I was glad last week when I heard that the Boy Scouts of America will allow girls to join.

It’s been a long time in coming and anyone who is or has been a Boy Scout should welcome the decision.

I say this as a former Boy Scout. First, it strikes me as strange that an organization that requires boys to recite and oath that says, in part, “I will do my best … to keep myself mentally awake and morally straight” and also has a 12-point law that says, in part, “A Scout is trustworthy, helpful, friendly, courteous, kind and obedient,” would separate boys from their sisters and friends. Surely if one is to mold boys into respectful models of citizenry then allowing them supervised interactions with girls would be a good place to start.

But beyond shaping proper boundaries for young men—which is no small thing—the organization offers quite a bit for girls as well.

Now, to be clear, I am sure Girl Scouts is a fine organization and I do not believe anyone should join Boy Scouts if it is not for them. But, the fact remains, the organization has some unique offerings which could make the path to adulthood easier for any child.

Specifically, I am thinking about Philmont.

The Boy Scouts is known as an outdoors organization and Philmont is their crown jewel. The sprawling, 140,000-acre New Mexico Scout ranch attracts Scouts from all over the world to camp and hike for a week and make lifelong memories.

My troop was not great about pushing boys to earn merit badges—we sneered at such troops, calling them merit badge factories—but we were an ambitiously outdoors-driven troop. We would have campouts at least once a month and every year we applied to go to Philmont. I was lucky to go four times, once as an Order of the Arrow volunteer wherein I got to spend weeks in the New Mexican mountains, building trails.

The camp includes opportunities for climbing poles, rock climbing, visiting cabins set to recreate 19^th century trapper cabins, visiting ghost towns and abandoned mines and shooting black powder rifles.

Truly, there was never a dull day at Philmont.

But mostly there’s the walking. There’s the getting up at first light, starting a fire, packing up and then walking all day long without headphones, without music without anything and carrying on, up mountains, over streams and along cold, high mountain ridges. There are encounters with bears, eagles and more familiar wildlife. There is the feeling of being bone-tired at the end of the day and a weird joy at the thought of doing it again.

To think (at least a few) young girls would not enjoy this is absurd. In fact, the fact is, girls have always been able to join the Explorer Scouts program, a co-ed program focused on camping. On occasion, I would see girls at Philmont who were there with their Explorer programs and at least the ones I talked to seemed to like the Scout ranch as much as I did.

But seeing girls was rare in no small part because the Explorer Scouts program is a vastly smaller organization than the official Boy Scouts of America organization.

Young people need to be outside and if allowing girls into Boy Scouts means more young people will get to breath in deep lungfuls of cedar-tinged air then so much the better.

And yes, girls have their own camps and I am sure at least some offer similar vigorous programming and surely some are as breathtaking as the Philmont ranch. No one should expect all girls need to enlist in the Boy Scouts or enlist in any co-ed program. I am sure there is value in a same-sex outdoors program.

But there is value in supervised mixing and mingling too and there is great value in the Boy Scouts.

So, I am happy that value is now open to all.