we took an alternate route down Baldy that added a couple of miles to the day's trek. We chose to walk down a use trail to a ridgeline off the north side of Baldy that then turns northeast and leads to a trail down to Copper Park. As it turns out, that was a wise decision, both because the trail is much better than the talus slog down the "usual" route and it provides much more picturesque views of Baldy on the way down.

Like most peaks, Baldy generates some of its own weather. We had been watching the pattern of thunderstorms blowing up over the ridges and knew we had to be up and off by 10:00 a.m. to safely avoid becoming human lightning rods. We left Miranda at 5:30 a.m. and hiked the 3.5 miles and 3,500 vertical feet to the summit by 8:45. We were on our way down by 9:15 and the thunder started to rumble around 10:30. Indeed, another crew up on the slopes of Baldy a few days later was caught in the storm around 11:00 and several Scouts were hit by lightning. Fortunately, they all survived, but it served as an object lesson in why you have to watch the weather and learn its patterns as you approach a significant peak.

This panorama was shot with a Nikon D200 and 10.5 mm fisheye lens. It is composed of eight shots in portrait orientation, taken at 45 degree increments, plus a zenith shot to fill in the sky above and a hand-held nadir shot to fill in the area covered by the monopod below. To navigate within the panorama, press and hold the left mouse button. Moving the mouse up/down/right/left will shift the viewing window accordingly. Holding down the "Shift" key will zoom in; holding conw the "Ctrl" key will zoom out.

The panorama was taken July 23, 2007. It was stitched using PTGui and the high-resolution Quicktime cubic VR generated using the Pano2QTVR utility.

If you have the patience and bandwidth to download a 2-meg file, the Quicktime QTVR file will yield much higher resolution than the smaller PTViewer file above.