Log Entry #445
August 20, 2025
HM Rodriguez
(Zweibrucken- 1970-73
BSA Troop 204)
The Promise
~
A 53-Year Journey to Philmont
The campfire crackled against the German night, sending sparks dancing toward stars that seemed impossibly bright above the Zweibrücken countryside. I was twelve years old; my father was stationed at Kreuzberg Kaserne Army base. I was living the kind of adventure most kids only read about in books. But Sgt. Mike Strassburg, scoutmaster for Troop 204, had stories that made even Germany feel small.
“Philmont,” he said, the word rolling off his tongue like a prayer. The orange flames painted his weathered face as he leaned forward, his eyes holding that distant look adults get when they’re remembering something that changed them. “Philmont Scout Ranch in New Mexico. 157,000 acres of the most beautiful, challenging wilderness you can imagine.” We were a ragtag bunch of military brats, far from home, but Mike had a way of making us believe we could conquer the world. He told us about the Sangre de Cristo Mountains, about hiking trails that wound through history itself, past abandoned gold mining camps, and Native American pictographs hiding in ancient sacred sites. He spoke of Mount Baldy, rising 12,600 feet into the thin air, and the way the sunrise looked from its summit. Mike was an Eagle scout.
“The altitude will kick your butt,” he chuckled, poking at the fire with a stick. “But there’s something about that place that gets into your soul. Every scout should experience it once in their lifetime.”
Then he looked directly at me, and I felt the weight of his attention like a spotlight. “Promise me something, kid. When you get back to the States, when you’re older, promise me you’ll go to Philmont.” The words came out before I could think: “I promise, Mr. Strassburg.” He nodded, satisfied, and the conversation moved on to other things. But that promise settled into my chest like a seed, waiting.
Life has other plans. Promises made around campfires by twelve-year-olds, I learned, are delicate things. Life has a way of piling on top of them like sediment, layer upon layer, until they’re buried so deep you almost forget they’re there. Almost. We moved back to the States the following year, and suddenly I was dealing with the drama of middle school, high school, then college, then career, marriage, divorce, kids and moving to different parts of the country. The promise became a whisper in the back of my mind during family camping trips: Philmont. It surfaced when I helped my own sons with their Eagle Scout projects: You promised. It echoed when I saw pictures of New Mexico’s high desert: Someday. But someday is the most dangerous word in the English language. It’s where dreams go to hibernate, sometimes forever.
Years turned to decades. My hair went gray, then white. My knees started complaining about stairs. Mike Strassburg passed away, taking his stories and that campfire moment with him. I wondered sometimes if the promise died with him, if I was released from an obligation that only a boy and an old man had witnessed under the vibrant pinpricks of the German stars. But promises aren’t contracts with other people—they’re contracts with ourselves. And deep down, past all the excuses and practical concerns, I knew that seed was still there, still waiting.
You never know when the time is right, or that seed of commitment will germinate. At sixty-five, I found myself staring at the Philmont website like a teenager planning his first date. My wife rolled her eyes when I mentioned it. “You want to do what? At your age?” But there was something in her voice—not discouragement, but recognition. She knew about the seed that waited fifty years to sprout.
The physical training was humbling. My body, which had once scrambled up trees and across monkey bars without thought, now required careful negotiation. Every muscle had to be reintroduced to the concept of sustained effort. But each day on the trail, each pound added to the backpack, each hill conquered, I felt that adolescent boy stirring to life.
The preparation with the crew, ten scouts and two other adults, was a culmination of years of anticipation. It was the practice hikes, the packing and re-packing of my gear, the early morning drive to the airport, and then the drive to Cimarron, New Mexico. I felt like I was traveling back through time. The New Mexico landscape grew more dramatic with each mile, the plains giving way to foothills, the foothills to mountains that scraped the belly of an endless sky. When I saw the Philmont gateway for the first time, with its iconic covered wagons and buffalo skull, and the collection of hiking boots hurled over the crossbeams, I had to pull over. Fifty-three years of wondering when, and here I was. Then I saw the iconic Tooth of Time off in the distance. It was real. That image I had seen all my life was staring at me, almost smiling back, as if a mountain could smile.
Our crew was a mixed bag—teenagers13-17, with two other younger adults, dreamers like me. The young ones looked at us with polite concern, probably wondering if they’d be carrying our bodies out of the wilderness. More than once, a young scout would wait as I labored up the trail, “How you doing Mr. R?” with a concerned voice. I didn’t blame them. I was wondering the same thing.
The first day nearly killed me. Not literally—though there were moments of doubt—but it murdered every romantic notion I’d harbored about being secretly twenty-five inside this aging shell. The altitude, at 7000ft, hit like a punch to the chest, the pack felt like it was loaded with concrete, and the trail seemed to climb straight up into the sun. But then something magical happened. My body remembered what my mind had forgotten: how to find rhythm, how to breathe with the mountain, how to let the trail teach you its secrets. By day three, I wasn’t just surviving, I felt I was belonging.
Philmont’s weather, I discovered, has a sense of humor. A dark one. We experienced every season in the space of twelve days, sometimes all in one afternoon. The morning would dawn clear, crisp, and beautiful, lulling you into a false sense of security. Then the clouds would build like towering fortresses, and by three o’clock, you’d be huddled in your rain gear as hail the size of marbles bounced off tree branches and the limestone outcrops in a fierce snare drum rhythm.
