Food and other Preparation

Over the past few months I have been slowly getting everything ready for my hike this year. This has included finalizing a few gear decisions and a whole lot of dehydrating. On my last hike my main plan was to have a few items of food with my dad to be sent but most of my food would just be purchased along the way in town. This is not a bad strategy and is used by many people that attempt, both successfully and unsucessfully, to thru-hike. For the first section of trail last time this worked quite well. I was able to find decent grocery stores at resupply towns and after a few resupplies I had a good sense of what I should buy and how much.

This all changed when my mom offered to get a dehydrated and dehydrate meals for me while I was hiking. Obviously I took her up on the offer immediately. There was no question in my mind, food I neither had to prep or purchase being sent to me on the trail... there's no down side there. Like most things my mom does she went a bit over board and dehydrated fancy meals for me for the rest of my trip as well as plenty of amazing dehydrated desserts. This split in styles of resupply allowed me to see both ways in first hand experience. It made me think carefully about what method I wanted to use this time around.

There are definite benefits in both styles. The resupply along the way in stores method allows for more leeway in distance traveled and times to resupply. If you feel like doing a lot of miles a few days in a row you can just hit the next town. If you take a few slow days to revitalize yourself just resupply a little earlier. For most of the trail there are plenty of towns along the trail to hitch a ride into and buy food. This slowly gets to be less true as you get further north along the trail and towns get further away from the trail and further spread out. 

The biggest upside to dehydrating food and getting it in mail drops along the way is the food itself. It is far easier to create a variety of meals with advanced preparation. In a small grocery store there are only so many different things you can buy that doesn't require refrigeration and is somewhat light. The biggest downside of mail drops is the amount of pretrail perpetration that needs to happen. For the last few months I have been dehydrating food at least two days a week. Luckily some family friends loaned me their homemade dehydrater which is much larger then my moms (picture below). 

In that photo I was trying to dry chili. It was the one thing that failed miserably. All I was able to do with the chili was turn 80 dollars into a fabulous quantity of mold. Besides that one failure everything else went great. If anyone is curious the dehydrater was homemade and used a toaster oven heating element as it's heat source. Using the food I prepared I made 20 boxes of food, guessing at about one a week. Inside each of these boxes there is 6 dinners, a bag of cheese powder, a bag of extra veggies, a tube of Nuun, a bag of trail mix and 6 BigSurBars. Big Sur Bars is the maker of the best tasting bar that I have found and is what I will be eating for breakfast. Not only do they make a great bar but when I asked them to sponsor me they actually said yes! If you want to try a bar out there is a link on the right. Here is a picture of what the contents of one of the 20 mail drop boxes actually looks like. 

In under a week I will be hitting the trail. Yesterday I drove from Maine to Washington DC in 12 hours, not a great time interestingly enough, and on Monday I will be heading to Georgia. I wish anyone who started the trail already luck and warmth since I checked the weather on top of Springer Mt using mountain-forecast.com and the wind chill was 5 last night. Stay warm hikers!