Lets Talk Foodstuffs

 

Foodstuffs. This is the single most talked about topic for David and I. It’s also the topic we’ve spent the most time researching and experimenting with. The first thing we noticed about trail food is that it isn’t particularly “healthy”. I’m used to cooking and eating fresh meat, fruits and vegetables. On the trail everything will be dried and packaged and processed, with the exception of the dehydrated homemade meals we will bring. We threw the idea of eating healthy out the window and instead switched our focus to calories per ounce.

It’s normal to lose some weight on a thru-hike. It’s near impossible to consume enough calories each day to make up for all the calories burned. It’s nearly impossible because you have to carry all of your food. And you have to keep it in a bear canister, which limits the amount you can physically carry and fit in the canister. The canister is heavy duty plastic and looks like a giant Nalgene bottle. It’s rigid, so unlike a flexible food bag, you can literally only fit a finite amount of food in it. Bear canisters are required on the trail because black bears are native  to the Sierras and a common occurrence- the old school method of hanging food from trees is ineffective as the bears have figured out, over time, how to get at the food. There has been a bear located on a specific stretch of the Appalachian Trail who has been reported to have figured out how to open the bear canister we’re using, so I guess it’s only a matter of time until the Sierra bears figure it out too. But for now, the BearVault is an approved canister. It’s kind of unbelievable that the Appalachian bear can open this canister, I can hardly get it open. And I have opposable thumbs.

Anyways. Back to the food stuffs and consuming calories while on the trail. I’ll be honest, I’m looking forward to losing a few pounds. David however, is not. He doesn’t have any body fat to begin with, so he really doesn’t have weight to lose. As we started doing our research, we learned that a lot of serious hikers have a general rule of thumb that they try to only eat foods that have a calorie to weight ratio of 100 calories per ounce. A few exceptions include sources of protein like jerky, foil packets of tuna or chicken, but protein isn’t deemed as important as fat and carbs in regards to sources of energy. I’ll be experimenting with dehydrating foil packet/canned chicken soon. I’ve read that these rehydrate the best and if they are dehydrated, it will reduce a lot of weight.

So we started a spreadsheet to track all this foodstuffs, which was David’s idea, and it’s been really helpful. We’ve recorded over 100 food and drink items and their calorie/ounce info along with ease and speediness of cooking, tastiness etc.

We plan to do most of our meal prep/cooking in zip-loc bags to make cooking easier, reduce the amount of dishes that need to be cleaned and to conserve stove fuel. Most of the meals will be “just add hot water to the bag” type recipes. In backpacker lingo, this is called Freezer Bag Cooking, or FBC for short. You add hot water to your bag o stuff, stir it up a bit, put it in an insulated "pot cozy" or bag or winter hat or jacket, and let it sit for 10-15 minutes or so while you finish setting up camp or make yourself a nice tasty beverage. There are many websites out there that have FBC recipes. We’ve picked out a few that we think we might like and have been test driving them at home to find out how they cook and taste. Some have been great,  some have been modified and others have been crossed off the list!

 

Here, I'm using the JetBoil at home to boil water and experiment with prepping trail foods- at whatever the elevation Pewaukee, WI is at and a cozy 68 degrees in my apartment, it took about a minute to boil 2 cups of coldish water. On the trail it will take at least 2-3 times longer as we'll be at a minimum elevation of 8,000 ft and will not likely be so warm, especially in the morning. Boiling water for coffee and oatmeal in the morning will take much longer as it will likely be around 30 degreez.

 

 

 

 

 

Using the insulated "cozy" method of cooking is a strategic way to save stove fuel and weight, as we will each likely only need to carry one fuel canister at any given point on the trail. Rather than using more fuel to keep the water and food boiling/simmering, once hot water is added to the bag and the bag or pot is put in a cozy, the food continues to cook as the heat is retained.

 

Example: Cooking Ramen. The package instructions say to bring 2 cups of water to a boil and then add the noodles, then return to a boil for 5 mins. This would use up a lot of fuel and is not necessary. Instead, we add 2 cups of hot water to a bag with the noodles, put the bag in a cozy or something insulated, then let it sit for about 10 mins. After about 10 mins the noodles are nice and soft and ready to eat and you've saved at least 5-8 mins of stove fuel.

 

 

Here's a picture of David test driving eating a meal straight out of the freezer bag= no dishes to wash!  If you couldn't see the couch, keyboard or counter top, you would almost think he was eating in camp! He's dressed for it!

 

 

I’m trying to do this trip as gluten free as possible. A Paleo/Primal menu isn’t going to work, so I’ve added grains, like rice and rice noodles, into the menu to get extra calories. Regular Ramen is not gluten free, so I did some experimenting to see how my stomach handled it. I felt mostly OK but I do not want to have stomach issues while on the trail, so will try to keep the Ramen and other things made of gluten to a minimum.

David doesn’t seem to mind going back to eating grains and gluten, he is more concerned with getting as many calories as possible. He has an intense Mac N Cheese recipe on his menu that is loaded with more than 1350 calories! Woo!

We’ve been trying to plan our menus with plenty of variety so we don’t get sick of eating the same things for 28 days. While on the trail, you don’t have the option to eat anything else besides what you’ve packed. The resupply locations all have cafes (except for Muir Trail Ranch) where you can be sure we will have a meal or two (and ice cream!). But apart from those couple of days, everything else is dried food.

One thing we are both looking forward to eating on the trail: candy bars!! They are a tasty way to get lots of calories. Snickers, Kit Kats, Twix, Reese's oh my! This is one of the items I am most excited to shop for! Plus there are many servings of M&M’s and other candy on the menu!

 

 

Other things I’m looking forward to eating: whole bags of chippers! Yesss! FunYuns, Cheetos, Doritos, Baked Lays! YES! Also, gluten free cookies, gluten free pretzels with nutella and peanut butter and honey. Word.