The worst storm hit us on day seven, just as we were making camp near Touch-Me-Not Creek. The temperature dropped thirty degrees in as many minutes, and the wind tried to relocate our tents to Kansas. I found myself laughing—actually laughing—as I tied down a tent line while rain lashed my face. Here I was, nearly seventy years old, living like a pioneer, and I’d never felt more alive. “You okay, Mr. R?” one of the teenagers yelled over the storm. “Better than okay,” I yelled back. “This is what I promised to do!” He looked at me like I’d lost my mind. Maybe I had. But sometimes losing your mind is exactly what you need to find your soul.
Mount Baldy had been waiting for me for fifty-three years, and it wasn’t about to make things easy. The trail from Baldy Town to the summit is deceptively gentle at first, winding through 150ft pines, and aspen groves that whisper secrets in the wind, then giving way to short strong junipers. But as you climb above the tree line, the mountain shows its teeth. At 11,000 feet, every breath is a negotiation. Your lungs file formal complaints with your brain, and your legs start sending resignation letters. The teenagers bounded ahead like mountain goats while I plodded along like a determined turtle, stopping every fifty yards to pretend I was admiring the view, and snapping a picture or two with my phone. But I kept climbing. One foot in front of the other, one breath at a time, carrying that promise up the mountainside like an offering.
The summit, when it finally appeared, was nothing like I’d imagined and everything I’d hoped for. No dramatic peak, just a gentle rounded top marked by a simple U.S.G.S. geodesic symbol. But the view—dear God, the view. The world spread out in every direction, layer upon layer of mountains rolling away like frozen waves, disappearing into distance azure blue and vibrant orange horizon. As I sat on that summit a tear formed in my eye. Not from exhaustion or altitude or even accomplishment, though all of those played a part. I was emotional because I could feel twelve-year-old me sitting beside me, grinning with satisfaction. I choked back crying when I heard Mike Strassburg’s voice in the wind, saying, “I knew you’d make it, kid.” Sometimes keeping a promise isn’t just about integrity—it’s about keeping faith with the person you used to be and the person you’re still becoming.
The descent from Baldy was harder than the climb in ways that had nothing to do with my knees. With each step away from the summit, I felt the magic of the moment settling into memory, becoming story, becoming the thing I’d tell around campfires for the rest of my life.
But the trek wasn’t over. We still had days of trail ahead, days of storms and sunshine, of blisters and breathless views, of shared meals and shared stories around evening fires. They were the days of being the person I’d promised to become. On our last night, camped in a place called House Canyon, I found myself staring up at stars that seemed close enough to pluck from the sky. The same stars that had watched a young boy make a promise to his scoutmaster in Germany all those years ago. “You did it,” I whispered to the darkness. “You actually did it.”
The trip home was bittersweet. Part of me wanted to stay in those mountains forever, to keep living that heightened version of myself that could climb summits and weather storms and sleep on the ground without complaint. But another part knew that the real test wasn’t in the wilderness—it was in bringing that mountain version of myself back to the ordinary world.
People ask me now if it was worth it, if twelve days of physical punishment and weather extremes and sleeping on rocks was really necessary at my age. They don’t understand that it was never about age. It was about promise-keeping. It was about proving that the boy who dreamed around that German campfire was still alive somewhere inside the old man. They don’t understand that some promises are made not to other people but to the universe itself, to the grand possibility that we might become who we’re meant to be if we just keep faith long enough.
I asked myself if there may be a moral in this story. Fifty-three years is a long time to keep a promise. Long enough for the promisee to die, for the promiser to forget, for the whole world to change around the edges of that single commitment. Long enough for doubt to creep in, for practical concerns to build walls, for life to offer a thousand perfectly reasonable excuses.
But here’s what I learned on that mountain: promises aren’t contracts with other people—they’re contracts with possibility itself. When twelve-year-old me promised to go to Philmont, he wasn’t just making a commitment to Mike Strassburg. He was making a commitment to the idea that dreams matter, that words have power, that the boy who makes a promise and the man who keeps it are connected by something stronger than time. The funny thing about promises is that they don’t expire. They don’t get canceled by the death of witnesses or the passage of decades or the accumulation of reasonable excuses. They just wait, patient as mountains, for the right moment to call in their debts.
And when you finally pay up, when you finally do the thing you said you’d do all those years ago, something magical happens. You don’t just keep a promise—you keep faith. With yourself, with the dreams that shaped you, with the impossible notion that we’re all capable of being more than circumstance suggests.
Mike Strassburg never knew I kept that promise. He was gone long before I laced up my hiking boots and pointed myself toward New Mexico. But I think somehow, he knew I would. Not because I was particularly virtuous or determined, but because some promises are so perfectly aligned with who we’re meant to become that keeping them isn’t really a choice—it’s gravity. The summit of Mount Baldy is behind me now, reduced to photographs and stories and the quiet satisfaction that comes from promises kept. But the real summit—the one that matters—isn’t a place at all. It’s the moment when you realize that the boy who dreams and the man who achieves are the same person. They are separated only by time and the courage to remember what you promised to become. Some people climb mountains because they’re there. I climbed one because I said I would, fifty-three years ago, around a campfire in Germany, to a man who believed in the power of promises to shape destinies. He was right.




For more stories by Hector M. Rodriguez – go to hectorsbooks.com