After 4 stores and 8 or 9 hours out shopping, we filled the car!
I grossly underestimated the amount of time it was going to take to shop for, unpack, repackage and pack all of our backpacking food... I thought we could get it done if we spent Friday night and all day Saturday. I was WAY off. By 10:00 pm on Sunday night we accomplished packing ONE resupply bucket :) Now, granted we unpacked and repackaged everything, which were the most time consuming tasks, but still...!
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| Starting to unpack his food... |
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| Halfway through unpacking |
Here is a small example of the repackaging we did. In this picture I measured out and packed servings of granola with powdered soy milk. On the ziploc bag, I noted the flavor and how much water to add. I wish I would have taken a picture of all the bags of instant rice I made...there was a mountain of them!
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| 16 bags of granola |
So once we were ready to actually start packing up our resupply buckets, we started with our 8 day stretch between Muir Trail Ranch and our resupply at Mt Williamson Motel. We knew that all the other resupplies, which are all 4-5 days, would be a breeze once we figured out our 8 day situation. Well, we could not fit 8 days of food in our bear cans. Not even with David's superb tetris skillz. We can't fit 7 either, but we're going with it. We exchanged several foods in David's can for either something that packed down smaller, like instant mashed potatoes or higher calorie foods like macadamia nuts and cashews. The majority of David's food for this 7 day stretch now consists of nuts, olive oil and instant mashed potatoes... To eliminate one additional day on the trail we rolled a short, half day of hiking (5 miles) into two other days. Which now brings our 8 day stretch to 7 days. We will have several long days in a row at 12+ miles per day, but hopefully by this point in the trip we'll be in good trail shape and it won't be a big deal.
We finished packing up our buckets on Thursday night! So much for getting it all done on Saturday, wishful thinking Kimburly! Turns out we needed to make a quick run to Walmart for a couple small items including camping toilet paper. After painstakingly packing up the other resupplies, we unpacked them and calculated how many calories were in each bucket, then divided that number by how many days the food was to last. We hit our targets with every bucket except, not surprisingly, the Muir Trail Ranch/7 day bucket. Daveed is low on calories and so am I, but we'll have to make due.
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| All packed up! That's one of the bear cans on the right, with the black lid and red sticker on top, not very large considering the amount of food we wanted to fit in it! |
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| Can see the floor again! |
Took the Mt Williamson buckets (resupply #4) and Lone Pine post office box to my parent's house on Sunday, they will mail these out for us in mid-July. It's too soon to ship them before we leave for our trip. When we taped the buckets shut, Daveed said "Are we really doing this??! Should we check them one more time??". Well, it seemed we had our bucket game down, but I had to open and re-tape the Lone Pine post office box twice because I kept forgetting things... We will pick up the box at the Lone Pine post office when we finish the trail, so it's not really a "resupply" box as it only has a few items in it, including a jar of Speculoos cookie butter from Trader Joe's!!!!! Yummm. It also has a few toiletry items, $0.98 flip flops, and clean clothes.
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| Resupply #4- off to Mom and Dad's |
Now all we have to do is take the other 6 buckets to the post office next week and ship em out! We have a ton of leftover food, which we will take with us on the trip and eat as we go! Although we wanted to fit everything we bought into our buckets, the reality was that pretty much nothing actually fit in our bear cans. We even have leftover candy bars! We really shouldn't need to do any grocery shopping, apart from fresh produce and meats, at all until we finish the JMT! That means we have enough leftover food for the first 2.5 weeks of our trip! :)
Our departure looms near...!!! Super excited! There are just a few things left to take care of before we leave! Cleaning the apt is one of those things, albeit one of the not so fun things. Assembling the trad gear and sorting the rest of our climbing gear is another thing that needs to be done. I also need to dig out my swimsuit...it's somewhere in the depths of my closet.
We hit the road in 8 days!!!!
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