Other strategies to get more calories is to add olive oil to most dinner recipes. Olive oil in Stove Top stuffing, mashed potatoes, rice, pasta and pretty much any other dinner recipe will be quite tasty.  On my menu, I have several Asian inspired recipes in which I will add sesame oil, which is of course packed with fat and calories just like olive oil.

We’ve tried a few freeze dried backpacker meals like Mountain House and Backpacker Pantry….although the taste was OK, they had an enormous amount of fiber in them which made our GI tracts do weird things. We tried Katmandu Curry, which consisted mostly of lentils. The first few bites we thought, wow this is tasty! But after a few more, the flavor was overpowering and the amount of lentils was ridiculous. Freeze dried Katmandu will not be on the menu! We’ve tried a couple others that were good and will make it on the menu. We will keep these meals to a minimum as they are super expensive, and like all other dried foods, super high in sodium! We are currently brainstorming on how to reduce sodium intake. Homemade dehydrated meals are a good start, but we need to look for additional ways to reduce the salt...

 

John Muir Trail- What's That?

 

In this post I’ll attempt to explain what the John Muir Trail is and how we’ll be hiking it. I won’t give you the history of the trail because I don’t want to plagiarize, if you’re interested I encourage you to google it and read all about it!

The trail is named after John Muir, who was among other things, a naturalist from Wisconsin! If you’ve never read anything by him, I encourage you to. He had a unique way of looking at and describing the natural world. Describing things like trees and animals with the words “glorious” and “majestic”. Very uniquely Muir. Muir played an important role in convincing Teddy Roosevelt to establish Yosemite as a National Park and spent a lot of time in the Sierras. He did a lot of other cool things too, like starting the Sierra Club. I can’t really do him justice. Google him.

OK, so the JMT. We’ll be hiking it from its northern terminus in Yosemite Valley, where the trail begins at Happy Isles, to its southern terminus atop the summit of Mt Whitney and then to the nearest trailhead which is Whitney Portal. The trail is about 220 miles, we’ll be hiking closer to 240-250 miles because of resupply locations. The trail follows the Sierra Nevada mountain range in California and passes over several 13,000 and 14,000 foot peaks. Mt Whitney, the trail’s southern terminus, is the tallest mountain in the lower 48 at 14,505 feets. The JMT differs from trails like the Appalachian Trail in that it has significant elevation gains and losses on the regular. Some days we’ll gain 3000+ feet of elevation and lose 2000+ feet all in one day. I think there are only 2 places along the JMT that are sort of flattish, where the elevation gain/loss is only a few hundred feet. I think the total elevation changes along the trail is somewhere around 80,000 feets!

We’re planning to thru-hike the JMT and resupply along the trail. Another way to do the trail is to “section hike”, where you hike sections of the trail, then return later to hike other sections and eventually complete the trail, by hiking all the sections. Some friends from the gym section hiked the trail in 4 sections over the course of 4 summers. They were not able to get enough time off of work to do it all in one go (aka thru-hike), so they did what they could in the time they had. Since we are not section hiking, we’ll need additional supplies along the way. We’ll have 4 total resupplies, all 4 resupply locations are near the trail, listed below in order from north to south and around which day we’ll arrive at that location:

Red’s Meadow (Day 7)

Vermillion Valley Resort/Lake Edison (Day 11)

Muir Trail Ranch (Day 15)

Mt Williamson Motel (Day 23)

A typical resupply consists mainly of food, but other supplies such as first aid stuffs, clothes, money, batteries etc are often included. Most resupply locations are located in sort of remote locations which require boat travel etc and they ask that you send your stuffs in a 5 gallon plastic bucket. It’s durable and will keep rain and critters out. So we will each pack one 5 gallon bucket for ourselves, 8 in total.

 

The resupply locations will pick up your bucket from the nearest town’s post office, transport it to their resort and store it for you until you come and pick it up. This service is of course not free. The price varies from $20-65 depending on which resupplier you use.

 

Here's a picture of the bear canister we'll each be carrying, the BearVault 500. More on the use of bear cans later, but all food and anything with a scent (sunscreen etc) must be kept in this canister. Thanks to modern day packaging, pretty much everything we'll be eating will need to be taken out of its original packaging and re-packed into something smaller, like a small zip lock bag. Otherwise, as you can see from the picture, we wouldn't even be able to fit 1 or 2 day's worth of food in it!

 

We’ll be carrying everything on our backs: food, water, shelter, supplies. Our longest stretch between resupplies is 8 days, our shortest is 4. Since we’re starting in Yosemite, we have a 6,000 foot climb out of the valley to start out our hike...we’re planning to get a few resupply food items in Tuolumne Meadows (which we will reach on day 3) so we don’t have to carry the extra weight out of the valley. We did the Mist Trail and the trail to Half Dome last fall with about 20ish pounds on our backs for when we climbed Half Dome and it was REAL. I can only imagine the fun it will be this time around with a pack nearly twice that weight! WOOT! Climber friends: the Mist Trail is like the CCC trail at Devils Lake but like 4 times longer and way steeper, and often times wet from the spray of Vernal Falls. The rest of the trail to Half Dome is kind of like the hike to Long Wall (aka Long Haul) except 4 hours longer and steeper.

So, we’re planning about 28 days to do the trail, which includes a few rest days (zero miles) along the way. Our longest planned hiking day is 12 or 13 miles, our shortest 5. We’ve tried to plan all of our rest days and where we camp each night at the prettiest places. There are hundreds of alpine lakes along the trail, beautiful views of the Sierras and countless meadows. All in all there will be amazing views every day all day, I hope the memory card for the camera can hold all the photos we’ll want to take!