Final Prep and Travel

The past week has been full of doing final preparations for my hike. The dehydrator has been running almost 24 hours a day but everything that needed to get dehydrated did. Everything got assembled into individual meals and boxed up for shipping. I shipped the first two boxes out myself, Alicia decided it was enough of a momentous occasion to warrant a photo. The USPS employee thought she was a little crazy.

The remaining boxes went into the back of my car and will be at my dads house. As I approach places that I need a resupply I will email him and another box will get shipped. Anywhere that it looks like I could resupply out of a full grocery store I will probably forgo a food shipment and just use the grocery store. With food prep finally done the last step was figuring out how to fit everything into my backpack. It is a fairly daunting task.

After maybe an hour of fiddling I finally got everything to fit inside. It is initially more difficult because everything has to fit inside for the flight. Normally my trekking poles won't be inside my pack and if needed I could store some small things in the mesh outside pockets but I barely trust the airlines to get me and my checked bag to the same location. Trusting them to not lose something tucked in an outside pocket is going a bit too far. All in all, packing went fairly smoothly.

Saturday morning was pretty rough emotionally. Starting a long hike like this involves a lot of dramatic changes to your life which are always kind of hard to adjust to. This time it seemed harder than the other two times and I've been trying to figure out exactly why. The best theory I can think of is this the most settled my life has been around the start of a hike. Both previous hikes started during points of large change in my life even if I wasn't going hiking.

The first time I was unemployed, single, and generally wondering what I should do with my life. I don't feel overly confident that I've figured that last one out yet but it doesn't feel like quite the same scale anymore. I thought the first hike would be fun, which it was, but I was also hoping it would help me learn about myself. I think it did, although what specific lessons those are is hard to define in words. Needless to say, there was a lot more going on in my life than just heading to the woods.

My second hike also came at a transition period. I was debating/planning on moving to Washington DC. When I started that hike I didn't really know what state I would be living in a month after I was done with the trail. I didn't end up moving there and it was not quite as large of a life change as it could of been but made the start of my hike feel like it fit into what was happening outside of my hike.

This time my life feels stable. When I finish my hike I will be living in the same apartment as when I left. I will be going back to the same job as when I left. Those are both new experiences mentally. Also, it was harder leaving Alicia, my girlfriend, because she is not changing her life drastically at the same time. (My girlfriend on my second hike moved to DC as I started my hike.) With everything added together it was a rough morning all around Saturday. But I got on a plane and 12 hours later arrived in San Diego.

I'm starting this adventure off in true hiker fashion. The hostel I am in in San Diego feels like a hiker hostel. Not because it has a lot of hikers in it, or the personality of the people is like hikers, but because it is a pretty terrible place to stay. To turn on the light in the bunk room there isn't a switch, you have to reach up and tighten in the bulb. There are also a few mice in the bunkroom with us, feels like l'm already on the trail! Later today I actually start my hike, future post will hopefully have more photos.

PCT Prep

I am in the middle of preparing for my upcoming journey. In less than two week I will be starting the Pacific Crest Trail. Over the last few weeks the last few pieces of gear have arrived. I will be writing a more in-depth post about the gear selections I made for this trip next week. For now I will go over some of the other preparations that I have been doing.

The main trip related prep of the last few weeks has been around food. Once again I am planning to have pre-built boxes of food shipped to resupply points along the trail. This is not a required method of resupply but I enjoy the benefits of supply drops.  It is reasonable to buy food at stores along the way. The benefit of that method is it allows for more flexibility in how much food to resupply and where exactly to do that. Using mail drops makes resupply into a structured event, at very specific locations with a set amount of food. The main benefit for mail drops is I think the food is better.

The food you eat on the trail is usually the best time of day. It makes the entire hike more enjoyable to have something to really look forward to at the end of the day to eat. Eating boxed mac and cheese or pasta sides every single night gets old after a while. Dehydrating your own meals allows for many more vegetables and more variety in dinners. To start the dehydrating process I made a run to a bulk retailer, coming home with roughly 80 lbs or frozen vegetables. I generally don't think that mail drops actually save money but buying in bulk might end up being cheaper than buying food along the way.

In addition to all the frozen vegetables I tried to pick up enough granola bars to allow me to ship myself 2 per day. This is probably not enough for the whole trip but it should be enough to create a base line of food and allow me to supplement my mail drops at the resupply points. Despite that, 300 granola bars still looks like a lot of bars.

Over the last week or so I have had the dehydrator going most of the time. As of right now I have made it through all of the vegetables and now I need to work on all the beans that I want to dehydrate as well as the brown rice that I want to prepare.

The last bit of trail prep I have done over the last few weeks was to drop some weight. Ounces make pounds after all...