[pct-l] Resupply strategies

[CHUCK CHELIN]

Good morning, and Merry Christmas,


I’m unconventional in my eating habits on the trail.  Typically my resupply
box or purchases have a sack of no-cook food per day, including a nice
variety of items.  My practice is to eat everything in that sack sometime
during my six meals a day.  I may eat “dinner” type items for breakfast,
“breakfast” type items for a mid-afternoon snack, or any combination
thereof.  I just reach in my day-food sack and grab whatever appeals to me
at that moment.

I eat mostly purchased fast-food – read “junk food” – which receives such
bad press among nutrition-conscious Americans.  Such food is said to be
mostly carbohydrate, with too much fat, salt, and preservatives.  I eat very
wholesome food at home, but what I need on the trail is lots of
carbohydrate, fat, and salt in products that won’t go funky after several
weeks.

I don’t use much salt at home, but with heavy exercise I crave it on the
trail.  Anything salty is welcome, and I add salt to no-cook items like
peanut butter and reconstituted bean spread.  If I’m cooking I add salt to
whatever glop happens to be in the pot.

As much as I believe the additional sodium is necessary, I
use reduced-sodium table salt on the trail.  That may seem counterintuitive
but that product has less sodium because they have added potassium in its
place.  I use it generously, and believe the sodium-potassium product is
superior to pure table salt as an electrolyte.


Many beginning hikers try to take the nutritional high-ground with eating
theories, but most often these theories go down the tubes after a week or
so.  At that point they become considerably less picky and doctrinaire and
will eat just about anything that doesn’t scurry away from them and hide in
the brush.


Enjoy your planning,

Steel-Eye
Hiking the Pct since before it was the PCT – 1965
http://www.trailjournals.com/steel-eye
http://www.trailjournals.com/SteelEye09



On Wed, Dec 23, 2009 at 8:47 PM, Diane at Santa Barbara Hikes dot com <
diane at santabarbarahikes.com> wrote:

>
> On Dec 23, 2009, at 7:03 PM, pct-l-request at backcountry.net wrote:
>
> > Supplying along the way definitely means a big
> > compromise in nutrition.
>
> Is this really true? I mean, is there really a huge amount of
> nutritional difference between breakfast cereal and fig newtons?
> Between crackers with peanut butter and dehydrated lentils with
> minute rice? Between a power bar and a snicker bar? If there is, I
> never noticed. I hiked 25-30 mile days all through my hike even
> though I'm a 44-year old peri-menopausal lady. Nutrition didn't seem
> to matter much. Emergency-C was a big help, though.
>
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