Philmont 2019
Category: History / Fitness Period: Summer 2019 Location: Philmont Scout Ranch, Cimarron, New Mexico Summary: Jack’s 12-day, 100+ mile high-altitude trek - his self-described greatest achievement Last updated: 2026-04-06
Overview
Philmont Scout Ranch is a 140,000-acre Boy Scout high-adventure base in the Sangre de Cristo Mountains of northeastern New Mexico. It is one of the largest youth camps in the world and one of the most physically demanding experiences available to Scouts.
Jack completed a Philmont trek in 2019. In his Medium post on the experience (titled “Philmont - A Journey of Hiking Through Mountains (2019)”), he calls it his greatest achievement. This is a significant claim given his subsequent arc: Berkeley hackathon placements, viral TikTok, Elon Musk video calls, building Agentdex. Philmont still tops the list.
What Philmont Is
A standard Philmont trek is 12 days, roughly 70–100+ miles through the backcountry at elevations of 6,500–12,441 feet. There are no roads, no support vehicles, and - for most of the route - no cell service. Crews of 8–12 Scouts carry all their food, gear, and equipment in 40–60 lb backpacks.
The terrain ranges from gentle meadows to technical ridge scrambles. The altitude causes real physiological effects on most people from lower elevations - headaches, reduced appetite, slower pace, shorter breath. The weather is volatile: afternoon thunderstorms at altitude are a near-daily occurrence and a genuine lightning risk.
Philmont has a fatality history. People have died from lightning strikes, altitude sickness, and accidents. It is treated seriously.
The 12 Days
A Philmont itinerary for Jack’s crew would have included:
- Base camp orientation and equipment check at Philmont’s main camp (Cimarron)
- Daily hikes of 8–12 miles with 2,000–4,000 ft of elevation gain on many days
- Stops at staffed “program camps” offering activities: blacksmithing, burro racing, rifle shooting, mountain biking, rock climbing
- Backcountry camping in designated sites with bear boxes
- The summit of a major peak - likely Baldy Mountain (12,441 ft), Philmont’s highest point and a standard goal for most itineraries
Why It Matters
Philmont is a Type 2 fun experience: miserable during, deeply meaningful after. The combination of sustained physical difficulty, genuine exposure to risk, total self-reliance, and team dependency produces something that most comfortable modern experiences don’t: a real memory of what you’re capable of.
Jack calls it his greatest achievement in 2019, when he was a high school student. This is the same period as the running project-adjacent era - the summer before he started tracking runs systematically. Philmont and the summer 2021 running project (Running Project 2021) are both examples of the same pattern: Jack takes on a physically extreme challenge, documents it obsessively, and extracts lessons from the suffering.
The Philmont Medium post is one of his earliest published pieces. “If anyone asks me what my greatest achievement is, I probably will say Philmont, a few reasons. First, in the 12 day trek, we had…” - the post goes on to document the experience in full.
Connection to Later Work
The Philmont experience prefigures a lot:
- The running project: 5+ miles daily, in heat, with detailed logs - same discipline applied to a different physical challenge
- The Electric Unicycle: 2,500+ miles, crash, persistence - same relationship to difficulty as a learning tool
- Cave Diving as a fascination: both are type-2 environments where the difficulty is the point and the reward is a specific kind of confidence
- His Notion documentation system: the same impulse to capture and reflect on every significant experience started early