Sailboat aka Ryan McDowell - October Tales

Published: Oct. 18, 2022, 9 a.m.

At Philmont one is able to dream and take on different lives - spend a summer as a miner, learn the ropes as a wrangler,  or protect lives as a medic.  Youth is full of unusual adventures - like for instance recording an entire album at a backcountry camp, and managing to release it before the summers end.  Sailboat, also known as Ryan McDowell, and the Cypher’s Staff of 2021 did just that.

Today, Sailboat and I go behind the scenes to discuss the recording of Down In the Contention by Charlie’s Revenge, including the haunting tune The Ballad of Anne Marie.  All of which you can listen to on Spotify.

Although Sailboat spent summers in the backcountry, perhaps his favorite summer was spent in the PTC Dining Hall where he built a tight knit group of friends and spent his days off as a self-proclaimed teenage dirtbag, living free.  After the traumatic experience of the 2018 Ute Park fire and doing his part on TSI, he lived at Pueblano with an incredible staff of friends and muses.  He also experienced a somewhat alarming encounter with the other side. Was it a ghost, a hallucination, an abnormal migraine? I’ll let you decide.  Furthermore, Sailboat spent a summer working at The Summit, and he shares some haphazard stories from that experience as well.

Philmont Experience:
2015 - Trek participant
2017 - PTC Dining Hall
2018 - PC Pueblano/TSI/LEBs
2019 - PC Pueblano for real
2020 - The Summit - housekeeping / zip lining
Fall 2020 - Philmont Forestry Team
2021 - PC Cypher's Mine

Notable Mentions:
Joey Fernandez
Brady Geronomy
Mike Neihart
Maggie McCulloch
Jenna Trione
Emily Bartles
Sarah Wettemann
Stephen Kurt
Sage Early
Zachary Vig
Alex Conrad
Ellyn Washburne
Jack Anthony
Ranger Conner

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