[pct-l] Advice on Gear List

[CHUCK CHELIN]

Good morning, Mike,

I don’t choose to equate my trail sustenance with what I eat at home any
more than I equate walking with my pack to driving my car on a highway, or
sleeping in the open on the ground to sleeping in a comfortable bed.  For
me, eating on the trail is more akin to loading fuel than it is to fine
dining.  However, I’ll argue that life on the trail – as crude as it may be
– is probably a more healthy existence than the decadence of a
mostly-sedentary home-life.



Hiking significant distances without cooking isn’t for everyone, but it
suites me well.  Since I almost always hike alone I’m not influenced by
social pressure to stop and cook “like everyone else.”  My eating habits are
typified by many small instances of “grazing” rather than the more organized
stops for three meals per day.



My wife – my supply & logistics manager – assembles and bags my food by day
to assure I have the required Calories.  I keep a daily food sack separate
from the remainder of the supplies, and I know that I should consume all of
its contents sometime throughout that day.  I can easily eat any of my food
anytime during the day – or even at night for a snack – so whenever it
occurs to me I just browse through the day-food sack and grab anything that
interests me at the moment.



Some of the items are “junk food”, i.e. snack crackers, chips, cookies, some
candy, etc.  Such items are routinely criticized as being little more than
cheap carbohydrate containing lots of fat, salt, and preservatives.  True --
and I don’t eat much of that stuff at home -- but as a hiker that’s exactly
what I need: carbohydrate, fat, and salt in a form that won’t go funky after
several weeks in transit and in storage.



Once when I was preparing to hike a section here in Oregon I loaded my
supermarket cart with the usual snack items and junk food – plus, as I
recall, a six-pack of beer for home consumption.  While the checker was
bagging everything she glanced up at me accusingly and said, “So – how long
is your wife going to be gone?”



Other items are a bit more wholesome, such as nuts, durable cheese, peanut
butter, dried fruit, powdered milk, powdered cheese, dehydrated refried
beans, jerky, packaged meats like salami, tortillas, crisp bread, various
“bars”, cereal “party mix”, honey, jam, regular oatmeal, etc.  If oatmeal is
included it will be measured into a baggie along with some dried fruit,
nuts, and milk powder so all I have to do is add water and kneed it for a
minute.  The oats will still be chewy but that’s the way I like it.  I treat
the powdered cheese and dehydrated refried beans much the same way:  Sometimes
I re-hydrate them separately, but usually I mix the two and use the result
as a thick dip for crackers.



Occasionally I get a little weary of what I eat.  For example when I
resupplied in Independence for 8 days up to Tuolumne Meadows I packed the
bear ‘can with little more than 80 multi-grain tortillas and a couple of
jars of peanut butter.  That was OK, but I did look forward to a stop at
VVR, and the abundance and variety of my next resupply box.



Steel-Eye

Hiking the Pct since before it was the PCT – 1965

http://www.trailjournals.com/steel-eye
http://www.trailjournals.com/SteelEye09

On Thu, Sep 16, 2010 at 6:42 AM, Mike Cunningham <hikermiker at yahoo.com>wrote:

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> --- On *Wed, 9/15/10, CHUCK CHELIN <steeleye at wildblue.net>* wrote:
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> Stove – I don’t carry one.
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> For those of you who go cookless, what do you eat?  Breakfast & lunch I can
> see but what about dinner?
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> hm
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