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...